Thursday, June 26, 2008

on mayo

I was away in the bush getting blistered and scratched and altogether well-loved for a while there, and I didn’t read one line of news or check my email. So all kinds of things happened without my gert alter ego getting puffed up. I’ve been back from never-neverland for two days and here’s a summary of what I skirted:

C-section rates have never been higher; another man went to jail for killing his wife and child; the FDA is discriminating against older women who would like to be vaccinated against HPV (even though HPV can come in many forms, can go away and come back, and can never have been contracted by older women who are virgins/monogamous); Mr. Max is claiming he didn’t know about his bad-girl girlfriend’s bad-girl past and so he is INNOCENT and frankly SHOCKED (oh me! oh my!); women aren’t as pleased as men the morning after one-nighters (because of some ludicrous evolutionary psychology proposition about female fearing of the dangers of childrearing…WHEN will evolutionary psychology catch up with the brilliant evolution of humans to TAKE BIRTH CONTROL? (My personal theory: women’s pleasure is often a little more tricky to crack, takes a little longer than seven minutes of practice…no?); California caught up with Canada and let gay couples wed (next stop in the catch-canada relay: universal health care!); Jamie Lynn Teenager had her baby and took her straight to Walmart; a gaggle of US teens made or did not make a pregnancy pact, regardless, they are pregnant and they are teens (I recall the pregnancy pact being up there with “let’s have a house together on the seaside and drink tea and raise four snuggly gray kitties” in terms of top childish girl-to-girl promises, but even when we made up these silly stories we knew we’d have careers and fulfilling sexual and equal partnerships before we got around to cottaging together in Velcro rollers); AND, finally, prudish objections were made to men kissing over mayonnaise sandwiches, the virgin mary breastfeeding, italian women breastfeeding, and women in Malaysia wearing lipstick (unless they WANT to get raped, of course). How we got to the 21st century of breastfeeding since little baby jesus was breastfed and STILL we debate whether this is indecent, I dunno. I’m stumped. The lipstick thing, uh, yeah, whatever. But the men kissing? That riles me up. I love men kissing, for starters. And I love mayonnaise on sandwiches! What could be more wholesome than natural mayonnaise and a little natural man-on-man domesticity in the morning? Are you kidding me? There were enough objections to a little g’bye hon peck that the ad gets pulled? Because it might SCAR THE CHILDREN?

Last time I checked, kissing= good, horrific homophobic assholeness = scarring. It’s pride week! Make out!

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

on lower case letters

bell hooks is the other writer, besides the obvious e e cummings, who caused me to write in humble but also glaringly narcissistic lower case letters from the teenage discovery of poetry and for the rest of my life. In 2001, my brilliant Brown summer love from 1997 asked me to have an environmental economics prof of mine send him a pdf library of tradeable emission permit literature. I carbon copied the old bf to the request, and Raj sent back a shocked retort: is this prof such a big deal you’ve started using capital letters?

In 2001 I also went to hear bell hooks speak, in a giant evangelical church dug much deeper into Oakland than my telegraph ave muscousy-peach stucco sublet. Snuggled into the pews between power buttocks and yards of extensions, my brilliant White summer love and I were sheepish, in the black sheep sense of the word as well as shy to the point of sweating. Bell hooks writes beautifully and honestly about love as action, I milked her words for a wedding reading last year to great appreciation. She is not all hugs and buttercups when it comes to loving thy systematically privileged historical enslaver, but I wasn’t really expecting it. I can handle that my Boer ancestors are an embarrassment, and I can own up to how that embarrassment has rendered me advantaged.

Her opening act was Rebecca Walker, famously half-black, half-white & half-Jewish and as categorically jeopardized as they come. Except of course she is gorgeous, always a plus when you are pushing buttons. Walker’s mother wrote The Colour Purple, which was so doused in incest and religious fanaticism and racist hatred that my own purple heart fell out onto the page, and I disturbingly demanded equally harrowing plot lines from literature ever since.

The Walker women are now feuding because Rebecca claims Alice denigrated motherhood in that quintessential second-wave way we WASPs summarize as Julianne Moore’s belted-waist & blossom skirt suicide in The Hours: it is horrible, you lose yourself, and then you die.

Hmm.

Rebecca’s newest book is called Baby Love. It’s about her choice to mother and how lovely it is, despite her adult suspicion of the act, and her mother’s persistent and politicized discouragement. To the point of disowning Rebecca. Holy jesus Alice, and I thought Celie’s story was brutal.

My mother disagrees with me when I am prematurely unequivocal. She encourages caution when I say things like Love Is Bullshit or Without Nationalized Daycare No one Should Procreate. But I can safely say from the way she coddles my poodle that she would unequivocally find my reproduction The Best Idea Ever. So although I wish Obtaining Grotesque Amounts of Higher Education ranked a little higher while my biological clock remains in its manufacturer’s packaging, I am grateful that Mom managed to pull me out of elementary school to attend feminist protest rallies and she still took pride in the undrugged birthing of three chubscicle babies. But her sacrifices were always apparent, and for the time being they really do not seem like sacrifices I’d be willing to make.

My impulse is to accuse Rebecca of being too harsh, regardless of the accusation that Alice cut her from her will and started the antagonistic fiasco from the start. Rebecca is being pouty. Poor little brilliant Rebecca who’s mom is an even more brilliant writer and thinker and fighter, who was (what with the time constraints and all), a less than coddling mama. Lucky Rebecca had her father’s other wife to look to for a model of stay-at-home mother-smother.

Not to turn this into a tirade about the impossibility of being the perfect power leader- cupcake baker chimera, I had to voice how irritated Rebecca has me. And yes, that’s well and good for me to say what with my mother having worked part-time while my nose ran and my bones grew. What is always left out of these mommy war gripings is the possibility of debating daddying for while. Come on Rebecca, do that for a minute. Without necessarily attaching photos of the Jolie-Pitt bonanza…let’s just take a wee break from judging our mothers and ourselves as (potential?) mothers.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

on salami

Remember a few posts ago I said I was going to the big city for a meeting about women and law? And I wondered if it would be tired and depressing? Well it wasn’t, it was the best damn weekend of feminism a girl could ever hope for.

In addition to campaigns around Morgentaler’s case in NB and the third federal reading of C-484, the org is also currently involved in some family law stuff. This is one productive femmy group. They’re responsible for women being able to give their children a maternal surname (not sirname); for spousal support in same sex partnerships; for balanced tax benefits (and penalties) between support-paying separated parents; for fathers having employee benefits to childcare; for the sharing of CPP between elderly ex-spouses; for the elimination of the “spouse in the house” rule governing social assistance in Ontario (last time I checked this still applied in NB); for the requirement of legal aid provision to poor families; for retroactive child support; for enforcement of child support; and for the equitable sharing of economic consequences of divorce. Major shit. If you want to join a local branch, especially if you are a law student or lawyer, contact me.

Meanwhile we workshopped in my favourite focus group style: Like, we know it is insane to kick a girl out of a soccer game because she wears a hijab, but is it insane to be furiously opposed to FGM? No. So, discuss limits of respect for religious freedom. Until happy hour. I love that.

My former supervisor had her team over my last night in town. She is the bossiest powerhouse I have ever encountered. She never met an opinion of her own she didn’t like. So we cooed at coworkers’ babies and barbequed salami (seriously, that happened. My supervisor is CLASSY) and the six-year olds flooded the sandbox with unsupervised access to the garden hose. Then my supervisor told me she completely disagreed with all of my always ridiculous plans and that she really wished I would just become a lawyer.

Speaking of which, Babs became a full-grown full-blown lawyer last week. Congrats.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

on gin and juice

Tonight I’m flying. When Dr S and I travel she goes a lighter shade of Irish pale and her teeny hands in baubly big rings grip the arm rests with the supernatural brute strength typically reserved for saving babies from car wrecks, etc. I’ll share a few empathetic rounds of airborne gin sodas with her, but honestly I don’t mind planes at all. I mind luggage. I mind packing it, I mind carrying it, waiting for it, setting it down and briefly losing it, etc. And I really mind being told by strangers who don’t know my needs and wear ill-fitting navy blue uniforms what I can or cannot have in it.

And I am of course no new parent, but I am some ticked about the minor special-interest piece in the Globe today about the flyer who had to dump 1.5 litres of BREAST MILK she had dutifully pumped while at a conference because, of course, security wouldn’t let on board with it because her infant wasn’t with her because, you know, she was on a BUSINESS TRIP and left the babe home with Dad and a fridge full of pre-pump.

Going without perfume, hair products, and self-tanner every time I go away so that I don’t have to check my bags is, in my opinion, a womanly and unpleasant experience that I just have to endure for the sake of my inner impatient demons. But refusing to let breast milk through security is SEXISM. You know how people are always cheaply asking about or excusing sexist this or that, like dull jokes or entrenched remuneration disparities, wondering what sexism is? Well breast milk banning is sexism. That’s the definition of sexism. Making a stupid, inconvenient rule about liquids and ON TOP of that stupidity, not thinking about how this might impact one of the two uniquely womanly productive activities on this earth is SEXISM. Only women produce breast milk, only women will be affected by banning it from air travel. (And of course the babies who don’t get the nourishment- but that’s another story). I am honestly stupefied…it’s the tackiest thing I’ve had to read about in ages. I cannot believe we have gotten to the brainless lemming point of body regulation where no one had the cajones (including the breastfeeding flyer) to say “FUCK OFF, don’t be so effing afraid of boob juice, get out of the way I’m boarding and the cooler’s coming with me.”

I feel like boarding tonight with a case of Picarroons and screeching something along those lines while wearing a string bikini.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

on couchetard

Though he couldn’t have possibly known it was coming, Michael Wolff’s post-Spitzer piece in this month’s VF about political men and their sexual downfall makes for smugly coincidental reading in the first sexy minute in Canadian politics since ooohh, Belinda chose an (unfortunately short-sighted) career opportunity over a potato-faced but powerful man. This is the minute of Mad Max and Julie, whom M-L-T deliciously nicknamed “Julie Couchetard”. Aaahmazing.

Wolff has a couple of theses going. Among them: the infidelity of the White middle-aged men (who dominate politics, obvs) exposes their characters as weak and pathetic brown-nosers of the derrieres of the young and well-endowed in a desperate attempt to disguise self-defining middle age. Because being weak and pathetic makes for a lousy leader image, the electorate is keen on the opposite of the White middle-aged man: Hilary or, and as was confirmed last night, Obama.

And he goes where I think I’ve gone before, egging leaders to open up and speak out about their kinks because between Facebook, the polipaparazzi and the Patriot Act, baby you have no where to hide. Better to be kinky and proud than caught with your pants down.

Wolff also blames women for ganging up en masse to make White male sexual depravity so unacceptable and, frankly, so little fun. Right muffin, we’re sorry about that. He counters with some irritating militant imagery: you know Obama isn’t depraved not because he is too damn physically fine to ever use interns/escorts to assert his sustainable architecture of gorgeousness but because Michelle Obama would whoop his ass if he ever stepped out of line. And by line we mean her first lady G string. (Sorry again but just what about Michelle Obama differentiates her from other reasonably gorg charismatic stylish powerhouse partners - besides her unreasonably gorg husband?)

Hmm.

There is no arguing. Couchetard whooped Mad Max’s ass. But she had gangs of bikers behind her. She had top secret file blackmail. And anyway Bernier wasn’t infidelous- HE BORED HER.

I definitely do not want to think about Harper having sex. But sex is apparently how political careers live and die. Are his zombie eyes immunity from the sex slanderous political arena of the over-surveyed era? Or can a kid dream?

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

on Spain

The New York Times had a piece yesterday about the most logical and yet astounding emerging trend in the bewilderingly inequitable American system of private health insurance: the denial of insurance to women who have had a C-section. WOW. As if the pain and immobilization, risk of infection or death were not enough for someone to deal with! This is exactly the type of thing we never foresee until it is too late, proof of the axiom that the more we know the more we know we don’t know, and another notch in the adjustable ward bedpost of medical progress as women’s regress.

Not that the C-section is anything terribly new- it’s at least of the Roman era- but there has been considerable progress it the quality and quantity of its use. I am reading a not-new-either book by Matt Cohen called The Spanish Doctor, a medieval tale of dodgy and heroic medicine in the context of serial Jewish genocide and ghettoization. It’s good, I recommend it. M-L-T’s sister is in Spain right now and Spain was on my brain, so I picked it up. In one of the first scenes, Haveli, the doctor, is called to the home of a wealthy, heirless Christian merchant whose wife is near-death from labouring a very crooked babe. The merchant makes it clear the life of the infant should come before that of his bride, but Haveli decides not to wait for her death to remove the baby from her womb: he drugs her with four cups of wine, and cuts.

After the medieval bedroom procedure Cohen describes, it’s certain she cannot conceive again. But now not only is C-section not counter-indicated with future pregnancy, vaginal birth after caesarean delivery is also possible. It’s pretty sleazy for insurance companies to automatically assume you will get pregnant again, require another C-section and cost them money, just because you did once before.

In Canada at the moment we do not face even a fraction of the peril Americans encounter when they need health care. But some things you do need insurance for, non-hospital-administered drugs especially. And we imperil our likelihood of qualifying for insurance by seeking out unnecessary health care. (Some C-sections are obviously needed! Just not as many as women are receiving!).

Last year when I studied genetic screening of infants we faced the unanswered question of how abnormal but not necessarily “positive” results would affect insurability. It is hard to worry about what infants will be asked by Blue Cross thirty years from now, so it didn’t weigh too heavily on me. But last week Women’s College in Toronto announced it is now offering genetic testing to all Jewish women to detect BRCA1 and 2 positivity- markers for breast and ovarian cancer risk. Jewish women appear to host the BRCA genes at far greater number than non-Jewish women; the Women’s College project may find justification for a more systematic screening program. Cancer drugs- including prophylactic tamoxifen- cost a lot of money. Are these volunteers jeopardizing insurability? Does it make economic sense to require insurance companies to turn a blind eye to voluntary genetic testing results? Hardly just for the genetic testing industry and the pharmaceutical industry to reap while the insurance industry pays. If anything these markers of medical progress provide increasing evidence of the need for a complete extraction of health care from the market, and complete socialization of the burden of treatments.

Monday, June 2, 2008

on chemistry

Last night I accompanied my mother to a dinner party for the women’s peace group she’s been involved with locally since moving here in the seventies. I would always go if I was in town and now I am always in town. The women meet at an old cottage downtown wallpapered in works by the Bobaks, matched in charm by a backyard garden of gaping June tulips and pond koi fish. The make gluten-free dishes, having at one creative moment past thrown the pots they now present them in. They lament the waning productivity of their organization and the soreness of their hips. I got restless.

When Pini and I lived in NDG, somehow, and I forget entirely how, we were sent to Toronto for a meeting of the now-defunct national congress about gender equity and learning. We took the greyhound and stayed at the Yonge/Eglinton apartment of Pini’s mentor, an Amazonian blonde grad from our college about ten years our senior. She wore shiny emerald green blouses and took us clubbing…all I remember is the men in her lawyer friend group couldn’t get in because they wore the wrong shoes.

The meeting was a last ditch and expensive attempt to save a long-beloved and respected federal-level organization that was similarly suffering from waning activism. It was a horrible experience. We were distrusted and accosted, I guess for being new and young and chipper. We weren’t even twenty. The facilitator had explained there would be a “feminist philosophical” approach to conference participation, and we were instructed to move freely between sessions, to choose and change our minds and “explore”. Even in a late-adolescence hour of pre-cynicism, I had my doubts about this “system”. And when we attempted to leave one sour session we met what was nothing short of verbal spanking. We hadn’t had much of any attachment to the group and still we were socially forced to share the feeling of a piercing rip from the nipple as the organization limped into rhetoric and irrelevance.

There aren’t a lot of groups that champion women’s barriers to learning. Just like there aren’t a lot of groups that point to the separate experience of women in war and other contexts of violence. Old-school second wave activism was about womanly chemistry, lentils and candlelight vigils and tongue-twisty protest chants. These groups fall apart from inclusion. What a hoax to bring token youngins like us to Toronto! Can that chemistry ever be inherited? At last night’s dinner table I felt more an anthropologist than a daughter of the gentle, water colour & chintz revolution.

This weekend I am going back to Toronto for a women & law group’s AGM. Report on generational translation to follow…