west of the moon

absorbing the status quo.

Yesterday evening, at the gym, I was changing back into my clothes when I noticed a five- or six-year-old girl staring at me.  My locker is in the downstairs kids-allowed locker room, as opposed to the upstairs grownups-only one, so having kids around is pretty normal.  The staring part, I'll admit, was a first, but you know, little kids find all sorts of things interesting, and it didn't actually bother me.  She was with her mother, and her mother kept reminding her that if she didn't get into her bathing suit faster, she'd miss the start of swim class, but she was too busy watching me.  The putting-on-pantyhose part was the most interesting, but even putting on moisturizer, combing my hair, buckling my shoes was interesting.  Her mother tried, once or twice, to discreetly get her attention elsewhere, but she was having none of it, and eventually the mom gave up.

"I'm sorry," the woman said.  "I think she just finds your routine fascinating."

"Oh, it's okay.  I don't think there's anything weirder-looking than someone trying to put on pantyhose."

"And she just learned what panythose were last week.  We made a scarecrow for Halloween, and we stuffed some stockings with straw, for his head.  She was really interested in how they stretch and stuff, and now she keeps saying she wants to wear them."

I looked at the girl, whose eyes had gotten really big, listening to us talk.  "They're not very comfortable, you know."

"That's what I told her," said her mom.  "And sometimes they itch." 

Suddenly I felt the need to say something about why I was wearing pantyhose, even though they're uncomfortable and sometimes they itch.  I didn't think I could explain the major reasons to a five-year-old, not while she was already running late for swim class, but I hit on one thing that might make sense.  I gestured towards my feet.  "But it makes it easier to wear shoes like this" (Dansko mary janes, the best shoes ever, by the way) "without socks."

"But they are socks," she said. 

I opened my mouth to start to say "no" and then stopped, realizing, well, kind of, except they're not.  Huh.  "They do the same thing as socks, I guess, but they don't look like socks."

She laughed.  "They don't!  They don't look like socks at all."

"But they work like socks, sort of."

She nodded, as if that made sense, and finished putting on her bathing suit.  Having solved the mystery of pantyhose, she was finally ready for swim class. 

On my end, I spent a while continuing to think about the mystery of panythose.  I mean, this is a problem I sorted and solved last year, when I started teaching, but it still bothers me from time to time.  I dress for teaching much the same way that I would dress for an office job--business-y skirts, button-down shirts, panythose, the all-purpose Dansko mary janes.  (Seriously.  Best shoes ever.  Super-cute, very professional, but also no/v. low heel and good foot support.)  It feels strange to me, sometimes, in the context of all of the discussions of feminism and image and presentation, that I choose to wear this.  It's not just that I'm wearing panythose, it's also that I'm wearing clothes with no pockets, that I wear makeup (extremely minimal, but still), all of it.  It's not as though I'm in a work environment with a dress code.  (Although there's more dress conformity, in my department, than one might imagine.  One or two faculty members will show up to teach in jeans, but by and large, the male professors wear ties, or at least dress shirts, and the female professors are at an equivalent level of formality.)

The reasoning, on my end, has been very simple.  I have enough to think about when I'm in front of a classroom.  I don't want to be putting any real attention into my clothes. (This is, oddly enough, why I choose skirts over pants, even though skirts necessitate pantyhose.  I sometimes get self-conscious about how I look in pants, and I don't want to divert any mental energy in that direction when I'm teaching.) More importantly, I don't want anyone else paying attention to my clothes.  The skirt-and-blouse model has a kind of entrenched position in mainstream American culture--it's the closest I can come to a uniform for this type of work, which means it's the closest I can come to being invisible.  I don't want to be making any statements.

Of course, sometimes choosing to not make a statement is choosing to endorse existing social norms, etc etc.  It's not that I want to be tacitly supporting a system where dressing this way is the default.  It's that I've prioritized other things.  Almost all of the time, it's not an issue.  Every once in a while, like when I'm meeting with students who want me to be faculty sponsor for a feminist-themed DeCal class, or when explaining to a five-year-old girl why I'm wearing pantyhose even though they're uncomfortable, it twinges at my conscience. 

Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago

I was on two panels at WisCon, and despite my initial mild skepticism, they both went very well.  Interesting panelists, engaged audience members, a good balance of who got to talk when, etc.  (Both suffered slightly from my own personal need to talk constantly, but I don't think I crossed the line into Bad Panelist territory.  If anyone who was there disagrees, please please please let me know?  I would hate to be That Guy and not know it.)  The feminist fiction panel is the easier of the two to talk about, I think, and so.  Panel report!  We bounced around a little bit, topic-wise, so the report will be more thematic than chronological.

The Panelists:  Me, Kameron Hurley, Lyda Morehouse, Rebecca Maines, and Victoria Gaydosik.  (Oh!  Hey!  Someone took pictures of us.)  Victoria and I were co-moderating, and we started by explaining the concept of the panel.  A lot of feminists are concerned about the fact that younger women are less and less likely to either identify as feminists or find feminism interesting or relevant.  Many of us found fiction to be a powerful force in discovering feminism, so how can we use that to help younger women discover feminism? 

At this point, we asked all the panelists to name a few books that had been influential for them, and to talk a little bit about why.  I am going to try and reconstruct this book list, but I am almost certainly going to miss something important.  (There are not many books on this list mainly because we had fairly repetitive influences.)

• Alanna, by Tamora Pierce
• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy
• The Women's Room, by Marilyn French
• Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong
• Books by Elizabeth someone?  Naomi, can you help me out here?
• And, in a big non-fiction ringer, The Feminine Mystique.

Okay, that list is too short.  I have to be forgetting something.  I was surprised, though, by how much The Feminine Mystique was completely relevant to the conversation.  I first read it a few years ago, after Paula Fass discussed it in one of the lectures in the social history course I was reading for.  I picked it up expecting to read it for historical significance, and was shocked to find how completely relevant it was for me, given that it was first published more than a decade before I was born.

Younger Women and Feminism: Talking about those influential books, and why they were influential for us, brought us directly back to the question of younger women and feminism.  They fell roughly into two categories: books that openly discussed the ways in which women are constrained and limited by society, and books that showed girls doing things like going out in the world and having adventures.  We used the word "epiphany" a lot when describing the experience of reading these books.  If you grow up immersed in the idea that women can't (or just don't) do certain types of things, then books like these can have an enormous impact.

The thing is, the overt rhetoric that young women growing up today hear is that there aren't limitations on what women can do.  A book can't be revolutionary or inspirational just because it shows girls having adventures, and a book that talks about the limitations placed on women isn't going to resonate with a teenager or college student who's still in a supportive environment and still being told that she can do anything.  One of the greatest victories of feminism has been the fact that girls today generally aren't told that their lives are heavily restricted; where feminism still has work to do, though, is in dealing with the fact that women's lives still are socially constrained in any number of ways.  What happens when the much-discussed younger women get a little bit older and realize that (to draw an example from an audience member) ideas they propose in business meetings are dismissed, but those same ideas will be praised when proposed by a male colleague?  Or when (drawing my example from last year's feminism-and-fashion panel) they find that they're less successful in job interviews because their voices don't sound serious (read: deep) enough, or they laugh when they're nervous.  Or when they hit their mid-twenties and suddenly realize they're surrounded by magazine and newspaper articles about how "nesting" is the hot new trend for ambitious young women. 

I know people disagree on this, but it seems clear to me that the battles feminism is fighting today are a lot more subtle than the battles it was fighting thirty years ago.  This is a good thing, overall, but it might also mean that the fiction that was written in response to the situation thirty years ago probably doesn't resonate with young women today. 

That brings up another interesting point from the panel, though, which is the possibility that younger women don't identify as feminists, or don't find feminism important, because there are so many other battles to fight.  Lyda Morehouse brought this up very early in the panel, saying that she doesn't actually think of herself as a feminist much these days; the problems she faces as a lesbian and a mother are much more important than the problems she faces just as a woman, and she's only got so much energy.  If feminist-sympathetic young women are more interested in today's big and un-subtle problems, like gay rights or war or political corruption or any one of a dozen other things, can we really fault them? 

Today's Feminist Fiction:  So what is it that we're looking for in today's feminist fiction anyway?  Just making a statement about women being strong and/or equal isn't enough, apparently, so what is?  This was the most energetic part of the discussion, I think, and I can't even begin to re-create all of it, so I'm just going to talk about the part that I found most interesting.  Which is to say, a lot of us are looking for fiction that does something more realistic or more interesting with both men and women.  Kameron Hurley pointed out that fiction that just goes "poof!  men and women are entirely equal and everything is happy!" is really kind of unsatisfying because it dodges the difficult questions. 

I brought up romance novels here, because in my (admittedly limited) experience, there's some really fascinating stuff going on in romance novels in terms of gender dynamics.  I mean, okay, the only romance novels I read are Nora Roberts books, but I'd be shocked if she's far out of the mainstream for romance authors.  And what I see in those books, over and over again, are men and women who are negotiating (successfully, of course) the complexities of gender relations.  The men -and- the women are allowed to be both strong and vulnerable.  These books are full of women who value both their careers and their families, and men who encourage and support them.  And Lyda, who's recently started publishing romance novels under the name Tate Hallaway, backed me up and went one further, saying that there's been a real revolution in romance novels recently.  As far as she can tell, she said, category romance is producing some genuinely feminist fiction, while chick-lit has become the new standard bearer for crappy gender stereotypes.

And -that- was something I found fascinating, and made a lot of sense to me once I started thinking about it.  Clearly it would be a mistake to slander the entire chick-lit genre, but I've read a few chick-lit books (and read reviews of a lot more) that do seem to follow a pattern.  "Sassy young woman thinks that she's doing a bang-up job of having both a successful career and a satisfying personal life, but when she runs into some serious conflict, she realizes that having it all is just too hard."  So that's troubling, especially given how popular these books are.

Inadequate Conclusion:  I know there was more I wanted to say about this panel, but this writeup is long, and I've been working on it on-and-off for three days, and I'm tired of it.  Sorry.  But I had a great time on this panel, and found that I kept wanting to talk about it for the rest of the weekend. 

that feminism stuff.

A couple of months ago, Matt and I spent a few days in Boston, which increasingly feels like the ancestral homeland from which we have been exiled. But that isn't the point of the story. During our long-weekend trip, we spent a long (long) evening at this bar we both used to frequent, and while we were there we ran into an old friend and his new girlfriend.  The dynamic there was more than a little bit fraught, in that this old friend is someone I was briefly involved with, Back In The Day.  Back when I knew him well, he had a habit of dating girls of a particular type: overly-intense intellectual girls who read a lot and liked indie films and made a hobby out of serious introspection.  His new girlfriend likes cheap beer and Van Wilder, and (to borrow a phrase from the vernacular) she's a slammin' hottie.  Please believe me when I say that I wish them only the best.

So we're at the bar, and he's complaining about work, and I admit I'm not feeling particularly sympathetic.  He has two major complaints about his job, apparently.  The first is that he's occasionally called upon to actually do work.  The second is that one of his coworkers has been really getting on his nerves lately because she "keeps getting worked up about all that feminism shit." 

He'd just ignore her, but she's also an old friend of his from high school (in fact, she's the reason he has this job, because she recommended him for it).  And my first instinct here is to just let this pass, because it's Saturday night and we're all just hanging out and I don't want to get into anything too serious, but then he turns to me and he says "I mean, you know how she gets." 

And, well, yeah, I do know how she gets.  The woman in question is also a good friend of mine, and we're pretty much on the same page in terms of "all that feminism shit".  When he says she's "worked up", what he probably means is that she questioned why women in their company have a harder time getting promoted to manager, or that she didn't laugh when he made some joke about chicks and shopping, or something like that.  As far as I'm concerned, what he means is that she's paying attention.  The stupid provocation of his expecting me to agree with him, in combination with my most recent bourbon and ginger ale, meant that I actually told him that. 

That's where his girlfriend got involved in the conversation.  "So wait, you're into that feminist crap too?"  And from there we were off!  It felt sometimes like I'd entered a weird parallel universe.  I spend so much of my time around people who take for granted that feminism is something worth talking about, you know?  That whatever we mean by feminism, whatever it does or doesn't encompass or address, that there's still something going on.  But this woman I was talking to, she was of the opinion that feminism is really just about making trouble where there aren't really any problems. 

There's not a lot of point in recounting the conversation in too much detail--we mostly just ran through a lot of the standard iterations on the standard issues.  I think I surprised her by not being, how to put this, strident.  Part of that is a stylistic thing; I think I've picked this up from teaching, this method of disagreeing with someone by first agreeing with them.  "No, you're totally right that it's nice when everyone in a family shares a last name.  There's a lot of power in that, even if it's just symbolic.  It's just that, don't you think there's something weird about the idea that it's always women who change their names?"  And then go on from there with the main part of your argument.  The other part of it is that I've spent so much time talking through these questions that I really do see them as complicated, so there's nothing deceitful about agreeing with elements of the other position.  It's all a big messy tangled set of questions, and I don't think there are any easy answers, so I didn't come off as preachy.

It's all about knowing your audience.  No one likes being lectured to, and no one likes being talked down to, and no one likes being told that they're wrong or stupid.  If you're in a conversation where you actually care at all (even if, as in this case, only a teeny tiny little bit) about persuading the other person of your point of view, you can't be unyielding, it will just make them defensive and shut them off.

Anyway.  It's all been on my mind lately, in a kind of loose shambling way, meandery and with no coherent argument.  I've been saying for years that I see feminism as less of an ideology and more of a framework, that it's about asking the right questions rather than thinking you have the right answers.  And to some extent that's still true (I mean, once you've condensed something to that tidy of a soundbite, how can you just abandon it?) but I'm also realizing that it's a filter.  Gender is generally the first lens through which I see any problem or situation.  (It's not the only lens, not by a long shot, but it is the first.)  I don't think this was always true, and to be honest I'm a little surprised to realize that it's true now.

Strong women.

Friday night, I met Matt for dinner at the restaurant around the corner.  It's all red walls and stylish dangling lamps, foreign movie posters, cheap(ish) pasta and good wine and highly erratic service.  The staff greets us by name now, but still can't reliably get our orders right, and it's okay, in a way, because we're used to it.  Sometimes, like this week, Matt walks straight there from the train station after work, and I meet him there.  This time I headed over a little early, sat at the bar with a glass of wine and read for a while. 

One of the women at the restaurant stopped by to refill my water glass and asked what I was reading.  I showed her the cover, the cowgirl in the low-slung jeans.  "It's fantasy, set in Santa Cruz, sort of old gods and earthquakes coming to life."  And immediately I wish I'd described it better, I worry I made it sound boring, but she's smiling. 

"Is the author a woman?"

"Hmm?  No, he's not... he's a friend of mine, actually.  The hero of the book is a woman, though.  She's great."

"That's what I love about those kind of books," she says, nodding.   "Women can do a lot of more interesting things than in other kinds of books."

And, you know, I never thought about it that way.