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Welcome to RMB’s first installment of Naked Pictures of Faceless People, a series of guest posts from diverse anonymous bloggers. (Read more about NPFP’s origins.) These are the posts that are jumping to get out of us, but for whatever reason — safety, embarrassment, conflict of interest, protection of loved ones’ reputations or feelings, or so on — we don’t or won’t or can’t post at our own blogs. Anyone is welcome to submit or discuss a potential post by emailing me at arwyn at raisingmyboychick dot com.
When Activism Becomes Bloodlust
I’ve posted this anonymously, much thanks to Arwyn, because I fear that discussing this openly or even pseudoanonymously will make me a target. For that reason, some details are vastly reduced in this post and my own experiences with situations of this type have not been discussed.
Normally, activist groups have a rightfully heavy handed rule to prevent people from defending privilege. When someone calls you out for something, back down, accept it and apologize. Safe bet they’re probably right, you know? Don’t criticize the callers tone, don’t criticize the way the caller brings the call out on, just accept it and move on.
It is built on the fact that the people who get pushed down by prejudice are dealing with abuse and harassment every day from people with privilege over them and that expecting them to be polite in the face of that is extraordinarily unfair. And really, pretty privileged and entitled. This is a caution thing: it is to give a bit of an advantage to oppressed peoples to deal with that oppression; leeway so that the excuses used by the privileged and self centered to escape are more constrained, allowing more calling out to be successful and maybe even make changes in how society works.
When people do concentrate on the tone, it’s called a tone argument and it’s mostly used by concern trolls, insincere pretenders and people who don’t get this concept that oppression kind of sucks and maybe oppressed people are tired of being polite when others are always treating them badly.
And it isn’t like I haven’t been on the other side of that either. It does suck when people who don’t face what I face, who are privileged over me in some way, tell me that I’m being mean to them or that they would listen if only my tone was better.
So it is a good rule. It prevents more bad things from happening to groups that already face a lot of bad things and it takes away the excuses that people use to get out of having to deal with what they just did or said and how its wrong.
So then… what do you do when someone is taking advantage of this rule to honest to god abuse people?
I can’t vouch for whether the person writing this is sincere or not. I don’t need her to be sincere to get this point across. I don’t know her, I don’t know who else was involved. And if you do know who else was involved or know her, I would appreciate it if you didn’t reveal information that could endanger her; she seems pretty adverse to going into details and I can’t really blame her.
I gleaned from her post that she is talking about this occurring in movements and activism, which is why I started my post the way I did — because what she writes about looks to me like a case of the call out and tone argument avoidance rules being used to justify, enable, and protect an abuser’s abuse in an activist community. Now, I can’t be sure if this alleged abuse is horizontal in privilege and oppression, or bottom up. But for either type, the tone argument rule still applies. Horizontal bigotry (usually internalized self hate being used on others) can still be called out, and tone arguments are still a problem for that. And so that means that the tone argument rule and the activist resources are being used to justify abuse.
Let’s talk about abuse. Abuse is a horrible thing. It is destructive, cycling and terrible. I have faced abuse — several times actually. It trains certain patterns into you. Patterns of fear and hope. Fear of the abuser and hope the abuser will change. The hope is the hook. It keeps you there. The fear is rope, it ties you down, keeps you from fighting back. You cycle between fear and hope and the abuser uses this to control you. Abuse is pretty much always about control, whether you control someone because you think you have their best interests in mind or you control them because you were hurt and now you’re going to take it out of the hide of anyone who reminds you of who hurt you.
That’s the really freaky thing about abuse: it can sometimes (a lot less commonly than most think though) act like a virus. One of the people who abused me was also abused when that person was younger. No doubt I worry about the possibility of me being abusive in the future (yes, women can be abusers) and I’ve worked really hard to get back to a healthy place so I don’t have bitterness and hate to fire at people for what happened to me.
Abuse isn’t ever justified. And using emotional attacks, lies, sowing fear, spying, using personal information against people to manipulate them and harming them in order to control people is abuse. There’s really no exceptions.
So, if the claims from the writer of that blog post linked are true, then someone is using the rules of an activism community — used to protect its own (or people who face worse than most of those in the community but still have ties to it) — to abuse.
That’s… not good. At all.
This isn’t a topic I’m terribly comfortable with discussing. My past history of abuse makes me a bit troubled by the whole thing. The idea that someone could take advantage of these systems and hurt me, abuse me, well, it’s terrifying. Not only that, but I have a lot of privilege in a bunch of areas and I also face a few oppressions as well (I won’t get into which I have in either sense, doing so puts me at risk in a way that would negate the usefulness of having gone anonymous) so I have both the risk of using tone argument and my privilege to silence people and the absolutely awful experience of being silenced using those exact same methods.
So raising a topic like this feels really disingenuous and worrisome, on top of scaring me. I worry that by raising this topic, I’m enabling tone arguments and undermining the rules that protect oppressed people and our/their (as the case may be) discourse.
But that’s why something like this is so bad. Because it puts us in this double bind dilemma. Do we address the concept that oppressed people can be abusers and can take advantage of these systems to do so and risk undermining a rule that prevents one of the worst types of entitlement based derailment out there? Or do we protect our rule with as much caution as we can and end up allowing someone to continue to abuse and harm people freely?
But really, it isn’t so much a dilemma as it is more of a really hard question. Because we know we can’t let abuse go. Abuse can not be condoned. It can not be enabled. It can not be allowed. Or we have no right to expect our own lives and health to be protected from abuse. So instead of the binary dilemma, it’s really a question of: How do we address the topic of oppressed people who take advantage of the systems in an activist movement or community and use them to enable, hide and allow their abuse of people, either in a horizontal privilege relation or who have a given privilege that the abuser doesn’t, without undermining those very same systems and the protection they afford to oppressed peoples?
I seriously don’t know. I’m not even joking. I guess like this. Maybe. I’m not even sure if I’m addressing this sort of thing correctly or if I’m undermining these systems myself. Or alternately, if I’m not addressing them correctly in a way that downplays or continues to enable the abuse that could happen (and may be happening now, to not just the person above, but to others, possibly even me). It is a topic that that makes me second guess myself a lot. It is also a topic that truly scares me because if it can happen to the woman above then it can happen to me. It can happen to you. And as a survivor of abuse, that’s not an idea I like thinking about. So I worry that my own fears are pushing me towards bias.
And there is an even bigger question about these (presumably rare but still dangerous) abusers after we solve the one above, with the same stipulation that we can’t break the systems that protect oppressed people in movements.
How do we stop them?
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Please support the Naked Pictures of Faceless People project by commenting — and especially by discussing potential solutions, in this case — on the posts. Comments which attempt to guess the identity or any aspect of the identity of the blogger will be deleted, however. Protect and respect this space as though it were your own work on display here, naked and faceless.
When I wrote The things we won’t blog, I had no idea I would get such a reaction: over 30 comments in 24 hours, talking about the things we don’t feel comfortable writing about on our own blogs, but nevertheless want to get out of us. Obviously, we have things to say that aren’t getting said. And that, I think, is a problem. For myself, I have found that the unbearable and unspeakable become so much smaller once spoken, once the burden is shared.
So I had an idea: I’ll publish here what you won’t say there.
I’m inviting anyone who wants to submit a post to be published here anonymously, or pseudonymously, or even with a link back to your blog but not vice versa. I’ve already had several contacts about such a post, so you don’t have to worry about yours standing out as the only one.
Ground rules and guidelines:
- No naming names. If you’re anonymous, so are they.
- Rants about individuals, while sometimes cathartic, are not generally interesting or helpful. Rants about how something someone else did affected you, and how you struggle to cope with it, can be. If you’re not sure of the difference, talk to me, we can work it out.
- Topics should more or less be within this blog’s purview — which, granted, is rather wide.
- I will do my best to preserve your anonymity as much as possible and as you desire, including making suggestions about which details to remove or alter to obscure your identity. However, I cannot guarantee true anonymity; as with all online interactions, there is some possibility people you do not want to read it will find it, and may even recognize you or themselves in it. Do not post if doing so would violate the law or put your life in danger.
Pretty easy as far as rules go, eh?
If you’re interested, send me an email: arwyn at raisingmyboychick dot com
NOTE 7 Feb 2010: The first post is already up, as part of the newly named Naked Pictures of Faceless People project (points to those who recognize the Jon Stewart reference). Please read, comment — and be welcome to submit your own story.
Y’all know that I write about almost anything: my period, my sexuality, my genitals, my craziness, my racism and cissexism, my self-injury, even unwanted sensations with breastfeeding. I wrote about being bipolar, bisexual, and fat in my college application essays. (I won a scholarship in part because of an essay about my breasts.) I am a big, big believer in openness and forthrightness and disclosure and exposure and wearing our hearts on our sleeves and honestly answering “how are you?” (mostly).
But.
There’s a post half-written in my queue that will probably never see the light of a monitor because certain members of my family (hi Dad!) read this blog.
And I know I’m not the only one with such restrictions, either self-imposed or externally-motivated. So I thought I’d ask:
What don’t you blog about? And why? (Or because of whom?) Is it for protection, secrecy, court order? Fear of embarrassment, fear of reprisals, fear of what people will think? Do think some topics just aren’t appropriate for public discussion? What are you NOT saying that is clamouring to come out of you?
Obviously, I am not expecting that if you won’t blog it you’ll feel comfortable just spouting it here. You may allude, of course, to one or all parts of the question, or confirm only the existence of such things and nothing more. OR, I invite you to answer anonymously. You may use your own email and a new name, or create a free email just for this — or just put in a pseudoemail. For this, I won’t care. I will go spelunking in the depths of spam-filter hell for you, rescue your flagged anonymous comments, if you so choose to share.
What don’t you, won’t you blog about?
NOTE: It has come to my attention that if you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, it will still show up even with a different, anonymous name. These comments will go to pending, awaiting my approval: I will not publish them with the image, for your privacy. I can alter the email to remove the image, but this may affect your ability to receive email updates on the comment thread. Feel welcome to use an anonymous or fake email instead.
FURTHER NOTE (7 Feb 2010): Because of the overwhelming response to this, I have issued an invitation for anyone who wishes to submit an anonymous post, to be published as part of the Naked Pictures of Faceless People project. Because all our stories deserve to be told.
The Thirteenth Carnival of Feminists is up at Zero at the Bone, and wow is it worth checking out. It’s been up for two days, and I still haven’t read through it all yet. Chally is an amazing organizer, though, and has easily navigable categories, and concise descriptions to narrow in on the posts most likely to interest you, if you only have time to read a few.
A few from the Carnival I would like to draw your particular attention to:
- Quantity time at Spilt Milk: “But actually, it is in those daily interactions; the thousands of little ways I care for Bean bodily most days, that the foundations of our bond have been laid. [...] It wasn’t always fun and it wasn’t always pretty but it was… always.”
- CL Minou writes The Secret Lives of Married Men — Now With Bingo Cards (As background: in anti-oppression circles, there are oppressive/offensive statements said to/about marginalized groups so often we can predict them in advance. So we write them down on little cards and play a rousing game of BINGO when the trolls come out, and point and laugh, and thus do we survive.)
- Covering Up is a Feminist Issue, says Annie of PhD in Parenting — click over to this one especially if you and your computer are capable of viewing pictures. Lots and lots of beautiful, pointed pictures.
Not from the Carnival but found on a link trail from it, paradox_dragon addresses Queer women, the slash debate, and the question of internalized oppression with depth and nuance and precision that makes me weep with joy and want to join LiveJournal just to friend her. (“Slash” is “fanfiction written about romantic or sexual relationships occurring between two same-gender characters, usually male.” Mostly written by women — supposedly but not actually mostly straight women –, it is reputed to have originated with original Star Trek characters.)
Vying with the above for my new all time biggest crush is this video (with a full transcript below) of Chimamanda Adichie, Nigerian novelist and storyteller, on the problems of the single story.
Posted just after my last link round up, on race and parenting, from Love Isn’t Enough comes Is a diverse environment enough to inoculate children against racism? (Short answer: no, and if we’re thinking of racism only as a problem to inoculate white children against, we’re missing the point something fierce.)
And finally, if you haven’t already seen, the Lesbian/Bisexual Woman of the Decade has been chosen (entirely by you!). Please go drop a line of congratulations, complaint, questions, kibitzing, or angling for getting nominated in 2020. It was so, so much fun, but it may take me all decade to recover!
 picture declined for privacy The relatively obscure — but hugely beloved, among those lucky few — “Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza” rocketed up in the last 6 hours from tied-for-3rd to win with 19% of the 610 total votes. Clustered at 13% each came little light’s former tie-mate Julia Serano, the previous forerunner Rachel Maddow, and also-late-rising Missy Higgins (with Serano just leading the pack by 3 and 4 votes respectively). Long-time runner up Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir rounded out the top 5 with 11%.
Other than that everyone else is as much as a procrastinator as I am and ballot stuffers show up at the last possible minute (2/3 of the votes came in the last 12 hours of the two weeks of polling), I learned a lot from this perhaps-silly exercise:
- Some people want well-known names and faces (more on this in a bit)
- Live tweeting the end of a poll that allows multiple votes is good for hours of full-on laughter… for the person who gets to see the numbers, anyway
- Calling Sheryl Swoopes the “only black nominee” in a contest which contains Rebecca Walker (because she momentarily slipped your mind) is a really bad idea — sorry Rebecca!
- It is both harder and easier to spread a link around virally than I’d hoped and feared
- Bloggers vote for their own, and when you host a poll on a blog, the blogger nominee has a bit of an advantage — although it seems particularly right to me that a blogger (though not just any blogger) would win as representative of the decade of 2000-2009
Where was Ellen?
I had many people ask me why Ellen DeGeneres wasn’t among the finalists (also Ani DiFranco, Rosie O’Donnell, and other big-name mostly American mostly white women). As I replied on the poll thread,
It’s certainly not that I have anything against Ellen, and I’m glad she’s doing so well, but there were so many amazing women to choose from that I couldn’t fit them all in. And I tried to give preference to women who had done exceptional things in 2000-2009 (who were really OF that decade), and to women who were not white, cis, and American.
I pulled the 10 finalists out of the 43 reader-submitted nominations more or less by myself, guided partly by the repetition and enthusiasm of people lobbying for nominees’ inclusion, partly by my own analysis of the weight and decade-representation of the nominees, and yes, partly to attempt balance in representation across demographics, to bring to the fore women so often overlooked in mainstream popularity contests.
I wanted to create a list that was not just “Most visible American or Hollywood [white thin cis] lesbians”. One of the things I noticed was that the #biggaybattle (which inspired this poll) was over two white thin cis American men — and of the half of the list I recognized, only one was not white. I wanted to compile a different kind of list, a list that we could be proud of, that queer women of all kinds could point to and say — This is who we are, this is what we do. We are famous, and we are unknown but so worthy; we are partnered with women and with men and we live full lives unattached; we are in politics and comics and music, in science and sports, on the air waves and internet and network TV; we blog and act and act up; we are mothers and writers and revolutionaries, sometimes all at once. We are everywhere.
And maybe that wasn’t what people wanted. Maybe that wasn’t what you expected. But if I did even one thing to raise the visibility of queer women you might not have heard of, if I introduced one person to a queer woman who looked more like them than they had ever seen in the pages of People or Out Magazine, then I count this as an entirely worthwhile endeavor.
Look at the nomination list. That is an amazing group of women. As hard as I tried to balance it, the finalist list is mostly white women (6 white women, 4 women of color), mostly from North America (6 Americans, 2 Canadians, the Prime Minister of Iceland, and an Australian), and (almost?) entirely abled — but still, I am hoping that there is someone there that every queer woman who might stumble upon this blog can identify with in some way, someone every burgeoning queer girl can be inspired by.
A lofty goal for a little poll, to be sure. But there you have it.
Congratulations little light,
Lesbian/Bisexual Woman of the Decade
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Thank you so much to all of you who participated. A poll is nothing without its voters and its publicists: I appreciate each one of you.
Just one more day to vote. Repeat votes are welcome (for the same nominee, or multiple), as are votes from anyone, regardless of gender or sexuality.
I’m not voting (because I picked them; doesn’t exactly seem fair), but here’s my official plug for Sook-Yin Lee (bisexual! multi-talented! not unattractive!) and little light (you need to read her writing). They’re not getting near enough vote love as far as I’m concerned.
24 hours left! What are you waiting for??
I am not making this up.
I like much of the genre generally known as hard rock. I put up with 99.9% male vocalists, and often-problematical lyrics and topics, because I like hard/alternative rock (among other things) and I am too lazy and cheap frugal to bother amassing my own music collection and toting around a multi-listed iPod. So I listen to a lot of radio, and so I put up with 99.9% male vocalists and a lot of other crap.
OK, it’s just music, I can deal with it. Half the time I can’t figure out the lyrics even when I try. And, y’know, sometimes I just don’t mind — for instance — Reznor singing he wants to [bleep] me like an animal. Misogynist? Sure. Enjoyable? Um, a little. I may have been known to shout along with the lyrics upon occasion. What? It’s a good song.
But there’s misogyny, and then there’s misogyny.
Tonight, driving with the Boychick to drop off our ballots, The Man at home, this station ad came on between songs:
There’s no such thing as lesbians — only women who haven’t met Chuck Norris. Be a man. Celebrate MANuary.
…yeah.
That’s courtesy these gems of humanity. It’s not a joke. (Or, it is a “joke”, in the “lighten up, you ugly humorless hairy feminist bitch, can’t you take a joke?” kind of way. But it’s part of a whole “Manuary” promotion, which I’m not even going to go into, because ugh. Point is, they really said this.)
I nearly crashed the car. Not only was I shocked, I felt, suddenly, very vulnerable.
I changed the station. I am going to change my radio preset buttons.
And here’s my mini-epiphany of the day: this is how -isms and institutionalized hatred work. They think that lesbians (and women in general) don’t listen to hard rock; and so they say shit like this; and so we stop listening to their station; and so they are more right in their initial belief that women don’t like hard rock, and feel just fine in continuing their exclusionary culture.
It’s true for women in rock, women in sciences, trans women and women of color in mainstream feminism, nonwhite people in business, and so on. It’s not that we’re not interested; it’s that we are actively excluded. And our disgust and unwillingness to put up with the exclusion, with the boys’ club, with the “just jokes” that tell us over and over again just how unwelcome we are, how we are not even people in the eyes of those who would be our colleagues, is what then justifies the belief that it’s “not our thing”.
I call BS. And to KUFO, I say: FU. There is some shit I will not put up with, even for music I love. The problem is not with me, nor with my sense of humor. The problem is not my girly sensibilities, nor a lack of love for hard rock.
No, sirs, the problem is with you. Plenty of lesbians and hairy queer feminists like hard rock; we just don’t like you.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve seen most of these. For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, I highly recommend reading the following, if you haven’t already (most are not recent posts):
Feminist Parenting: Teaching History
I’ve never had any thought of telling her about [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton thru rose colored glasses. Far from it. I guess I didn’t think she’d bring up the equality question. But I should have known better.
Anti-racist parenting: It’s for everyone
Now, I have several anti-racist parenting allies who are the white parents of white children, but far more of my white friends and acquaintances see racism mainly as a function of the past. … They “don’t see color” and neither, they insist, will their children.
White Noise: White adults raising white children to resist white supremacy Long, but worth it. The comment thread is illuminating too.
Thandeka in her book, “Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America,” states that the first act of child abuse directed towards all white children is that the minute they come out of the womb, they are being taught to be racist. So the game has already started, whether or not we ever directly address race and whiteness in our family.
The last two are not explicitly parenting-related, but are nevertheless important for those of us tempted (by virtue of our whiteness) to consider oppression “only” through gender — which really means through gender and whiteness:
Black Women Need Not Apply
What’s great about how our beauty oppression operates is white women can still feel like feminists when they engage in hand wringing about their looks being picked apart by men without once having to examine their race privilege or acknowledge the way in which their status as highly valued hurts and oppresses marginalized women.
What If Black Women Were White Women?
What if suddenly, instantly, the power of white femininity were transferred to black women?
The answer is clear: Black women would represent value, purity; and based on their natural traits would be worthy of protection and instantly become the objects of universal desire. White women would represent the opposite.
“Beauty tar potion” would become globally popular to get the “black look.” “Dove” would be replaced with a black soap called “Raven” to help exfoliate the skin and bring out subtle hints of melanin.
I have posts bubbling away in the back of my brain — threatening to boil over if not attended to soon — but at this moment, I am out of fuel to address them adequately. Tomorrow, though: watch this space!
I’m pretty bad at planning ahead, and as usual I’m a step or two, and a day or two, behind the rest of the world (or the blogosphere, at least). So here is my belated entry to this year’s Blog for Choice Day, on the topic Trust Women:
First, go read Do you REALLY trust women? at FWD/Forward. I mean it. Skip the rest of this post if you only have time to read one thing right now: go read that. If this is to make any sense to you, you need to have read and understood that post.
Second (you read the FWD post, right?), an all-too-real example of the above: Kerry Robertson, whose story I linked to in Whose child is this?, has had her baby removed from her by Irish Social Services. Whether or not there is “more to the story” (there is always more to the story than what becomes public, though not always in the way people who say that mean), the fact that her learning disability has been used throughout as the public justification for these actions — blocking her marriage to her fetus’s father, removing her 4 day old breastfeeding baby from her care and her presence — is far more proof than I would ever care to have that we do not trust women, and that motherhood is a function of privilege, not a privileged status itself. Robertson made the “mistake” of being too young, too unmarried, too poor, having the wrong parents, and being disabled by her kyriarchal society: for that error, she has lost the child she chose to have.
Abortion rights are important, indubitably, indisputably. I would likely not be here if my mother had not had the right to choose when her IUD failed while she was a medical student. In my own very-much-tried-for-pregnancy, I found the knowledge that I had choice, that at any time for the first several months that I could change my mind, to be immensely, indescribably helpful and joyful. I’ve known women who are happier for the abortions they chose, and women whose lives were damaged by the abortions they wanted but could not obtain. We need 100% available, accessible, legal, safe abortions.
But there is so much more to reproductive rights, to real choice for women, than just abortion. And more than that, throughout history and throughout the world today (yes, in your country, in 2010), women who were not the “right” kind of women have been and continue to be coerced or forced into abortions and sterilizations and separations that they did not want.
My own grandmother was strongly encouraged to have an abortion — in the 1950s, in the USA — because of concerns over what the medical procedures she was undergoing at the time would do to her fetus and what the pregnancy would do to her; which is to say, because of ableism that says some babies are not worth having, and because of the misogynistic belief that women can’t be trusted to make the choice for ourselves. She was privileged enough (and obstinate enough: my grandmother did, in fact, wear army boots) that she was able to say no, to make another choice, to birth my mother, and only thus am I here today.
I am not anti-abortion. I am, it can easily be said, pro-abortion, in that I do not think of abortion as an “unfortunate necessity” or a “lesser evil”. But to be pro-choice, we need to think in far broader terms than just access to abortion, as important as that is.
“Trust women” means nothing if we do not also trust women to choose to retain her fertility (no matter how many children she has had or what gender she was assigned to at birth), to choose to not retain her fertility (no matter how many children she has had or what gender she was assigned to at birth), to choose what types of reproductive assistance to use when, to choose to carry her pregnancy to term or to terminate it, to choose to how much prenatal screening to have or not have, to choose the location and manner and attendants — or lack thereof — for her birth, to choose when and how and with whom to raise her child(ren).
We don’t have to agree with the choices any woman makes, and we damn well should work to make sure her choices are uncoerced and unconstrained by kyriarchy (classism, capitalism, racism, sexism, ableism, and so on), but we do have to trust her to make them and all the other choices that exist around reproduction if we are to claim we trust women.
Do you?
Y’all know that I blame the kyriarchy — to talk only of patriarchy is to whitewash (ha ha) the myriad ways that people, including women, are variously oppressed and privileged. It pretends that all women experience oppression in the same ways, and focuses on sexism as the prime or only marginalization of women (because the concept was formulated by highly privileged women — white, US, middle class, mostly educated, abled, cis, and largely straight), which erases the experience of the majority of women on this planet.
To think only in terms of patriarchy leads to false assertions based on too-narrow perspectives, on the belief that what one experiences as a cis white upper class academic woman is typical of all women. Like the assertion that women with children are privileged over women without. (No, I’m not going to link to where I encountered said assertion.)
To the contrary, childfree/child-having is a classic double-bind of womanhood; there is absolutely no way to “win”, no choice to be made that does not result in discrimination and oppression. For to be sure, childfree women — if they are the “right” kind of women, or perceived to be so — are absolutely criticized, and marginalized in many ways; there can be no doubt of that, I think, and this is absolutely not a competition of who has it worse. But let’s go back to that caveat, because that is why the narrow-minded privileged academics get it wrong: it is only some women — the “right” women, privileged women, women like the ones making that assertion — who are most definitely expected to be mothers, and woe unto them if they fail to fulfill this imposed obligation.
What if you’re not the “right” kind of woman? What then?
If you are not white, if you are not cis, if you are not well-off (forget being on public assistance of any kind), if you are disabled or have a history of psychiatric diagnoses, if you are “too young”, if you are “too old”, if you have “too many” children, and especially if you exist at the intersection of more than one of those “failings” — if you are not the “right” kind of woman, motherhood further invites society to comment on and assert control over your life, if society allows you motherhood at all.
Motherhood does not confer privilege, but is a function of privilege; it is conditional, a “right” granted only to those whom society is best pleased with — and only for as long as we continue not only to be “right” but to do “right”.
Because even the rich cis white etc etc mother is policed, often with further double-binds: the work for pay question is a classic example — there is simply no winning that one, no matter whether one works out of the home, in the home for money, in the home for sticky kisses, or some impossibly juggled combination thereof. But if she shares sleep space with her children, breastfeeds for “too long”, lets her child roam “too far”, or in any of a million other ways steps outside of what her society deems the “right” way to mother (whatever that is where and when she lives), even the most privileged mother still risks comment and criticism, risks losing her children to “protective” services.
(To some extent, I don’t think that is even necessarily wrong — I entirely approve of lines drawn against physical and psychological and sexual abuse, against reckless child endangerment and neglect, against child slavery and prostitution. The problems come when those definitions of abuse or neglect are defined by a kyriarchy-fueled society, implemented in kyriarchal ways with biases against the already marginalized, and are used to enforce kyriarchal norms: don’t let your child be too emotionally close or physically distant, don’t let women ever have a moment’s rest, don’t let women use their bodies as they choose, don’t respect the personhood and autonomy of children. There are ways to do serious, inexcusable harm as a parent, to be sure, but there are a far, far more ways to be “bad” in society’s eyes.)
We cannot, we simply cannot extrapolate from a singular, privileged experience of motherhood/childfree womanhood to the entire population of women and think it relevant or right. And to pit women against each other, to pretend that one side of a double bind is “better” or “better off” than the other? That’s how we all lose, and kyriarchy wins.
If you want to help broaden the understanding of what it means to be a woman with a child, please tell your story — any one of your stories — as part of the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer.
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Arwyn
In my bathroom hangs a plaque with a picture of a yin yang and the word BALANCE. I can never get it to hang straight. This probably says something deep and meaningful about my life.
Read more about me and this here blog.
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