True Colors

At the end of this month I am going to see Kinky Boots with my daughter and granddaughter. I have always liked Cyndi Lauper. The highlights of her career took place in my daughter's heyday, not mine. However, Cyndi is only 2 years younger than me. That always gave me pause and inspired me a bit.

There is great pressure on women to "act our age" and to live our lives according to age appropriate norms. She never allowed herself to be bullied in that way. I like that she retained her youthfulness and quirkiness. I like that she always promoted equality and acceptance. She has always been honest, genuine, and true to herself. That's why I love her.

Cyndi Lauper - True Colors (Live Letterman 1986) from You Tube

Courage, My Friends!

This morning I woke up thinking about the online accounting system at my old job. Then I read a provocative blog post on Feministe defending a certain Southern sorority’s questionable recruitment video and scolding readers for commenting so ruthlessly about it. I was reminded that courage is needed every single day in every single life, and often for rather mundane issues. However, I know in my heart of hearts that courage alone is not enough.

When I retired the new university accounting system was still new. Maddeningly complicated, the system was designed for central administration’s use. 

I worked most of my adult life as a staff member at this large research university, the “business” of which is teaching, research, and public service. A significant number of employees work in the academic units where the teaching, research, and public service actually happens.  The central administration (aka, Central) is there to make sure the tools are in place and well maintained to meet those goals.

Central is naturally concerned with the University macrocosm.  For them budgeting in aggregate is critical.  The staff in the academic “units” are concerned with the microcosm.  In academic units budgets are a means to get money into a financial entity (called an “account”) so spending can begin and teaching, research, and public service can happen.

Faculty researchers are creative individuals.  Some are the best people in the world at conducting their specific research. They think new thoughts, explore our humanity, analyze social issues, create new materials, isolate genes, cure diseases, and even take us to Mars and beyond. I am not saying they are perfect.  Some of them are not nice and a few are not even all that smart; however, when they behave themselves and do good work they are extraordinary!

Financial staff in the “units” need financial data generated quickly and easily so spending can be monitored and federally funded grants and contracts do not go into overdraft. The new system did not give us what we needed.

Anyway, Central just needed to tell the programmers to design a few different reports for the academic units.  For a ridiculously long time that did not happen.  When we complained, the central accounting people responded defensively. They accused us of being averse to change and stereotyped us as “negative.”  The result?  A solid majority of users hated the system and lost faith in the University's central accounting office.

Neither side listened to the other and no one changed their mind.  This left me scratching my head, once again wondering how you effectively challenge someone’s belief system to effect change? In a nutshell, the courage to speak up is not enough if you cannot get someone to listen.

Personally, I do not always have the good sense to fear those in power.  I know some people think I am foolish, or a glutton for punishment, but I always felt it was important as an employee to do a good job, speak the truth, and try and make things better.  I am not afraid to interrupt or talk over a man in a suit to make him listen to what I desperately hope is a well-reasoned argument.  I learned early on that you have to interrupt people in power or else you will never get a chance to talk. To do that you have to believe you are as important, as smart, and as valuable as anyone else in the room.

I also think it is important to do “the right thing.” However, unless you are comfortable being an ideologue it is hard to figure out exactly what the “right” thing is in any given situation. To figure out what is right you have to be open to the idea of being wrong.  Then you have to think critically, leaving comfortable, established belief systems behind.  This does not come naturally to human beings.  It is hard not to jump on the bandwagon or try not to succumb to group think.  Let’s face it, it is hard to be alone.

You have to suspend a natural human desire to be liked, too.  That means you cannot cry if someone gets angry with you. You just have to take it on the chin. I am sorry, but you also need to stop caring about being sexually attractive, at least for the duration of your argument. There is a time and a place for everything. 

This is a huge stumbling block for some young women. The media would have our vulnerable young girls believe sexual presentation and social approval are the most important things EVER in their whole entire lives.  Big sigh.  How do we liberate these young women from this great lie? 

Which brings me to the post I read this morning on Feministe and the murky connection between that blog post and the University’s online budget system. The post is titled: In which, God help me, I find myself defending the Alpha Phi video.  It was written by a fabulous blogger named Caperton.

As I read her defense of those seemingly frivolous young women I thought, “I don’t buy this.” The whole cutsie-cute sorority sister routine bothers me, why was this serious feminist defending them? What was her point?  In the final paragraph she laid it on me.

We are not going to change any young girl’s mind by attacking or ridiculing her. What I think Caperton was saying is this: a young sorority girl will be humiliated and angered by hurtful dogmatic criticism. Consequently, she will then be lost to the cause.  Plus, she’s still a kid and she is just trying to have fun so give her a break. We were all young and stupid once.  Some of these girls might still grow and change if they are not attacked and traumatized by raging and rabid feminists.  Ha!  You KNOW she’s right! 

I was blown away by Caperton’s courage and intellectual fervor. I enjoyed her message, but it was not as important to me as her savvy in presenting it.  Alone she stood up within the confines of a righteous but dogmatic political movement and spoke what she thought was the truth. She asked what might be a better way to effect change in those young ladies. That took courage, but it also required critical and, more importantly, strategic thinking.

I still do not like sororities. That is probably not going to change considering who I am and what I value.  That was never the point of this or the other blog post, anyway.  Still, I wish all young women cared less about how they look and more about how they think.

Fury Road

T and I finally went to see the new Mad Max movie (Fury Road) the other night.  Fury Road was not nearly as good as the gloriously futuristic Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, from 1981.  Fury Road fell short because it has a few of the corn-ball, Disneyesque elements that ruined Beyond Thunderdome for me.  

OK, I realize I am probably losing my audience right now.  Yes, this is a 63 year old woman writing a review of a post apocalyptic action movie.  Let me ask you to keep an open mind for a few moments, though. I am trying to figure out WHY I liked Fury Road.  If you have any sense of the absurd at all, the fact that a 63 year old woman can like a movie like this is weird enough that it justifies further consideration.

• It was fun, fast paced, and loud
• I like it when the bad guys get blown up
• The bad guys looked like neo-nazi skin heads, making it even more satisfying to see them get blown up
• The skinheads go into battle with a heavy metal music war-vehicle featuring skin head drummers on back and a headbanger guitar player tied to the front playing a huge red electric guitar
• The skin head army is motivated to fight and die in battle by their leader's exhortation that dying in battle is the price they must pay for entrance into paradise, Valhalla (giving even Vikings a bad name!). 

Gotta love all that!  Most compelling for me, Fury Road includes a story line wherein women are trying to help each other.  Women are trying to be heroic.  It alluded to actual female culture (a rarity in any kind of movie) and there was no great romance.  Post apocalyptic, indeed!

Fury Road's good guys included women of various ages, including multiple gray haired women. I liked that, too; although they most certainly did not develop the characters for the old women.  Come on, it is a pop culture movie and it is NEVER going to get it right or be great art.  But at least they acknowledged the older women as courageous and worthy human beings. They also put them on motorcycles and gave them guns. That's new.

It's your thing, do what you wanna do

Third children are rare these days, but back when most families had a third child it was an interesting role to play. I rarely got to make decisions about what we watched on TV or what activities we did as a family. But that was OK. I was usually left to my own devices, and I was able to create a fairly wonderful play-world for my self.  There is a lot to be said for a childhood where you are not the focus of everyone's attention. I was able to be myself, whatever that was.  My younger brother did not come around until I was four, and I am sorry to say I really was not all that interested in him. For one thing he was a baby, and then he quickly turned into a boy.  

Back then I not only thought boys were boring, but I thought they were weird, too.  They played with cars and trucks, for crying out loud.  What the hell kind of fun are you going to have involving a truck?  At least that was my perspective.  I was not a "tomboy", nor do I wish I had been one.  Good for you if boy stuff is what floated your boat as a child, but it was absolutely not my cup of tea.  That is not a judgment on what is better or what is worse.  I am a third child and I do not feel strongly about having my way be the right way.  That is not the way the world works when you are a third child.  I am just stating for the record that I was a girly girl and I loved it.  If I could go back and change anything it would to wear more pink.  In fact, I may start wearing pink now!  What a great color.

I have a grandson and I play with him a lot.  I adore him. I would do anything for him. But when he starts in with the cars and trucks my eyes glaze over with supreme boredom.  I play with cars and trucks on autopilot, just going through the motions.  I am not having fun.  Eventually I re-emerge, energized and fully present for tag, hide-and-go seek, drawing, games, and acting like a monster.  I love playing with tinker toys and building blocks.  I love rolling all over the floor and chasing him in the pool.  I fully appreciate the energy that goes into play, and I no longer think boys have cooties. I can see that he is truly creative about car and truck play and it makes him happy.  Cars and trucks seems like good play things to me.  I simply do not "get" the attraction of things with wheels.  However, if that is what he likes, then I am all for it.  I love him.  That's what you do when you love someone, you accept them even when they are different than you are.

I am thankful for boys!  But you know what?  I am thankful for girls, too. I am tired of people putting down those sweet little girls who want to wear pink and be ballerinas when they grow up.  While we're at it, I like little boys who wear pink and want to be ballerinas, too.  And I am very thankful for little girls who like trucks or want to be superheros.  I am so happy that everyone is not like me.  Most of all, I am thankful for the innocence of children who play with what they like, or wear what they truly love, regardless of whether it is gender appropriate or not.  The world is so damn interesting.

Old Wives and Vampire Killers

I am not biking, hiking, exploring, or being active in any meaningful way because I feel like crap.  I've had the flu, and Iam not doing much of anything except laying on the couch reading trashy paranormal romance/urban fantasy novels. That sounds great, I know, and it is. But probably not for the reason you think. I no longer read each page because they all pretty much follow the same formula and they are not written particularly well. In fact, I can read one of these books in a day. I have been skipping the sex parts for years.  The sex scenes are all pretty much the same.

Why do I still read this genre? Because I love reading the parts where these women beat up bad guys. They kick ass and take no prisoners. These women are not afraid of anything. Should I be ashamed to admit that is MY fantasy?  And these heroines always have some kind of magical power that helps them kick bad person ass. Way fun.
I also started reading this great book on Fairy Tales (From The Beast to the Blonde, by Marina Warner). It is chock full of subversive information about what people in the Middle Ages thought of old women. Apparently we are all useless, (i.e., no longer able to conceive children), physically repulsive, scary old gossips who spread "old wives tales." The up-side is that we are also the original source of Fairy Tales. 

Imagine grandmothers throughout the centuries telling their grandchildren tales the storytellers heard from their own grandmothers. These stories were dismissed by the literati of their times as the inane drivel old women used to stoke the irresponsible fantasies of young children. Still, the storytelling continued until eventually men like Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm decided to collect the old tales, write them down, and sell them for profit and posterity. However, the men who wrote down these stores often changed them, cleaning them up to make them more acceptable to the later Christian reading public. 

It seems grandmothers in the Middle Ages used to tell it like it was: weaving and repeating tales that warned their grandchildren about the dangers of violence, greed, brutality, abuse, scam artists, and even incest. They taught children how to use their heads in a crisis and avoid becoming victims. They also taught them to be nice to old hags they might meet in the woods, because those old hags might be fairy godmothers in disguise!  What great advice! THEIR grandkids were schooled in street smarts and knew who and what to avoid.  Our grandkids, relying solely on Disney to tell them the watered down and revised tales, are naive at best. Our kids mistake the old hag they meet in the woods for an evil old witch who should be ridiculed, ignored, or worse. Talk about bad manners and meanness of spirit! I am surprised more young people today are not spitting out toads when they attempt to speak. 

At worst, our granddaughters spend their lives obsessing over their appearance and looking for a gentleman prince who will change their lives. I think we should be telling our granddaughters to forget about getting that Princess makeover at Magic Kingdom and instead we should help them figure out how to spin straw into gold.

Plan for your retirement, my sweet! Give your future husband a break and change your own life. In the meantime, I am going to continue speed reading urban fantasy for the fight scenes. My sweet Grandma only told me Bible stories and I still have a lot to learn.

Sisterhood should have been a lot more powerful

After all these years, feminism still has a long way to go before it becomes acceptable to the masses. If you do not believe me, just wait until Hillary runs for President and the wingnuts start to criticize her outfits and hairdos instead of her political message.

Back in the late 1960s, when the so-called second wave of feminism was young and vital, I was young along with it. The "first wave" was in the early days of the 20th century when the suffragettes were fighting for women to get the right to vote.  Anyway, I remember going to hear Dr. Benjamin Spock speak at Notre Dame circa 1968. I am not referring to the Vulcan who was also a pop icon at the time, Dr. Benjamin Spock was the guy who published a book in 1946 originally called The Commonsense Book of Baby & Child Care.  This wildly popular child care book was subsequently blamed for permissive child rearing and the resulting radicalism of the baby boomer generation. Indeed, his book was quite radical and forward thinking in the 1940s and 1950s.

Of course he was a man of his time and the gender role stereotypes he pushed in early editions of his book were deemed sexist by the late 1960s. I was a high school student and I vividly remember how exciting it was to hear the college-aged activists in the hall shout him down and call him out on his sexism. Those women were fearless powerhouses like no women I had seen before that night. They were no ladies! They were superheros. You may remember their crazy radical feminist notions, like recognizing that fathers should help out with childcare, that at least half of the children might be female, and that women had the right to work outside the home.

Spock actually listened and later changed his "message" in subsequent editions and even apologized to women for not thinking of us as fully realized human beings. In 1976 the newly enlightened Benjamin Spock divorced his old wife (the mother of his children, the one he married in 1927 and the person who helped research and write that famous book) and he married a woman 40 years younger than him. Concerning his second wife, he was quoted as saying "she gave me back my youth."  Gag me with a spoon. I guess no one told him about the sins of ageism.

I attended my share of consciousness raising groups and women's writing workshops back in the day.  I tried (and failed) to make my daughter play with trucks instead of dolls. I happily signed up to attend assertiveness training workshops.  I wish those still existed, they were quite useful in instructing us how to be women instead of ladies. In case you did not know, second wave feminists did not want to be called or thought of as ladies. "Ladies" tottered around aimlessly on high heels never thinking deep thoughts or challenging authority. Let me be perfectly clear: Ladies have cooties. Women kick ass.

By the mid-1970s I was discouraged by the movement's subsequent focus on the rights and privileges of upper middle class women.  It seemed to me that was all the women's movement came to care about in later years; enabling women of means to enter the professions alongside their equally privileged men. I am all for upper class women having the same opportunities as upper class men, of course. However, none of my friends or family members were going to become doctors, lawyers, or professors; not because they were not smart enough to become professionals, but because no one was paying for them to go to college. Let's be honest, working class people do not have parents who can buy them a future.

It would have been nice if the later women's movement had been interested in understanding and supporting the special struggles of working class women. Feminism might be more than just a tired joke in some circles today had the movement embraced all women and not just the elite few.  I was not alone in feeling undervalued and ignored. Class struggle was arguably the downfall of the second wave of feminism in the 60s/70s.  I would recommend an article written in 1977 by Marlene Dixon.  She was a bit of a firecracker and definitely too extreme in her politics, but it is still a good read if you are interested in stepping back in time and immersing yourself in the history of feminism.

In truth, the 1960s/70s women's movement was different at first.  Feminist ideology influenced and/or energized organizations that really made a difference in the lives of all women, like Planned Parenthood - an organization that was started by Margaret Sanger, a first wave feminist and onetime labor activist.  Some other efforts championed in the glory days of feminism were the creation of professionalized day care centers, job training programs, battered women's shelters. Affirmative Action has its problems; however, women and African Americans would not have been hired into traditionally white male jobs or professions without it.  Again, not because they were not capable of doing the jobs, but because they would never have gotten an interview without Affirmative Action stepping on the toes of the white guys in charge of Human Resources.

Second wave feminism WAS successful in altering the cultural landscape and making things a bit better for women. Don't let anyone tell you any different.  Why then is the concept of feminism seemingly still a hard sell for young women, women of color, rural women, and working class women?  In my opinion, the "second wave" of the women's movement simply did not finish the job, instead becoming decadent, myopic, and self-serving. The leadership failed to stay interested in or establish meaningful dialogue with these disparate groups of women. When that happened, it stopped being relevant to the majority of women. It is all about perception, after all.