If everything goes according to plan (dear whomever the hell is up there, please let me get it the hell over with), I will be expelled from school clutching an embossed, overpriced piece of paper this fall. I have hated a good two-thirds of the graduate school experience, so I'm thrilled senseless to get the fuck out of there, but as soon as I gtfo, I have a problem.
What am I going to do with myself?
Obviously, get a real job. With some kind of suit. I hear, to the limited extent I discuss this with people, that the feeling of utter inadequacy is common to graduates.
I am not entirely sure I am grown-up enough to feel comfy in a monkey suit, behaving myself and otherwise acting the normie. *hyperventilates into paper sack* Actually, I shouldn't sweat the normie bits; there is no monkey suit on the planet capable of fooling a selection committee into thinking that I would make a bland member of a working team. I'm doing good to tone it down enough to hold a conversation and only minimally make the person I'm talking to uncomfortable. I've been joking with people for years that what I really need to do for a living is clear rooms. Seriously, I can clear a room in thirty seconds. With a joke. It has been hell not bursting into dead baby jokes when I'm nervous on campus. And not aiming random innuendo at people has been murder. I tend to default to innuendo when I'm feeling paranoid, since it does such an excellent job of deflecting attention.
The professional jobs available to me tend to fall into the 'enforcing the standardization of creativity' or 'enabling bad writing' categories, both of which I can do but am uncomfortable with some of the ramifications of. There is a difference between helping hone the writing and passing really bad writing because you are not authorized to change anything but the grammar, constrained by the author's need to RanDomlY cApitAliZe or italicize for emotional effect and your own need to get paid for your work, or ending up telling people what to write. I would like to think that I can fix most of those concerns with diligence, but my experiences thus far in both the world of publishing and teaching have been troublesome. As an editor, I dislike being authorized to only address things like capitalization (I'd prefer global editing, but you have to do an awful lot of copy editing first), and I cannot work the newspaper hours anymore (I have done both editing and production, which tended to be late night/early morning until it is finished. I miss the clear short-term deadlines, though.) Workshops are good, if nothing else, for learning to tolerate all kinds of different writing, so I can tolerate much in terms of subject matter (though there are a few subjects I am short as hell on, whether I mean to be or not.)
My dissertation director will tactfully tell me, when the subject comes up, that I do not suffer fools lightly, nor well. I spend a lot of time biting the inside of my cheeks and I still manage to have something to say, even if just in tone.
In terms of regulating creativity, I think there is a fine line between helping and treating your students like idiots if they disagree with you. I wonder about that, about my ability to be more graceful. I have tutored everything from kids in elementary reading at least two grade levels under their own to some of the immigrants I've worked with who could not afford English courses. Up until the last year of teaching single lessons in graduate school, I would have said I did alright. At least the feedback I've had from the people I've tutored/creative writing workshops I've put together suggests that I do well.
My fellow students do not think so.
I am split on the subject. On the one hand, I am less concerned with students who can afford to go to grad school than I am students who are struggling to go to compulsory school or are too poor to afford an education. Because of this, I don't do the things I would for a community class, where I assume that anyone I'm helping has limited access to the information I have or no access. I assume that graduate students both have access to the same kinds of information and are willing to think about it, and it angers me when they refuse to think about it or to do the reading. I have left classes shaking with rage because I bothered to do all the readings and write the papers and came eager to discuss the subject and sat in a class where no one talked but the professor, who begged the silent students to respond. (I did not get into school because it was easy or even expected of me. Quite the opposite, in my case.)
rant/ It's a fucking privilege to get to go to grad school and one that's costing me, at least, out the fucking nose. There are any number of people who cannot afford to go, whom no one expects to succeed at anything or who have been habitually instructed that they are not the right type for that education. Anyone (and there are many such anyones) who drifts into grad school should go get a life, instead. /rant
On the other hand, and I think this is true anywhere, you have to wonder, when you have chronic problems, what you've been doing wrong. I've concluded that I have an attitude problem.
Bet you're not surprised, if you've read more than one post.
I would like to teach, specifically high risk populations, because the level of education offered in poor urban or rural neighborhoods, or to severely abused children is demonstrably deficient. I'm not going to bother to cite. This is easy to verify with Google. I think I am uniquely situated to understand the everyday needs of those populations. The question, as I am currently able to articulate it, is whether or not my... strong personality will allow me to take jobs with that kind of structure. I have to figure something out. I have people to support.
The jury is still out.
Monday, January 7, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
things I should have thought more about before I said them # 2,456
This is a tough one. The last girlfriend I had was, among other things, performing sex acts for money with men. Because I have the background that I have with prostitution and with sex work in general, I really thought I'd be okay with it.
So I volunteered to run the cameras and to provide supervision as the domme. I still have the CDs, in fact.
It turns out I either have a hidden puritanical streak or there was something in the relationship I still haven't processed well enough, because it bothered me. We went, on a road trip, to LA to film porn (and being on the set of even a small porn production is an interesting experience) and it bothered me less than watching her perform sex acts in a small setting, even though I liked the guy. (He was the single most respectful john I've ever met.) There was something about watching her scream (even though I knew she was more performing than enjoying, though she did make him adjust to engender a better time for her. I knew that the arched back and the noise, the moaning and the way she smiled were all services, and the extent that she enjoyed them was deeply mitigated by the fact that, while they had known each other for five years, they had a financial relationship that could not, no matter how friendly, help but commodify to some degree, even though the the conditions were as good as they could have gotten and I understood them, there was some part of me that was troubled by what I was seeing.
I have issues, in a general sense, with my own queerness, which did not help. As much as I love relationships with women (and apparently over half my best friends growing up did too; damn it, I could have been getting laid for a long time back with women who I cared deeply for), the fact that it is an intensely dangerous experience troubles me. We do not live in a culture that allows lesbianity without some cost; it attracts attention to love the woman you love, and that attention can be lethal when it is not belittling, exploitative or abusive.
Add being a professional domme, going to men's hotel rooms with a giant duffel of sex toys dressed to the sinister nines, and you have a recipe for my paranoia going off like a demolition derby with police cars.
I began to wonder if she always remembered to put our personal toys elsewhere, to wonder if she ever thought of me while she was doing what she was doing, or of them when we slept together. The body remembers, as I know very, very well. The separation between what is a transaction and what is an exchange is a fine line. And I'm enough of a putz to wonder if she was faking it for me.
Yes, I'm a putz. I know I'm a putz.
I don't think I was ready to see her do that. I don't think I was ready to have our relationship be the subject of porn (which it was. We did some photo shoots that would have curled your hair, dear reader.) But mostly, I could not shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen. Our profession, while the least physically invasive example of sex work I can think of (at least for me, but I am a sadist and prefer to beat and not to be beaten, and there was never enough money to make me fuck for it), is still a profession that receives less support and more degradation and punishment than any other profession I can think of. I have had a life which has rewarded my paranoia and viciousness with my continued survival. Every night we went out to a bar, or walked hand in hand, or entered a hotel lobby dressed like the sinister equivalent of a gangster and moll (I wore the suit), the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was genuinely afraid for us.
Chalk it up to my damage, if you like.
But I should definitely have thought longer before volunteering to be the camera girl/domme for my own girlfriend. I have some serious trust issues, but I wanted her to be safe. She would find this condescending, I think, but you never know what the fuck is out there.
So I volunteered to run the cameras and to provide supervision as the domme. I still have the CDs, in fact.
It turns out I either have a hidden puritanical streak or there was something in the relationship I still haven't processed well enough, because it bothered me. We went, on a road trip, to LA to film porn (and being on the set of even a small porn production is an interesting experience) and it bothered me less than watching her perform sex acts in a small setting, even though I liked the guy. (He was the single most respectful john I've ever met.) There was something about watching her scream (even though I knew she was more performing than enjoying, though she did make him adjust to engender a better time for her. I knew that the arched back and the noise, the moaning and the way she smiled were all services, and the extent that she enjoyed them was deeply mitigated by the fact that, while they had known each other for five years, they had a financial relationship that could not, no matter how friendly, help but commodify to some degree, even though the the conditions were as good as they could have gotten and I understood them, there was some part of me that was troubled by what I was seeing.
I have issues, in a general sense, with my own queerness, which did not help. As much as I love relationships with women (and apparently over half my best friends growing up did too; damn it, I could have been getting laid for a long time back with women who I cared deeply for), the fact that it is an intensely dangerous experience troubles me. We do not live in a culture that allows lesbianity without some cost; it attracts attention to love the woman you love, and that attention can be lethal when it is not belittling, exploitative or abusive.
Add being a professional domme, going to men's hotel rooms with a giant duffel of sex toys dressed to the sinister nines, and you have a recipe for my paranoia going off like a demolition derby with police cars.
I began to wonder if she always remembered to put our personal toys elsewhere, to wonder if she ever thought of me while she was doing what she was doing, or of them when we slept together. The body remembers, as I know very, very well. The separation between what is a transaction and what is an exchange is a fine line. And I'm enough of a putz to wonder if she was faking it for me.
Yes, I'm a putz. I know I'm a putz.
I don't think I was ready to see her do that. I don't think I was ready to have our relationship be the subject of porn (which it was. We did some photo shoots that would have curled your hair, dear reader.) But mostly, I could not shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen. Our profession, while the least physically invasive example of sex work I can think of (at least for me, but I am a sadist and prefer to beat and not to be beaten, and there was never enough money to make me fuck for it), is still a profession that receives less support and more degradation and punishment than any other profession I can think of. I have had a life which has rewarded my paranoia and viciousness with my continued survival. Every night we went out to a bar, or walked hand in hand, or entered a hotel lobby dressed like the sinister equivalent of a gangster and moll (I wore the suit), the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was genuinely afraid for us.
Chalk it up to my damage, if you like.
But I should definitely have thought longer before volunteering to be the camera girl/domme for my own girlfriend. I have some serious trust issues, but I wanted her to be safe. She would find this condescending, I think, but you never know what the fuck is out there.
First unambigious sign
...my right butt cheek.
The first post I wrote was on economics. I skated around the weakening of the dollar, wrote some on the purchasing power and the meaning of irresponsible outsourcing and speculated on the importance of the inflationary signs.
Now, according to Mark Meadows at Tempus Consulting in Washington, we have stagflation.
What the shit is stagflation, you ask? It's when an economist tries to conflate two very alarming terms in order to make them seem, you know, cutesy. Stagnation is the first word being combined, in this case, the stagnation of manufacturing and business growth (read 'down-sizing, ahoy!') and the inflation of cost. If you don't know what that means for you, the first post covers in detail the inflation I've been suffering, as a model. You also might think Great Depression. The cost of everything goes up, and earning power goes down. Since we have outsourced everything from food (let's not even talk about the safety issues when your food's been to more countries than you have, and not been inspected in any of them very closely); we've outsourced clothing, growing at a phenomenal rate. In 2005, the share of the Chinese in our manufacturing there grew 46% in the first five months of the year. I'm going to do everyone a favor and skip the lecture on oil.
I picked food and clothing for the very specific reason that you need both to live, even should you happen to be lucky enough to still own your house. (I'm not even going to rehash what I had to say about the credit bubble. I hope you can hear me grinding my teeth from where you're sitting.) Let's pretend that the US does begin doing more of its own manufacturing; the travel costs on the lifestyles we're living (look at the 'Made in' stickers on your stuff, the stuff that has it) are going to rise, in a classic inflationary move, and the cost will be deflected onto the consumer, 'cause the company sure as shit is not going to swallow the cost. So the cost of food will go up, as well as the cost of gas, causing the middle-class and lower to continue to tighten their belts and begin to give up on luxury activities like going to the movies, or out to eat. Some people are, of course, going to keep doing it until they lose their home or whatever they might be wagering on (bloody stupid stock market; gambling should not be the model for responsible economic growth, no matter how pretty it looks).
The service industry has already taken a hit with their holiday sales, so the idea that this is just going to hurt a little is as equally ironic now as it was the last time I sat for three hours getting my lower back tattooed over my kidneys. Remember, this is the hysterically profit-hungry environment that (and I'm sorry, but the BLS only has statistics for the first three quarters of 2004) laid off 1,079,148 workers due to outsourcing. Outsourcing is basically better profits somewhere else. Unfortunately, the survey is anonymous for the companies, or I'd be gleefully cursing at someone stupid, right now.
Here's where I put on my tin foil lined prognostication cap: What happens when the service industry gets hit heavily?
Well, layoffs. Of course, this is a projection, but it's a projection made on the idea that the service industry is staffed with jobs that are highly outsource-able, can be done by computer, are becoming obsolete with the rise of PC shopping and communication, and are classed as tertiary sector economics. Here's an interesting fact (the truth is up for debate.) Tertiary sector activities are sometimes considered wealth using, not producing, and as such, more liable for downsizing due to outsourcing. Of course, this is from Friedman, and as such is trash advice. Unfortunately, it's popular trash advice. David Friedman's father, Milton Friedman, is the father of the Chicago School of Economics. Read The Shock Doctrine and look at Katrina if you'd like to get a good feel for the economics that father-son duo advocate.
I guess the high unemployment rates will do us some good, but if the service industry starts experiencing unemployment, it turns an entire group of workers who both do not have other skills and are not being reasonably offered the chance to get those skills, creating a class whose shot at finding work is.... minimal, to say the least.
The manufacturing jobs from the original BBC article are Secondary sector jobs, which Friedman tends to class as wealth producing (because the goods produced are owned by a class that is situated to sell them and manipulate the money more directly.) The drop could be more, but the fact that investment managers (creative money re-distributors) have broken down to call it the first definitive sign of recession (or stagflation, or whatever the hell label meant to keep everyone spending away as long as possible) is indicative of a long winter, if you know what I mean.
My advice is the same here as it would be to my neighbors, cause we are some poor bastards: trade, hoard and create community. Because the poor are who saddles the blame and cost of these kinds of things.
The first post I wrote was on economics. I skated around the weakening of the dollar, wrote some on the purchasing power and the meaning of irresponsible outsourcing and speculated on the importance of the inflationary signs.
Now, according to Mark Meadows at Tempus Consulting in Washington, we have stagflation.
What the shit is stagflation, you ask? It's when an economist tries to conflate two very alarming terms in order to make them seem, you know, cutesy. Stagnation is the first word being combined, in this case, the stagnation of manufacturing and business growth (read 'down-sizing, ahoy!') and the inflation of cost. If you don't know what that means for you, the first post covers in detail the inflation I've been suffering, as a model. You also might think Great Depression. The cost of everything goes up, and earning power goes down. Since we have outsourced everything from food (let's not even talk about the safety issues when your food's been to more countries than you have, and not been inspected in any of them very closely); we've outsourced clothing, growing at a phenomenal rate. In 2005, the share of the Chinese in our manufacturing there grew 46% in the first five months of the year. I'm going to do everyone a favor and skip the lecture on oil.
I picked food and clothing for the very specific reason that you need both to live, even should you happen to be lucky enough to still own your house. (I'm not even going to rehash what I had to say about the credit bubble. I hope you can hear me grinding my teeth from where you're sitting.) Let's pretend that the US does begin doing more of its own manufacturing; the travel costs on the lifestyles we're living (look at the 'Made in' stickers on your stuff, the stuff that has it) are going to rise, in a classic inflationary move, and the cost will be deflected onto the consumer, 'cause the company sure as shit is not going to swallow the cost. So the cost of food will go up, as well as the cost of gas, causing the middle-class and lower to continue to tighten their belts and begin to give up on luxury activities like going to the movies, or out to eat. Some people are, of course, going to keep doing it until they lose their home or whatever they might be wagering on (bloody stupid stock market; gambling should not be the model for responsible economic growth, no matter how pretty it looks).
The service industry has already taken a hit with their holiday sales, so the idea that this is just going to hurt a little is as equally ironic now as it was the last time I sat for three hours getting my lower back tattooed over my kidneys. Remember, this is the hysterically profit-hungry environment that (and I'm sorry, but the BLS only has statistics for the first three quarters of 2004) laid off 1,079,148 workers due to outsourcing. Outsourcing is basically better profits somewhere else. Unfortunately, the survey is anonymous for the companies, or I'd be gleefully cursing at someone stupid, right now.
Here's where I put on my tin foil lined prognostication cap: What happens when the service industry gets hit heavily?
Well, layoffs. Of course, this is a projection, but it's a projection made on the idea that the service industry is staffed with jobs that are highly outsource-able, can be done by computer, are becoming obsolete with the rise of PC shopping and communication, and are classed as tertiary sector economics. Here's an interesting fact (the truth is up for debate.) Tertiary sector activities are sometimes considered wealth using, not producing, and as such, more liable for downsizing due to outsourcing. Of course, this is from Friedman, and as such is trash advice. Unfortunately, it's popular trash advice. David Friedman's father, Milton Friedman, is the father of the Chicago School of Economics. Read The Shock Doctrine and look at Katrina if you'd like to get a good feel for the economics that father-son duo advocate.
I guess the high unemployment rates will do us some good, but if the service industry starts experiencing unemployment, it turns an entire group of workers who both do not have other skills and are not being reasonably offered the chance to get those skills, creating a class whose shot at finding work is.... minimal, to say the least.
The manufacturing jobs from the original BBC article are Secondary sector jobs, which Friedman tends to class as wealth producing (because the goods produced are owned by a class that is situated to sell them and manipulate the money more directly.) The drop could be more, but the fact that investment managers (creative money re-distributors) have broken down to call it the first definitive sign of recession (or stagflation, or whatever the hell label meant to keep everyone spending away as long as possible) is indicative of a long winter, if you know what I mean.
My advice is the same here as it would be to my neighbors, cause we are some poor bastards: trade, hoard and create community. Because the poor are who saddles the blame and cost of these kinds of things.
I added a site to my 'light reading' on rescuing child prostitutes
Being honest is a really bad habit. I ought to feel insecure about this, and I do (trust me), but you should put your money where your mouth is.
I'm practically an old lady, now. Really. But once upon a time, I was a teenage girl. A homeless teenage girl, at that. I write about this stuff, sometimes, but I am careful to change some of the pertinent details and label it fiction, because there's nothing worse than that look you get when people think it's you. I hate it when I'm pitied.
Hemming, hawing...
The thing about being too young to get a job and without a permanent address is that there are only so many things you can do for a living. I pestered all night convenience store clerks for awhile to do chores for a Lunchable, but there's only so many bags of ice you can load or floor you can sweep (this was before they were really videotaping the stores well.) If you go to a shelter, they will bounce you back home if they can.
In my case, I'd already called Child Protective Services, and they'd come to the house, told my folks about the complaint (after all, it was a nice house. Nothing bad ever happens in those, right? Right?) and fucked on off without doing a damn thing. I actually followed the bitch out into the yard, trying to talk to her, and my mother followed me to see what I had to say. Since the complaint was not substantiated, I'd have been bounced right back home.
I guess I was really lucky. Only a few times did some guy try to pimp me, but I've always been a mean ass bitch. I am not bragging. It was a close thing at least ten times in that year. Told you I was lucky. I fight dirty and run fast. There were a few 'trying to shove me in the car' incidences while I was out walking around (there is a man out there who has a permanent 45 degree angle to the left, if you know what I mean), a crack dealer that used to follow me around who 'just wanted to help me feel good' and one with a guy who thought I was too fat and thought he would 'help me' by locking me in a room in his house until I starved down to an acceptable weight. If I got out or went anywhere, I wouldn't have anywhere to stay/he would call my folks. He also expected me to keep house, and don't get me wrong, I like a clean place, but girls who haven't eaten in days make bad maids. This avoids the sexual stuff.
I certainly didn't. Let's call me free-lance and part time about it and have done. I really just wanted to get high, but the crack dealer's deal didn't appeal to me. I've always tried to own me. Growing up, I was reminded constantly about how everyone else owned me and how I was... let's call it ultimately fit for a party lifestyle as opposed to one where I used my brain. I laugh off a lot of the shit I got, growing up, when I can. I'm still getting shit from my folks whenever they get stressed.
I hope they know the quality of the nursing home they're going into is steadily going down hill.
God, it's weird even talking about this.
Looking back on it, at 30, I am sincerely glad to still be here. I mean, I'm an old fucking lady finishing an MFA. I have kids and someone to come home to that loves me. I'm clean; no diseases, almost no wounds from the experience. Hell, I even quit smoking awhile back. I'm living in the town I was homeless in. I pass gas stations, apartment buildings, parks, crashes and places I stayed all the damn time. Sometimes I pass friends who knew me or were homeless with me.*
I am so fucking lucky. A lot of them are dead or dying of something.
Which brings me (in a really, really roundabout way) to the organization I just linked to. The Children of the Night (argh, the name is awful. And it's a Richard Marx song, to boot) is based in LA, and they rescue kids from all over the nation. The site says they will fly a kid from anywhere in the US and they have specialists that will work with the prosecution to nail pimps to the wall. Anybody who specializes in pimping out children deserves to have something nailed to the wall. If I actually do have any readers, you should visit them. It's good to know.
*A note to travelers: I didn't have a buddy. We were all drifting but not friendly enough to hang, which I hear makes a big difference. My bf was a traveler. He tells me it would have changed my experience.
I'm practically an old lady, now. Really. But once upon a time, I was a teenage girl. A homeless teenage girl, at that. I write about this stuff, sometimes, but I am careful to change some of the pertinent details and label it fiction, because there's nothing worse than that look you get when people think it's you. I hate it when I'm pitied.
Hemming, hawing...
The thing about being too young to get a job and without a permanent address is that there are only so many things you can do for a living. I pestered all night convenience store clerks for awhile to do chores for a Lunchable, but there's only so many bags of ice you can load or floor you can sweep (this was before they were really videotaping the stores well.) If you go to a shelter, they will bounce you back home if they can.
In my case, I'd already called Child Protective Services, and they'd come to the house, told my folks about the complaint (after all, it was a nice house. Nothing bad ever happens in those, right? Right?) and fucked on off without doing a damn thing. I actually followed the bitch out into the yard, trying to talk to her, and my mother followed me to see what I had to say. Since the complaint was not substantiated, I'd have been bounced right back home.
I guess I was really lucky. Only a few times did some guy try to pimp me, but I've always been a mean ass bitch. I am not bragging. It was a close thing at least ten times in that year. Told you I was lucky. I fight dirty and run fast. There were a few 'trying to shove me in the car' incidences while I was out walking around (there is a man out there who has a permanent 45 degree angle to the left, if you know what I mean), a crack dealer that used to follow me around who 'just wanted to help me feel good' and one with a guy who thought I was too fat and thought he would 'help me' by locking me in a room in his house until I starved down to an acceptable weight. If I got out or went anywhere, I wouldn't have anywhere to stay/he would call my folks. He also expected me to keep house, and don't get me wrong, I like a clean place, but girls who haven't eaten in days make bad maids. This avoids the sexual stuff.
I certainly didn't. Let's call me free-lance and part time about it and have done. I really just wanted to get high, but the crack dealer's deal didn't appeal to me. I've always tried to own me. Growing up, I was reminded constantly about how everyone else owned me and how I was... let's call it ultimately fit for a party lifestyle as opposed to one where I used my brain. I laugh off a lot of the shit I got, growing up, when I can. I'm still getting shit from my folks whenever they get stressed.
I hope they know the quality of the nursing home they're going into is steadily going down hill.
God, it's weird even talking about this.
Looking back on it, at 30, I am sincerely glad to still be here. I mean, I'm an old fucking lady finishing an MFA. I have kids and someone to come home to that loves me. I'm clean; no diseases, almost no wounds from the experience. Hell, I even quit smoking awhile back. I'm living in the town I was homeless in. I pass gas stations, apartment buildings, parks, crashes and places I stayed all the damn time. Sometimes I pass friends who knew me or were homeless with me.*
I am so fucking lucky. A lot of them are dead or dying of something.
Which brings me (in a really, really roundabout way) to the organization I just linked to. The Children of the Night (argh, the name is awful. And it's a Richard Marx song, to boot) is based in LA, and they rescue kids from all over the nation. The site says they will fly a kid from anywhere in the US and they have specialists that will work with the prosecution to nail pimps to the wall. Anybody who specializes in pimping out children deserves to have something nailed to the wall. If I actually do have any readers, you should visit them. It's good to know.
*A note to travelers: I didn't have a buddy. We were all drifting but not friendly enough to hang, which I hear makes a big difference. My bf was a traveler. He tells me it would have changed my experience.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
forms of procrastination, #9,999
Okay, so I should probably be doing something productive. I told my dissertation director that I'd re-write an essay and get on my preface/comps, but-- I. don't. wanna.
So I did this instead. Will spank myself for it later.
So I did this instead. Will spank myself for it later.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
dealing with the raising of boys, volume 2
In case there's any doubt, I am angry. Pathologically pissed, if you will. If you had asked me even five years back what to do with the male half of the species, I would have arched my fingers, smiled faintly, and said that we only needed something like twenty percent of them for stud (and the rest should jack off into a cup and report to the camps.)
So what changed? A lot of things. Finally meeting a member of the male half of the species that was not interested in evading responsibility, in blaming women for their own problems, in committing rape and calling it love, in victimizing myself or my children, in spending his half of the rent and informing me the day before the rent is due, in trying to make me more 'feminine' and finally, a year as a professional dominatrix.
I always hesitate to reveal this experience, because it is a heavily charged subject. Women tend to believe I whored myself for money and engaged in bringing down the feminism movement, and men tend to believe that it means I'm so bitter that I am not worth dealing with or that I belong to a class of women that have made themselves objects and therefore deserve whatever they chose to give me (something women frequently echo.) Good luck making that one stick, ladies and gents. That assertion mostly amuses me.
They're both wrong. I talked to men about sex and beat their asses. There's nothing wrong with selling a sexual experience, to my mind, especially one centered around proving to a man that he is, in fact, less dominant than he thinks. Just because they're paying does not mean that they cannot be surprised by the brains and will it takes to professionally domme; not to mention the refusal to be only dictated to. I bring me with me into sessions and could not do other, though I do try to be adaptable. The client may want to discuss a specific subject, and they may volunteer to experience the pain, but the fact that a domme inverts gender relationships and expectations has ramifications beyond the session. It wouldn't matter if I had fucked men for a living instead of being a domme. The role itself exposes you to the ability to powerfully alter the fundamental terms of gender perceptions. How, you ask?
There is a lot of gender-bending involved in the professional sex industry. I was everything in sessions over the phone and in person from the traditional nurse/mother /doctor to another man. I learned more about my own gender expectations than I could ever replicate elsewhere, and being a domme forces you to articulate and to make others articulate boundaries, which does a lot for your awareness of gender and expectation.
Moreover, and this is the part relevant to child-raising, I discovered that men's experiences of gender (or at least the gentlemen I talked in detail to) could also be quite corrosive, albeit in different ways. In the post before this one, I discussed the things I have had to discuss with my daughters that I have not with my son. The following is what I learned form that job about men and gender:
1. Men frequently feel victimized by gender expectations. I talked to a fair share of cross-dressers who had spent their entire lives afraid to the point of panic that someone would find out their desire to see the other side or their feeling of being freed of the pressure to conform when they were in women's clothing. Call them cowards, if you like. Some of them were certainly being cowardly, but we are compelled to meet people where they are, not where we wish they were, if we want to communicate. Women know the escape these men were picturing is an illusion. No one gets out of gender unscathed. But the women's clothing represented an utterly different set of expectations, and these guys wanted out of the pressure to be macho. This is, in no way, the only reason for cross-dressing. This is merely what I took from it. As always, if anyone reading feels differently, I am more than happy to hear about it.
2. Many of my clients (and this is what I advertised for because I understand it from my own experiences and thought I would provide a good sounding board) were sexually abused or physically abused as children. They had been told their whole lives that the abuse they experienced could never be spoken of (lest they be told they were not men. I won't repeat what they thought it would make them; we ended up talking about stereotypes.) This was instructive because I had never met a victimized man and thought they were a myth or so isolated the point was moot. Not a few of them paid me to listen to them talk about it, because they had been exposed to therapists who attempted to normalize them and their experiences away or judged them for it. One of my clients had been profoundly abused by his mother and all he wanted out of life was to be able to talk about it without the listener feeling sorry for him or slandering his gender. As I told him, my own experience made me hesitant to judge him (and in my experience, if it hasn't happened to the listener, they tend to try to assign blame. Even when they assign it to the abuser, which does not always happen, the person talking may not want to rehearse their anger so that the listener can feel vindicated in being angry.)
3. Because my job was to step in and out of roles, it offered me the chance to live through my own experiences of gender. The roles I was asked to take were pretty uniformly dark in nature. (I've been a homicidal maniac, a heartless torturer, that voice which tells you why you are worthless, etc.) In experiencing being the things that were done to me, I got to experience both assertion (I am freer now to say what's wrong on subjects I felt gagged on) and to experience the emptiness of the role, which has allowed me to begin to forgive (but not to forget; I have no desire to re-experience these things. The process of forgiving has allowed me to be a little less angry.) I said earlier that I was angry. There's a lot of angry men out there, too, who are angry at the role they feel compelled to take, and wish to be punished for the wrong they feel as if they are compelled to be implicated in. (I think that feeling compelled there is a cop-out. I have been taught to be demure, shy and conciliatory and often feel compelled. This does not mean I have to act on it, as you can no doubt tell from the tone of the post.)
4. There are also a lot of men who have been taught that their sexuality is a guilty experience (men who have been beaten for masturbation, men who reject the aggressive, rapist mentality but have no idea what to replace it with and feel guilty about being implicated in that mentality and in participating in it, even though they have not, to their knowledge, raped anyone.) What I did is offer them a forum to discuss it and penance, frequently through demonstrating to them that respect was possible and that they could be compelled to conform to it. Amazingly, clients would stick around and talk for awhile after a session, not infrequently about gender. I allowed a few clients to talk to me for free because they needed to talk something out and I wanted them to know that the difficulties they were having did not have to be dealt with on the basis of money. This is not uncommon but not offered to every client. Professional dommes are not heartless, only cautious and offering a very stressful service.
5. I had a small contingent of clients in the armed forces. Those men were the darkest of the scenarios I ran because they were afraid of dying. We talked, in fantasy, about the tortures they might encounter if they were captured or talked through their deaths. Anyone with a background in behavioral psychology should recognize extinction; this is clearly a case of attempting to tie a pleasant sensation to the very real (and terrible) fear of dying. It was also stress relief for both them and me. I am, in case there was any doubt, a sadist (not a monster; I believe in consent and care.) I think the war (invasion) is bullshit and illegal to boot, but I'd like to think a made a handful of troops feel a little better while they were over there. It's not exactly what people mean by support the troops, but in my experience of men, I provided stress relief and a forum for their fears.
This is, no doubt, both going to get me in hot water and more intellectual than usually gets associated with the profession. As I told the people at college, in my department, I'm not here for the popularity contest. (The male professor in that class had just, the class before, told me to try and be more charming in person, like I am in my emails. I get that one a lot. I am cantankerous and have been from birth, I'm told.) I'd like to be liked, but I'm not continuing to live in hope of the Ms Congeniality award. When I was a girl, I was repeatedly told the canard about luring more flies with honey than vinegar. I find I don't want flies, don't care if I'm told I'm sour, and that results come to those who work their asses off and wear don't-fuck-with-me boots. I am frequently not in the right place at the right time, so I can't speak of that portion of success, and I'm told I do everything the hard way, which does not make me happy but does let me know that I continue to operate in defiance of at least a few cultural norms, an experience I value.
I also found the intellectual approach and a certain toughness to be consistent in quite a few of the women I worked with (we had a handful of Master's degrees, a PhD and a handful of housewives.) Some women did not approach being a professional domme or sub as such, but enough did to provide a conversation group when we met.
I think, in general, that the men I was exposed to softened me toward the gender by offering me a chance to view some of the penalties men suffer from our gender system here in the US. A lot of it was, to my mind, a bit of a cop-out, but I find that everywhere I look, including in the mirror. I have tons and tons of issues with gender and sexuality in the US, as its taught, that I'm not covering here, but I'll get to those some other post. The experience put a face on the male half of sexual abuse for me and offered me a common ground on which to meet the men around me. I'm not happy that abuse is the ground, but better a common experience of abuse (which was predominantly male on male in my clientele) than nothing in common.
I'd like to think that this, above all, will provide me with compassion for my son's experience with gender expectations (and my bisexuality, I hope, will provide me with tolerance for him if he decides to be gay. I know I'll love him no matter what.) I know that no matter my experience, I will not have total understanding of his experience, but I'd like to think the door is open for me to try. An awful lot of parenting is all about adaptation, observation and the willingness to keep trying. And going.
So what changed? A lot of things. Finally meeting a member of the male half of the species that was not interested in evading responsibility, in blaming women for their own problems, in committing rape and calling it love, in victimizing myself or my children, in spending his half of the rent and informing me the day before the rent is due, in trying to make me more 'feminine' and finally, a year as a professional dominatrix.
I always hesitate to reveal this experience, because it is a heavily charged subject. Women tend to believe I whored myself for money and engaged in bringing down the feminism movement, and men tend to believe that it means I'm so bitter that I am not worth dealing with or that I belong to a class of women that have made themselves objects and therefore deserve whatever they chose to give me (something women frequently echo.) Good luck making that one stick, ladies and gents. That assertion mostly amuses me.
They're both wrong. I talked to men about sex and beat their asses. There's nothing wrong with selling a sexual experience, to my mind, especially one centered around proving to a man that he is, in fact, less dominant than he thinks. Just because they're paying does not mean that they cannot be surprised by the brains and will it takes to professionally domme; not to mention the refusal to be only dictated to. I bring me with me into sessions and could not do other, though I do try to be adaptable. The client may want to discuss a specific subject, and they may volunteer to experience the pain, but the fact that a domme inverts gender relationships and expectations has ramifications beyond the session. It wouldn't matter if I had fucked men for a living instead of being a domme. The role itself exposes you to the ability to powerfully alter the fundamental terms of gender perceptions. How, you ask?
There is a lot of gender-bending involved in the professional sex industry. I was everything in sessions over the phone and in person from the traditional nurse/mother /doctor to another man. I learned more about my own gender expectations than I could ever replicate elsewhere, and being a domme forces you to articulate and to make others articulate boundaries, which does a lot for your awareness of gender and expectation.
Moreover, and this is the part relevant to child-raising, I discovered that men's experiences of gender (or at least the gentlemen I talked in detail to) could also be quite corrosive, albeit in different ways. In the post before this one, I discussed the things I have had to discuss with my daughters that I have not with my son. The following is what I learned form that job about men and gender:
1. Men frequently feel victimized by gender expectations. I talked to a fair share of cross-dressers who had spent their entire lives afraid to the point of panic that someone would find out their desire to see the other side or their feeling of being freed of the pressure to conform when they were in women's clothing. Call them cowards, if you like. Some of them were certainly being cowardly, but we are compelled to meet people where they are, not where we wish they were, if we want to communicate. Women know the escape these men were picturing is an illusion. No one gets out of gender unscathed. But the women's clothing represented an utterly different set of expectations, and these guys wanted out of the pressure to be macho. This is, in no way, the only reason for cross-dressing. This is merely what I took from it. As always, if anyone reading feels differently, I am more than happy to hear about it.
2. Many of my clients (and this is what I advertised for because I understand it from my own experiences and thought I would provide a good sounding board) were sexually abused or physically abused as children. They had been told their whole lives that the abuse they experienced could never be spoken of (lest they be told they were not men. I won't repeat what they thought it would make them; we ended up talking about stereotypes.) This was instructive because I had never met a victimized man and thought they were a myth or so isolated the point was moot. Not a few of them paid me to listen to them talk about it, because they had been exposed to therapists who attempted to normalize them and their experiences away or judged them for it. One of my clients had been profoundly abused by his mother and all he wanted out of life was to be able to talk about it without the listener feeling sorry for him or slandering his gender. As I told him, my own experience made me hesitant to judge him (and in my experience, if it hasn't happened to the listener, they tend to try to assign blame. Even when they assign it to the abuser, which does not always happen, the person talking may not want to rehearse their anger so that the listener can feel vindicated in being angry.)
3. Because my job was to step in and out of roles, it offered me the chance to live through my own experiences of gender. The roles I was asked to take were pretty uniformly dark in nature. (I've been a homicidal maniac, a heartless torturer, that voice which tells you why you are worthless, etc.) In experiencing being the things that were done to me, I got to experience both assertion (I am freer now to say what's wrong on subjects I felt gagged on) and to experience the emptiness of the role, which has allowed me to begin to forgive (but not to forget; I have no desire to re-experience these things. The process of forgiving has allowed me to be a little less angry.) I said earlier that I was angry. There's a lot of angry men out there, too, who are angry at the role they feel compelled to take, and wish to be punished for the wrong they feel as if they are compelled to be implicated in. (I think that feeling compelled there is a cop-out. I have been taught to be demure, shy and conciliatory and often feel compelled. This does not mean I have to act on it, as you can no doubt tell from the tone of the post.)
4. There are also a lot of men who have been taught that their sexuality is a guilty experience (men who have been beaten for masturbation, men who reject the aggressive, rapist mentality but have no idea what to replace it with and feel guilty about being implicated in that mentality and in participating in it, even though they have not, to their knowledge, raped anyone.) What I did is offer them a forum to discuss it and penance, frequently through demonstrating to them that respect was possible and that they could be compelled to conform to it. Amazingly, clients would stick around and talk for awhile after a session, not infrequently about gender. I allowed a few clients to talk to me for free because they needed to talk something out and I wanted them to know that the difficulties they were having did not have to be dealt with on the basis of money. This is not uncommon but not offered to every client. Professional dommes are not heartless, only cautious and offering a very stressful service.
5. I had a small contingent of clients in the armed forces. Those men were the darkest of the scenarios I ran because they were afraid of dying. We talked, in fantasy, about the tortures they might encounter if they were captured or talked through their deaths. Anyone with a background in behavioral psychology should recognize extinction; this is clearly a case of attempting to tie a pleasant sensation to the very real (and terrible) fear of dying. It was also stress relief for both them and me. I am, in case there was any doubt, a sadist (not a monster; I believe in consent and care.) I think the war (invasion) is bullshit and illegal to boot, but I'd like to think a made a handful of troops feel a little better while they were over there. It's not exactly what people mean by support the troops, but in my experience of men, I provided stress relief and a forum for their fears.
This is, no doubt, both going to get me in hot water and more intellectual than usually gets associated with the profession. As I told the people at college, in my department, I'm not here for the popularity contest. (The male professor in that class had just, the class before, told me to try and be more charming in person, like I am in my emails. I get that one a lot. I am cantankerous and have been from birth, I'm told.) I'd like to be liked, but I'm not continuing to live in hope of the Ms Congeniality award. When I was a girl, I was repeatedly told the canard about luring more flies with honey than vinegar. I find I don't want flies, don't care if I'm told I'm sour, and that results come to those who work their asses off and wear don't-fuck-with-me boots. I am frequently not in the right place at the right time, so I can't speak of that portion of success, and I'm told I do everything the hard way, which does not make me happy but does let me know that I continue to operate in defiance of at least a few cultural norms, an experience I value.
I also found the intellectual approach and a certain toughness to be consistent in quite a few of the women I worked with (we had a handful of Master's degrees, a PhD and a handful of housewives.) Some women did not approach being a professional domme or sub as such, but enough did to provide a conversation group when we met.
I think, in general, that the men I was exposed to softened me toward the gender by offering me a chance to view some of the penalties men suffer from our gender system here in the US. A lot of it was, to my mind, a bit of a cop-out, but I find that everywhere I look, including in the mirror. I have tons and tons of issues with gender and sexuality in the US, as its taught, that I'm not covering here, but I'll get to those some other post. The experience put a face on the male half of sexual abuse for me and offered me a common ground on which to meet the men around me. I'm not happy that abuse is the ground, but better a common experience of abuse (which was predominantly male on male in my clientele) than nothing in common.
I'd like to think that this, above all, will provide me with compassion for my son's experience with gender expectations (and my bisexuality, I hope, will provide me with tolerance for him if he decides to be gay. I know I'll love him no matter what.) I know that no matter my experience, I will not have total understanding of his experience, but I'd like to think the door is open for me to try. An awful lot of parenting is all about adaptation, observation and the willingness to keep trying. And going.
the difference between raising girls and boys, from their mama's perspective
I just had a little boy three months and change ago. He's a cute fella, and a total monster (he weighs fifteen pounds and is into the six-nine months range in clothes.) When I pick him up, he's longer than the entirety of my torso. I look like one of his sisters.
It's my fault for liking the big guys, though since so many of the women I know had come up pregnant by surprise recently that we've been joking about being given Pez instead of birth control pills, because we were pretty uniformly on hormonal birth control. One of us had even been told that the frequent inflammation of her ovaries meant she could not have children... surprise. Some of us were just using rubber colanders. Most of us decided to keep the babies, and I'm glad we had the choice. I decided to keep mine, joking with the bf that anything that got past all the precautions apparently really wanted to be here and that I was curious to see why.
Since he has two older sisters, I find myself frequently comparing the things I've said to either one of them as they've grown (they are now 12 and 10). I suppose this is the understatement of the century, but the way we raise them is utterly different. For instance, when I've had the talk (you know which one; the uncomfortable one) with my girls, we've discussed being careful out in public, touched on date rape and discussed pregnancy and STDs. Since I was, myself, an unwed teenage mother and apparent scourge of the nation in the 1990s, I reminded them that it complicates things considerably, but that I would support them no matter what.
The bf and I were talking after the last round of conversations that make little girls squirm (and I hate to broach the subject, but as I think I mentioned earlier, we're having problems with my oldest and men following her.) He asked, I think more out of curiosity than anything else, how I was planning on broaching the sex conversation with our son. I should probably state now that I am a cynic of first water and that a lot of my advice to my daughters boiled down to the perfidy of teenage boys (even when they don't mean to) and a culture that glorifies and advocates violence against women. I told him that I was going to lay out the risk of pregnancy and STDs, why birth control is absolutely mandatory no matter if it 'feels better' without birth control and that if he knocks a girl up in high school, I'm going to make him intensely sorry he'd ever been born. Because he will not be bearing the majority of the cost, socially, ethically or financially, without my interference. Society, to my mind, encourages the deadbeat dad, especially when the dad is young.
The bf reared back at this. I have no doubt it sounded... well, let's call me passionate on the subject, shall we? The bf's dad took off when he and his sister were kids, leaving them to be raised by his mother, so there are many times where the fact that he's always been around women are helpful, but this was not a subject I think he discussed with his mother (who just about killed herself raising him and his sister without any child support, in the eighties.) He expressed worry that I would shame the little guy. I'm with him, in terms of not making my son feel unnecessarily shamed, but the discussion boiled down to this.
Here are a list of topics that I will likely never have to discuss, but am going to try to, because my son needs to know these things are out there:
1. I will never have to discuss the fact that he is constantly a potential victim. Better paranoid than raped or assaulted.
2. I will never have to hold his hand and hear him cry about the fact that in movies and TV, he is represented as a fool, a perpetual victim or as requiring someone else to insure his bodily integrity or right to an opinion.
3. I will never have to comfort him because he had an opinion in class and his classmates called him a bitch or whatever creative other came to mind (which has already happened to both my daughters.)
4. I will never have to put up with the school requiring counseling which is really a front for how to make him act more normal (ditto on it happening with the daughters; they talk out too much and are too opinionated.)
5. He will never have his success attributed to sex or favoritism (I have walked into classrooms and had men call me 'the teacher's pet; and tell me/say loudly that the only reason I'm in my program is that someone felt sorry for me. That happened my first semester in grad school before class started. The female professor was not in the room.)
6. He will never be told, as I have been, that if he takes a job and goes to school at the same time, it's because he doesn't love his children.
7. He'll never be told that the only reason he's in school is because he can't make relationships work (implying that if he could, he wouldn't need to have an education. My mother told me this when I got into the Master's program here.)
8. He'll never be told to just put up with it when/if he works in an opposite sex environment and the rest of the crew goes on break, all at the same time (a restaurant I worked in. When it angered me, I was told to quit bitching and asked why I thought I was 'tough' if I couldn't handle everyone leaving on break at once.)
9. He'll never be told to just put up with sexual harassment (having your boss lock you in the freezer because you've got a snooty attitude, the kitchen; having to threaten to de-man a coworker who frequently pins you to the counter with his groin and hump you, the kitchen again.) If he chooses to write about it, he is less likely to be accused him of making it up or asked why he wants to ruin everyone's day by bringing it up.
10. He'll never be told that what he has chosen to do for a living doesn't count as real analysis or work. (My father, talking to me about the MFA I'm in, said this about a year ago.)
11. He'll very likely never, if he turns out to be heterosexual, be told to conform to gender stereotypes or face retribution. (In bed with a man from my program, after I turned in a series of works about my experiences in that kitchen, he asked me why I thought I was macho and what was wrong with me. I kicked him out of the house pretty promptly afterwards. I do not wish to be in bed with anyone who thinks I ought to be more ladylike.)
12. He'll never be told that if he complains about something, that no one will want to be around him, and that his job in a relationship is to pacify or make the other person comfortable, such that it is his job above all others. (I was told, growing up, to ensure that I hid what brains I had because men like to feel needed and because no man wants to 'compete' at home.)
13. He'll never be told that having on opinion is somehow gender betrayal.
14. He'll never be told (outside the military) that he does not own his body.
15. He will not see himself in movies being raped, rescued or used because he was promiscuous. He will be encouraged to be promiscuous if he wishes to be considered manly. If he choses to be promiscuous, he will be encouraged to chose good partners and to be proud of his choice. (Examine any rape story you like; forty plus years after the women's lib movement started in the US, it's still her fault because she was 'asking for it,' no matter what the circumstances.)
16. He will not be encouraged to associate his sexuality with being raped. Enough said.
17. He will not be mourned, the way my daughters were when they were born/he will never be subjected to people speculating on his future and decided he will never be whole (able to marry) because his mother was unmarried when she had him. The girls, however, have already had it, both barrels, from my family and my ex's, about their future because I am not married/have been divorced. In fact, when he was born, my family were much happier for him and had much more positive things to say about his future.
18. Thus far, he has gotten more gifts than my daughters from the relatives, and more of my relatives have opted to babysit. With the girls, no one wanted to feel as if they were condoning my 'sin.' He will likely never be referred to as 'my sin.'
19. I have been told, repeatedly, by my favorite relatives, that 'this one you can spoil. Boys you can spoil.' He will not be asked to 'suck it up' as often as my daughters by my relatives.
As I'm sure you've noticed, a lot of these are due to my own experiences. I don't know how one parents without paying attention to their own upbringing. It will creep in, all over. Some of the things I cited above could be written off to the times they were in, if they had not been continual assertions, to this day, by my family. I'd write my family off, but I see these things in popular media, as well. I have opted, for the most part, not to use the TVs I have, except for to game. I love war games and always have. (Dear Vox, bite me.) So do my daughters. Even though those, too, are laden with stereotypes, we can mock them together. And war games provide an excellent outlet for the anger we experience, all of us, because I have no doubt that my son will also have his own things to get angry about.
How do I tell him about these things without making him feel weird? Well, I suppose some of them won't be brought up for quite a while. I'm going to leave the family out of it for awhile, unless I see him being 'spoiled' (ie is beginning to believe that because he is male, he should be better than his sisters or mother. That will not fly.) I will bring my outside experiences up, as I think he is old enough to understand the context. But mostly, I think bringing him up in a family that is mostly female will help him to see, on a daily basis, the price of being female in this culture. I'm certainly not going to shy away from discussing it with him. I think the difference in raising boys and girls in the US is as much a matter of being aware of (and making them aware of) the rhetoric aimed at them based on gender, to the extent that I recognize it.
As far as the unique cost of being male, I'm working on it. I would take reasonable suggestions, as I have no experience with being a man in the US.
It's my fault for liking the big guys, though since so many of the women I know had come up pregnant by surprise recently that we've been joking about being given Pez instead of birth control pills, because we were pretty uniformly on hormonal birth control. One of us had even been told that the frequent inflammation of her ovaries meant she could not have children... surprise. Some of us were just using rubber colanders. Most of us decided to keep the babies, and I'm glad we had the choice. I decided to keep mine, joking with the bf that anything that got past all the precautions apparently really wanted to be here and that I was curious to see why.
Since he has two older sisters, I find myself frequently comparing the things I've said to either one of them as they've grown (they are now 12 and 10). I suppose this is the understatement of the century, but the way we raise them is utterly different. For instance, when I've had the talk (you know which one; the uncomfortable one) with my girls, we've discussed being careful out in public, touched on date rape and discussed pregnancy and STDs. Since I was, myself, an unwed teenage mother and apparent scourge of the nation in the 1990s, I reminded them that it complicates things considerably, but that I would support them no matter what.
The bf and I were talking after the last round of conversations that make little girls squirm (and I hate to broach the subject, but as I think I mentioned earlier, we're having problems with my oldest and men following her.) He asked, I think more out of curiosity than anything else, how I was planning on broaching the sex conversation with our son. I should probably state now that I am a cynic of first water and that a lot of my advice to my daughters boiled down to the perfidy of teenage boys (even when they don't mean to) and a culture that glorifies and advocates violence against women. I told him that I was going to lay out the risk of pregnancy and STDs, why birth control is absolutely mandatory no matter if it 'feels better' without birth control and that if he knocks a girl up in high school, I'm going to make him intensely sorry he'd ever been born. Because he will not be bearing the majority of the cost, socially, ethically or financially, without my interference. Society, to my mind, encourages the deadbeat dad, especially when the dad is young.
The bf reared back at this. I have no doubt it sounded... well, let's call me passionate on the subject, shall we? The bf's dad took off when he and his sister were kids, leaving them to be raised by his mother, so there are many times where the fact that he's always been around women are helpful, but this was not a subject I think he discussed with his mother (who just about killed herself raising him and his sister without any child support, in the eighties.) He expressed worry that I would shame the little guy. I'm with him, in terms of not making my son feel unnecessarily shamed, but the discussion boiled down to this.
Here are a list of topics that I will likely never have to discuss, but am going to try to, because my son needs to know these things are out there:
1. I will never have to discuss the fact that he is constantly a potential victim. Better paranoid than raped or assaulted.
2. I will never have to hold his hand and hear him cry about the fact that in movies and TV, he is represented as a fool, a perpetual victim or as requiring someone else to insure his bodily integrity or right to an opinion.
3. I will never have to comfort him because he had an opinion in class and his classmates called him a bitch or whatever creative other came to mind (which has already happened to both my daughters.)
4. I will never have to put up with the school requiring counseling which is really a front for how to make him act more normal (ditto on it happening with the daughters; they talk out too much and are too opinionated.)
5. He will never have his success attributed to sex or favoritism (I have walked into classrooms and had men call me 'the teacher's pet; and tell me/say loudly that the only reason I'm in my program is that someone felt sorry for me. That happened my first semester in grad school before class started. The female professor was not in the room.)
6. He will never be told, as I have been, that if he takes a job and goes to school at the same time, it's because he doesn't love his children.
7. He'll never be told that the only reason he's in school is because he can't make relationships work (implying that if he could, he wouldn't need to have an education. My mother told me this when I got into the Master's program here.)
8. He'll never be told to just put up with it when/if he works in an opposite sex environment and the rest of the crew goes on break, all at the same time (a restaurant I worked in. When it angered me, I was told to quit bitching and asked why I thought I was 'tough' if I couldn't handle everyone leaving on break at once.)
9. He'll never be told to just put up with sexual harassment (having your boss lock you in the freezer because you've got a snooty attitude, the kitchen; having to threaten to de-man a coworker who frequently pins you to the counter with his groin and hump you, the kitchen again.) If he chooses to write about it, he is less likely to be accused him of making it up or asked why he wants to ruin everyone's day by bringing it up.
10. He'll never be told that what he has chosen to do for a living doesn't count as real analysis or work. (My father, talking to me about the MFA I'm in, said this about a year ago.)
11. He'll very likely never, if he turns out to be heterosexual, be told to conform to gender stereotypes or face retribution. (In bed with a man from my program, after I turned in a series of works about my experiences in that kitchen, he asked me why I thought I was macho and what was wrong with me. I kicked him out of the house pretty promptly afterwards. I do not wish to be in bed with anyone who thinks I ought to be more ladylike.)
12. He'll never be told that if he complains about something, that no one will want to be around him, and that his job in a relationship is to pacify or make the other person comfortable, such that it is his job above all others. (I was told, growing up, to ensure that I hid what brains I had because men like to feel needed and because no man wants to 'compete' at home.)
13. He'll never be told that having on opinion is somehow gender betrayal.
14. He'll never be told (outside the military) that he does not own his body.
15. He will not see himself in movies being raped, rescued or used because he was promiscuous. He will be encouraged to be promiscuous if he wishes to be considered manly. If he choses to be promiscuous, he will be encouraged to chose good partners and to be proud of his choice. (Examine any rape story you like; forty plus years after the women's lib movement started in the US, it's still her fault because she was 'asking for it,' no matter what the circumstances.)
16. He will not be encouraged to associate his sexuality with being raped. Enough said.
17. He will not be mourned, the way my daughters were when they were born/he will never be subjected to people speculating on his future and decided he will never be whole (able to marry) because his mother was unmarried when she had him. The girls, however, have already had it, both barrels, from my family and my ex's, about their future because I am not married/have been divorced. In fact, when he was born, my family were much happier for him and had much more positive things to say about his future.
18. Thus far, he has gotten more gifts than my daughters from the relatives, and more of my relatives have opted to babysit. With the girls, no one wanted to feel as if they were condoning my 'sin.' He will likely never be referred to as 'my sin.'
19. I have been told, repeatedly, by my favorite relatives, that 'this one you can spoil. Boys you can spoil.' He will not be asked to 'suck it up' as often as my daughters by my relatives.
As I'm sure you've noticed, a lot of these are due to my own experiences. I don't know how one parents without paying attention to their own upbringing. It will creep in, all over. Some of the things I cited above could be written off to the times they were in, if they had not been continual assertions, to this day, by my family. I'd write my family off, but I see these things in popular media, as well. I have opted, for the most part, not to use the TVs I have, except for to game. I love war games and always have. (Dear Vox, bite me.) So do my daughters. Even though those, too, are laden with stereotypes, we can mock them together. And war games provide an excellent outlet for the anger we experience, all of us, because I have no doubt that my son will also have his own things to get angry about.
How do I tell him about these things without making him feel weird? Well, I suppose some of them won't be brought up for quite a while. I'm going to leave the family out of it for awhile, unless I see him being 'spoiled' (ie is beginning to believe that because he is male, he should be better than his sisters or mother. That will not fly.) I will bring my outside experiences up, as I think he is old enough to understand the context. But mostly, I think bringing him up in a family that is mostly female will help him to see, on a daily basis, the price of being female in this culture. I'm certainly not going to shy away from discussing it with him. I think the difference in raising boys and girls in the US is as much a matter of being aware of (and making them aware of) the rhetoric aimed at them based on gender, to the extent that I recognize it.
As far as the unique cost of being male, I'm working on it. I would take reasonable suggestions, as I have no experience with being a man in the US.
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