It Never Rains But it Pours

First, go to J-Friend Heidi's blog and read about the Atheist in the Hizz-owwwwse! By which, achem, I mean, and Atheist in the (US) House (of Representatives). Achem.

Rep. Pete Stark has "come out" as an atheist, which struck me as weird the first time I heard this, when I "came out" as an agnostic during my days at Procter & Gamble. Ol' P & G, despite being the object of much bitching and moaning on my part when I was working there, had an EXCELLENT, excellent diversity training program, really challenging and useful; as my ex-girlfriends can attest (hopefully positively), I use the things I learned from it about communication to this day. (Bottom line: Golden Rule is bullshit. Treat people as THEY want to be treated, not the way YOU would want to be treated -- and to do this, you have to communicate with them and LEARN how they want to be treated. Tougher to pull off, but better in the end, thinks I.) We had different sessions, one of which we went around and identified different things about ourselves (including an interesting one where you walked across the room with every social advantage you possessed, i.e. take one step forward if you're a male, if you're over 5'10", if you're white, etc.). I had never before realized how incredibly unique it was that my first childhood "best friend" was Vietnamese (I wonder what Ninh is up to these days?... hmm, Google-stalking makes it appear he might be a lawyer.) The other thing was that I was agnostic.

Now, not only is P&G predominately Christian, it is predominately Catholic. (It wasn't until I moved to Canton and then to Cincinatti that I realized how much variation there is in number of Catholics in different areas of the US; they're 25% of the US population more generally, but Canton and Cinti seem to have much larger "enclaves." Seems reminiscent to, but not nearly as dramatic as, the influence of Jewish US citizens, who I think actually only make up like 2-4% of the US population. On the other hand, though Catholics are a minority as compared to "Protestants", if you look sect-wise, they're 4 times larger than the next singularly organized Christian institution, the Baptists. That would seem to explain in part the disproportionate political power of a group composing 25% of the population -- that, and influence as a voting bloc extending throughout parties, but I seriously digress.) There were, I think, nigh-audible gasps at the fact that I was (am) an agnostic (or now that Heidi has made me hip to it, agnostic atheist). There was definitely a cricket-chirping pause, and then conversation resumed normally and I got sounds of acceptance. Afterwards, SEVERAL people, including a Section Manager (a solid middle-manager 6-figure position) who thanked me for my bravery in "coming out" and said that they had never had the bravery to do so before. (I kept thinking to myself "Am I gay? Did I say I am?") And incidentally, as I explained to my parents once, this was also when I realized my chances of settling down with a black woman some day are relatively small -- a very hot fellow African American P&G engineer, I forget her name, and I were chatting -- chatting up, perhaps, and somehow it got to religion (this was the same diversity session after all, though she'd been in a different group during my coming out). Feeling freshly confident in my atheist pride ("I´m here! I'm queer! I'm... the only one here..."), I admitted (mentioned) my agnosticism. Literally, I saw a wall come down behind her eyes, and it was the most acute sensation I've ever had from someone's affect going from "flirting/potentially interested" to "being simply very friendly." I was a possible fellow-traveler at P&G after that, a possible friend, but WOAH did I feel the lukewarm shoulder on the romantic interest front there.

So. Yes. Atheists in the House. Yay. Maybe, some day, in my life time, we can dare to dream that an Atheist can be president!!!

Ha ha ha. Okay, okay, I'll stick to being realistic and just wait for our gay (though god-fearing) president to come into office.

The other thing I had wanted to get into is Joan Williams BRILLIANT book, "Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It." It is FANTASTIC. Her points are, from my view, logically immaculate, and her prose is easy and enjoyable. It is simply one of the most enjoyable intellectual-politico-legal books I've ever read. That is to say, it's no "Song of Ice & Fire," I'm not staying up nights reading it, but it is very very enjoyable to read and I'm learning a lot.

Her basic point, one I've struggled a little with, is that the "choice" to stay home for today's women, to take the lead in raising the kids and home-making, is not anti-feminist, a step backwards, or simply a tactical error (as Linda Hirshman, for example, would have us believe), but rather an expression of a still male-dominated society together with a particular failure of feminism. That is, she doesn't critique feminism as an endeavor, as many are wont to do these days, or say that getting women into the workforce was simply wrong, tactically in error, or untimely, but just that we must now go beyond this. Working women are having a very tough time as mothers these days (and stay-at-home mothers are becoming more common) BECAUSE what allows and has allowed men to work as they do today in the market is a constant supply of "free" female labor. That is, we all know home-making is tough and is real work and all, but the part that hasn't been appreciated is that men couldn't perform as (what Williams calls) "ideal workers" without women's undervalued labor, meaning specifically that the wage a family man may earn is actually joint property created by a husband and caregiver wife (or any working spouse and caregiving spouse) together. That is, he could not earn what he does, staying at work all the time without a stay-at-home (or part-time working) partner, or hiring home labor and child-rearing services. Especially, she points out, in the cases of very wealthy husbands and/or the "you get your degree and I'll support you while you do it", the home-managing caregiver most often is sacrificing not only her time and immediate career goals, but decreases her own wage-earning power (by being out of the workforce; each year out of the workforce exacts a future penalty on career prospects) AND is essentially providing the services that allows the other partner to make whatever wage and get whatever degree. In a very real way, the degree and/or wage belongs to both of them, as they both made it.

I love her arguments and their rational basis, and of course can't go through the whole book here. But it's revelatory for me (and makes me realize how utterly AWE-SOME my own Mom & Dad are and were) and though I've always been in a weird middle on the "choice to stay home/choice to pursue a career" part of feminism, her critique and suggestions for Reconstructive Feminism make so much sense, and point out that the present regime also penalizes men who actually DO do their fair share of home work and child-rearing, or who would wish to, which is still sadly an exceedingly small minority of men. (Men do something much less than half the housework still in this day and age.)

I can't say enough good things about this book, but I probably will say some more at some future date. Until then, enjoy the update glut.

Solidarity Gone Awry

File it under yet another "Unbearable Lightness of Being Center-Left." Or perhaps just "The Unbearable Lightness of Analysis at Slate."

Whatever the case, Emily Bazelon's recent article disappoints. Me, at least.

Charitably, I can see how hard it is to watch a woman flub on the national stage and worry that we've all been set back some (well, all us feminists, but more importantly I suppose, women and specifically women feminists especially -- Wom Fems?). It is, similarly, hard for me to watch black people make a fool of themselves (See: All Wayans family members post-1995ish -- and no, it doesn't matter to me that they're suppposedly funny or just pretending, minstreling is minstreling, aiight? Though yes, it would be worse if it were a national politician.*) So I guess, just in this instant thinking about that, I can sympathize with her position.

But the thing is, Slate is not (nominally) a confessional -- it's a news outlet for analysis and debate and reporting. And while reporting the embarrassment wim-fems and their supporters might feel about Palin, she does seem to fail to engage much beyond that. Just as I don't believe Hillary Clinton did all that much to advance feminism or women's issues -- just being a woman close to the presidency was an important symbol, but one without substance, she being hardly a Shirley Chisholm or Ruth Bader-Ginsberg or Joan Williams, i.e., feminists I respect for their actual ACTIVISM and not just womanness -- I don't know how much Palin is taking away from it. It is, after all, institutional sexism as much as anything else at this point maintaining male dominance, and institutionalized discrimination relies much less on the outward symbols and prejudices that make up much of the substance of historical discrimination (which in turn allowed present discrimination to occur more discretely, once the institutions to maintain it were set up on discriminatory foundations).

Perhaps I'm wrong -- perhaps I'm underestimating symbolism. I sometimes/often do. But it shouldn't require me to ask Bazelon to do her job -- which is not just to sound agonized, indecisive and inactive (which I SWEAR, must be the Slate house style these days, except when they're being decisively smarmy) but to ANALYZE things. Get to the MEAT of it. Bazelon's lack of engagement in the deeper structures of sexism is nigh-unforgivable -- similar to the media's coverage of Iraq. Because I ask you, what would be more valuable to the American people -- coverage of the play-by-plays of politics in the Iraq war, and the body count, or actual substantive coverage of the HISTORY of Iraq, a major undertaking in educating the public about the culture and people of Iraq, such that we could responsibly interpret what's going on there? Or, to the point, a responsible history and analysis of sexism and progress in the US and, hey I know, it's crazy to even ask for it -- other countries (many of whom have already had female heads of state and so maybe could shed some light on... oh, never mind).

I'm not saying such an undertaking was ever likely to be in the offing in the US MSM; I'm just saying, people like Bazelon are smart enough to know it should be, yet so rarely use their pulpits to even CALL for such an undertaking; and if they do call for it, they would certainly do it in the best spirit of the Slate political gabfest and call for someone ELSE to do it...

Uggghhh, I'm spent.

(*I'm not sure if I'd count, say, Alan Keyes. He's horrible, but he's obviously intelligent -- just IN-SANE. So I guess I don't have a ready straight parallel to Palin in mind... though is that because I can't think of any, because there are more black "embarassments" in entertainment than politics, and/or because there aren't ENOUGH blacks in US politics to have much of a diversity of them...? Oh, actually, there was William Jefferson...)

A Warning to the Future Mrs. J-Continuum-Hyphen-Her-Name-Here

I find this article on diamonds/diamond engagement rings pretty convincing (and in line with what I already thought, more or less).

Not that this is a concern of the highest priority for the presently-single J Continuum, but it's an article that resonates personally, and represents an interesting challenge to the present gender status quo. What I've called 3rd Wave Feminism (and I have no idea if it's the academically correct use of the phrase) is the "Right to Be a Sex Object" feminism that seems to have reached its zenith a couple years ago. You know, the Girls Gone Wild version, where (it seems) my generation (or actually, the one a couple years younger than me) have reacted to the perceived anti-male anti-sex anti-sexy bent of feminism/radical feminism and the more real attempt of Baby Boom feminism to achieve equality by becoming like an "Ideal Male Worker" (see again Joan Williams' Unbending Gender) and the concomitant attempts to achieve in the work world through androgyny (see: shoulder pads). Reacting against this, "anything goes" sexuality seems to be the watchword, to be "liberated" by trying to emulate and best media portrayals of sexiness and promiscuity. This is based on the real point of the double standard -- guys sleeping around and flashing are just "boys being boys" and women doing so are sluts -- and, apparently, a serious marketing opportunity -- so there's a logic to it, for sure. But it isn't a very wholistic view of feminism, I'd say, neh?

So anyway, the question of a diamond engagement ring plays into this; is equality worth "giving up" the princess ideal (not in the general sense, but on an individual level)? Can you modify the princess ideal, where a woman partner is made to feel special, to generate equality and still have that specialness? (Short answer: yes. Longer answer: yes, as long as making both people feel special and both getting gifts, taking care of each other, and taking turns pampering each other doesn't ruin the specialness). Of course, this all goes sideways when talking about non-hetero relationships, but I'd not know to speak on that.

Of course, besides the equality considerations of the diamond ring, there's all those blood diamond, not to mention that, in the long term, digging up gems and being buried with them can't be sustainable (unless we start digging up gems that have been buried with people and putting them back on the market). And the whole conspicuous consumption angle. And the shady origins of engagement diamonds in the first place:

Even then, the real blingfest didn't get going until the 1930s, when—dim the lights, strike up the violins, and cue entrance—the De Beers diamond company decided it was time to take action against the American public.

In 1919, De Beers experienced a drop in diamond sales that lasted for two decades. So in the 1930s it turned to the firm N.W. Ayer to devise a national advertising campaign—still relatively rare at the time—to promote its diamonds...

[Legal scholar] Margaret Brinig [notes] crucially, that ring sales began to rise a few years before the De Beers campaign. To be marriageable at the time you needed to be a virgin, but, Brinig points out, a large percentage of women lost their virginity while engaged. So some structure of commitment was necessary to assure betrothed women that men weren't just trying to get them into bed. The "Breach of Promise" action had helped prevent what society feared would be rampant seduce-and-abandon scenarios; in its lieu, the pricey engagement ring would do the same. (Implicitly, it would seem, a woman's virginity was worth the price of a ring, and varied according to the status of her groom-to-be.)

--Meghan O'Rourke, Diamonds are a girl's worst friend, in today's Slate.

(*just for general reference, the J Continuum envisions taking the future Mrs. J Continuum's last name, too, though preferably with both partners' names done in a Latin America, non-hyphenated double last name type of way)

Self-referential to the max!

See J-Friend Heidi praising me praising her! (More precisely, praising me linking to her. But, you know, her new blog is very deserving of praise, outstripping mine in updates and coolness, and, I suspect, readership in a couple short months. So, Dear Heidi: Praise praise, praise. Less perfunctory praise available on request.)

Most self-self-referential post... ever. (That is, this one. I think. I'm sort of confusing myself at this point. But I think so, at least until Heidi one-ups me and links to THIS, but we all know that "girls aren't competitive"* so that'll never happen.)

*This is sarcasm. If you do not realize this, please read it again holding both your hands up at chest level, then point your middle and index finger on each hand up towards the ceiling and close the rest into your palm. Now, move your hands up and down gently 1-2 times, bending your upheld fingers down into a crook shape and back to pointing straight up concurrent with the hand motions. These are sarcastic air quotes.

Repeat as needed.

Alternatively, read Joan Williams' book, Unbending Gender: Why work and family conflict and what to do about it. In a quote that didn't make it onto the cover, "It fucking rocks."