Untimely Ripped

If you’ve had a child in the last ten years or so - or rather, if you’ve seriously contemplated having a child for more than about fifteen minutes of your life - there’s one fact you’ve probably heard: Caesarean rates in the first world, especially in the US, are too high. Every few months brings along another article like this one, deploring the Caesarean rate and explaining (1) why it’s so high and (2) what doctors and patients should be doing to solve it, and aren’t. In many circles, unmedicated natural childbirth is held to be the best possible birthing experience — “our birthright” according to one midwife — and women who end up having a Caesarean for causes which aren’t immediately and obviously life-threatening for the baby (for instance, prolapsed cord) quite often feel that they’ve somehow been denied a good birth, or that they have let themselves or the baby down. On Plans, we were discussing how “birth is not a competition”, but human nature is such that some people will inevitably regard it as one; to have had an unmedicated birth somehow gives you a head start in the Good Parenting Stakes, and to have had a Caesarean shows lamentable weakness.

What is professional hair, anyway?

I’ve been thinking about my hair a lot lately. Partly this is because it’s got split ends, and I need to have it trimmed. But then I started thinking about how much I should have it cut. Should it be just a trim, or should I really get it cut?

I’ve pretty much always had long hair. Very long. By the end of my third year of college, it was getting to the point that I could sit on the ends when it was down. I got it cut short for the first time after I returned from my semester abroad, in a sort of “I have the confidence to do something really different now!” act of independence. They cut off 25″ all in one go. Then I grew it out again for 2.5 years, only to get it cut short again in the middle of my second miserable year of grad school, this time with the hope that it would symbolize some sort of grand turning point for many things in my life then. It didn’t work, but they did take off 12″ that time, and it did mean that while I remained depressed for the rest of year, I didn’t have to worry too much about brushing my hair.

Anyway, I’ve recovered since then, and I’ve been letting my hair grow again ever since, so it’s back down to almost my waist. And I like it. So why would I want to cut it? Why do I sort of feel like I’m expected to cut it?

Some time last year, at whatever time of year it was that the local paper decided most new college grads would be seriously looking for job interviews or going to their first real jobs, there was an article about “how to look professional.” Most of it was dedicated to discussion of different levels of casual vs. formal professional clothing, but two things stood out to me from their suggestions for women:

What makes a role model?

I’m reading Veronica Chambers’ Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, and I just came to a part where Chambers describes the unexpected reaction she got when asking young Japanese college women about their role models. Coming from the US, she had clearly been thinking of it as a very standard question, along the lines of “Where do you want to be in five years?,” and so on. But instead, she ended up writing this:

The most obvious question to ask, when you are reporting on women and their changing roles in society, is: Who are your role models? Even if the answer is pat - “my mother,” “Hillary Clinton,” “Maya Angelou” - it tells you something about the woman and how she thinks of herself. Perhaps because Japan is not, by nature, a country of individualists, the role model question gets a lot of blank stares. “I don’t have any role models,” a girl named Gaga tells me at Sacred Heart [University]. “My parents taught me when I was small, you can choose your own way.” Akiko, another student, says, “I think I don’t have a certain person, but an image: someone who’s independent, strong, and caring.” I wonder, too, if it is because the national culture is so private, that it is hard to develop the kind of admiration and deep-seated affiliation that one feels for a role model: be it a senior employee at your company or someone you see on TV.

I wonder how many women at [Canon executive] Masako Nara’s company know how important it was for her to be called by her maiden name and the deal she struck with a coworker to make it happen. How many of Satako’s female coworkers know how uncomfortable she was at the late night drinking parties that were once part of her job, and how relieved she was to get more international clients who prefer lunch to dinner for work-related socializing? My sense, again and again, was that women told me stories they did not share with their colleagues, or even sometimes with their friends. It occurs to me that in order for someone to be a role model, they must reveal not only their strengths, but their vulnerabilities. It’s in the interplay between the two, and how they overcome the latter, that we find something worthy of admiring.

-Chambers, 84

Flappers, Sluts and Beauty Queens

I attended a recent presentation in Berlin entitled “Femmes Fatales: Japanese Bathing Beauties, Berlin Flappers and America’s Teenaged Sluts.” Three scholar/authors presented their research on the aforementioned female groups. First came Uta Poiger, who spoke on European attitudes towards color cosmetics and their advertisement in the inter-war period. Then Emily White, an editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, read from her book on the myth of the high-school slut. Finally, Jan Bardsley spoke on the first Japanese Miss Universe in 1959. While wildly diverse, each presentation touched upon the tension between natural and artificial beauty, upon the simultaneous admiration and distrust of beautiful women, upon the cultural and behavioral bounds in which women find themselves trapped.

O Mistress Mine

It’s a sign of how much sleep I’ve had lately that I can’t remember whether the discussion on the use of “Mrs” “Ms” and “Miss” was held on Plans or somewhere else (I’m *pretty* sure it was Plans) but as it’s one of those perennial issues I wanted to discuss it here, as well as offering my personal, farfetched solution.

Are part-time jobs sexist?

Tuesday was my last day at my old job, (I start a new one tomorrow,) and so I’ve been reflecting on the experience for a while, a process greatly aided by all the people who inevitably ask, “Oh, why are you leaving?” Besides the fact that my new job (at least on paper) looks fantastic, the real reason I was looking for a new job in the first place all comes down to money. And in this case, hours of work was the determining factor that meant I wasn’t really making enough money at my old job anymore.

I knew it was a 3/4-time job going in, and I don’t really have any complaints about it, because I only expected to be there for one or two years anyway. It did come with benefits, so I, as a single person living alone, could afford to take it anyway, even at less than full-time. Yay, me! It was a fun job and I enjoyed it, so it was worth it. But.

Here’s the thing about 3/4-time jobs. It’s really hard to find a 10-hour/wk job to fill in just those extra hours left over, and if you take a 1/2-time job in addition instead, you’re now working 50 hours/wk, without the benefit of overtime, and unless they’re both fun and interesting jobs, it kind of sucks to have your free time cut into like that. Plus, any time you work over 30 hours at your main job isn’t really overtime, either.

How many children are ethical?

This has been an interesting couple of weeks for considering the ethics of reproduction. Last week, it seemed like there were suddenly people everywhere talking about how it just might be a great idea if Americans (and everyone else in the world, really) were encouraged, or possibly required, to have only one child.

As near as I can tell, a lot of the discussion got started with this article: Global Swarming: Is It Time for Americans to Start Cutting Our Baby Emissions? It is, in its turn, a review of the book The World Without Us, which is mostly about what the world would be like, environmentally speaking, if all the people disappeared. How long it would take the Earth to “recover” to a pre-human level, so on and so forth. But the author doesn’t really want to wait for people to suddenly become extinct; he’d like to see us start doing something that might conceivably save the planet in a way that people could still be around to enjoy it. The article summarizes his call for action like this:

Let’s cut the birth rate to one child per couple, for a few generations at least. The population would dwindle by about 5 billion people over the next century, he says, ensuring the habitability of the Earth for the 1.6 billion who remained. At that point, they could all reap the rewards of a more spacious planet, sharing in “the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful.”

Feminism: faith or works?

Does being a feminist mean you have to dislike men? Have to go to abortion-rights rallies? Have to take out the garbage, kill the spiders, or hold down a job during the early years of motherhood? Does it mean you have to be a woman?

Of course not! It just means you have to hate the freaking patriarchy! At least that had always been my belief. And that’s the argument made by this celebrated Tomato Nation essay from 2003. (Tx Lindsey Kuper.)

There’s just one problem: the essay is built around a misread definition — a misreading that says a lot about the very same fissures in the feminist movement that the author is hoping to heal. So I’m calling her out.

Title IX Anniversary

Thirty-five years ago, in June, 1972 (about the time of the Watergate break-in), Richard Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (20 U.S.C § 1681 et seq.) into law. The US Department of Justice web site still describes Title IX as “…a comprehensive federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity. The principal objective of Title IX is to avoid the use of federal money to support sexually discriminatory practices in education programs such as sexual harassment and employment discrimination, and to provide individual citizens effective protection against those practices.”

Notwithstanding the DOJ’s description, Title IX mostly is known as the law that made sports, particularly college sports, more accessible to women. Some say that Title IX achieved this goal at the expense of men’s sports. Others say that without Title IX, women’s sports would be forced back to the bad old days (i.e., the time when I was at university) when our athletic opportunities were limited to such events as the intramural field hockey tournament.

I have always considered Title IX a good thing. Never having had the capability to play big time sports (far from it!), I was just an intellectual cheerleader for girl jocks like Mia Hamm and the US Olympic women’s soccer team. In my circle of acquaintances, though, I have found that Title IX is a topic that equals abortion rights in the intensity, emotion and sometimes rage exhibited by its supporters and detractors. Over the last few months, I’ve had some serious, thoughtful discussions with people whose intelligence and ideas I admire, and from these discussions I’ve determined that there are no easy answers. In fact, I’m not sure anyone even knows what the questions are. The fight over Title IX, like the fight over a woman’s right to choose, has taken on a life of its own.

International Women’s Day Postscript

As I wrote before, International Women’s Day isn’t as widely recognized and celebrated as it ought to be. But some people do. In the park behind the Houses of Parliament in London, there is a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, possibly the most famous leader of the British suffragette movement. At its feet, the day I was there, four days after International Women’s Day, it was still decorated with bouquets and wreaths of flowers.

Our tour guide who was showing us around the Old Westminster area bent down to see the card on one of the bouquets. It read, “For Mrs. Pankhurst, on an important day.” (Or something to that effect.) The guide admitted with embarrassment that she didn’t know what day it meant, so I told her. I’m sure Mrs. Pankhurst would be happy some remember. She was an amazing woman, and a fitting person to give such a tribute to.