I went to the WisCon panel on reducing global machismo, and have read and reflected on both Cat and Andrea's posts about it. And then I came across the latest issue of The Atlantic online, and found that the featured article was "The End of Men." Unlike most articles with this sort of title, this piece by Hanna Rosin is neither a joke nor a lament, but a thoughtful discussion of how society is changing in ways that appear to favor the skills and approaches usually attributed to women.
It's definitely worth a read. I disagreed with some things that were said, but it didn't come with an automatic assumption that biology is destiny, and hinted at the idea that some of the problems men face might well be cultural learned behavior.
While reading, I had a flash of insight: What many men appear to lack is flexibility. They have one idea of how to act in the world, and cannot adjust when the rug is pulled out from under them.
Now I don't believe men are born with a gene (or combination of genes) that makes them inflexible, nor do I believe that hormonal surges are responsible for their problems on this score. I suspect many men are taught that changing your mind is a sign of weakness. (In the US, we endured 8 years of a presidential administration built on this principle, and the world is still paying the price.) They are taught that certain behaviors and jobs are appropriate for men, and some are not, which leaves them high and dry in a world in which those jobs no longer exist.
Women, on the other hand, are taught to adapt to circumstances. I should point out that I consider flexibility to be a key element for human survival -- I include it as one of my seven skills of self defense -- and that my thinking on this comes from my Aikido training. That is, it's a principle of the supposedly manly art of warriorship.
At WisCon, I was thinking and talking a lot about the fictional images of women as warriors, both good and bad, and how important they are for helping women discover that they can take care of themselves and fight for things that are important to them. Now I think it might be just as important to look at fictional images of men as everything else but warriors -- as parents, nurses, teachers, and so forth. Look at them and create new ones that open more doors, based on the assumption that the stories we tell ourselves allow us to see new possibilities for our own lives.
BTW, The Atlantic is publishing a lot of interesting material these days, and doing it with a large and very usable online presence. Apparently this magazine -- over 150 years old -- is figuring out how to survive in the new world. It's worth checking out on that score alone.
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Girls Are Meaningless in Afghanistan
[cross posted on In This Moment]
That's what NPR correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson told me this morning in a report on Morning Edition. At one point, she covered a group of women all giving birth at the same time. The doctors didn't immediately tell those who had girls about the child, giving them time to rest before they gave them the bad news, Nelson said.
Many of the women were giving birth to their eleventh or twelfth child, she reported. It seems that in Afghanistan, sons are the old age plan. Daughters are useless unless they can be "sold" -- exchanged for a dowry.
Nelson, who wears a burqa when she travels in areas outside of Kabul, said that it's very hard to be a woman in Afghanistan.
I am haunted by the image of a woman mourning because she has given birth to a girl. In 2007, when women can do (almost) everything, there are still women mourning because they think girls are useless.
And I am depressed to know that many people still live such precarious lives that the only plan they can make for old age is to have lots of children in the hope that some will survive to take care of them. For most of human life, this was everyone's plan, but in our current state of world overpopulation (one of the key elements of global warming) it just creates bigger problems. In my essay "We Aren't Civilized Yet: Reflections From the WisCon 30 Panel on Women Warriors" -- published in The WisCon Chronicles: Volume 1 -- I pointed out that "it took all of human history up to 1830 for the world population to hit 1 one billion, a 100 years to hit the next billion, 30 years for the next billion, 15 for the next, and so on up to our current 6.5 billion."
With modern medicine -- which has greatly reduced maternal and infant mortality -- and technology, too many people using children as their retirement plan create a huge problem (though if you're a poor person in Afghanistan, it still may be the only option you've got).
In my essay, I argue that feminism is one of the solutions to overpopulation: "Feminism addresses the problem of overpopulation by giving offering women other purposes in life besides childrearing." But in places where women have virtually no rights -- places where they cannot take economic steps to ensure their own survival -- what can they do besides have children?
The situation of women in Afghanistan -- who mourn the birth of girls -- emphasizes once again that feminism is not just a means of resolving the fundamental unfairness of discrimination on grounds of gender, but an integral part of addressing the major problems of the world.
That's what NPR correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson told me this morning in a report on Morning Edition. At one point, she covered a group of women all giving birth at the same time. The doctors didn't immediately tell those who had girls about the child, giving them time to rest before they gave them the bad news, Nelson said.
Many of the women were giving birth to their eleventh or twelfth child, she reported. It seems that in Afghanistan, sons are the old age plan. Daughters are useless unless they can be "sold" -- exchanged for a dowry.
Nelson, who wears a burqa when she travels in areas outside of Kabul, said that it's very hard to be a woman in Afghanistan.
I am haunted by the image of a woman mourning because she has given birth to a girl. In 2007, when women can do (almost) everything, there are still women mourning because they think girls are useless.
And I am depressed to know that many people still live such precarious lives that the only plan they can make for old age is to have lots of children in the hope that some will survive to take care of them. For most of human life, this was everyone's plan, but in our current state of world overpopulation (one of the key elements of global warming) it just creates bigger problems. In my essay "We Aren't Civilized Yet: Reflections From the WisCon 30 Panel on Women Warriors" -- published in The WisCon Chronicles: Volume 1 -- I pointed out that "it took all of human history up to 1830 for the world population to hit 1 one billion, a 100 years to hit the next billion, 30 years for the next billion, 15 for the next, and so on up to our current 6.5 billion."
With modern medicine -- which has greatly reduced maternal and infant mortality -- and technology, too many people using children as their retirement plan create a huge problem (though if you're a poor person in Afghanistan, it still may be the only option you've got).
In my essay, I argue that feminism is one of the solutions to overpopulation: "Feminism addresses the problem of overpopulation by giving offering women other purposes in life besides childrearing." But in places where women have virtually no rights -- places where they cannot take economic steps to ensure their own survival -- what can they do besides have children?
The situation of women in Afghanistan -- who mourn the birth of girls -- emphasizes once again that feminism is not just a means of resolving the fundamental unfairness of discrimination on grounds of gender, but an integral part of addressing the major problems of the world.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Different meanings of 'strong'
Among the many issues raised by the Wiscon panel on feminist foremothers in sff, one that resonated with something I had already been mulling over was the one about the 'strong woman character'. Quite often there seems to be a segue from the idea of a strong character in the sense of one who is written in such a way as to interest and engage the reader (sense A) to the notion of a character who has to manifest some (rather stereotyped?) notion of 'strong' (sense B).
What is meant by 'strong' anyway? I'd been thinking for some time about the tendency of writers to put in 'strong woman characters' in sense B, who are very far from being strong characters in sense A. These are usually women in some non-typical female role (leatherclad ninja amazon bodyguard, daring guerilla fighter, ship's captain): but they don't actually do anything. They're just set-dressing. Or, if they do do anything it is simply for plot purposes to facilitate the endeavours of a central male character(s).
The whole question of 'strong woman characters' generates troubling questions about what is strength in women - is it only women-in-roles-traditionally-conceived of as male who can qualify, and does strength in more traditionally female forms, for example as a matriarch, simply replicate longstanding stereotypes, or get dismissed as the kind of stock trope that figures in female and/or domestic fiction.
When women in sff are depicted in more traditional roles they often have a distressing lack of agency: this tends to be excused on the grounds that 'that is what it would be like for women in a society like that'. The remedy for this is to go away and read some history, both biographies of specific women of the past and works such as Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter, Norma Clarke's several studies of networks of women writers and intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a whole range of works both recent and older (Alice Clark's and Ivy Pinchbeck's pioneering studies are still worth reading) that demonstrate the fallacy of simplistic notions of 'separate spheres'.
There are also issues about what constitutes a strong character in sense A: are fictional characters who are already shining exemplars of certain qualities particularly interesting, does the reader empathise and engage with them? More flawed, less perfect, conflicted, struggling characters who make mistakes or fail to do the right thing at the right time, characters who are questions rather than answers, are surely 'stronger' in this sense because more vivid, more interesting.
Literature is full of characters who remain in the memory even if the author is not setting them up as models to be imitated. Sometimes, indeed, they are meant to be an awful warning. But they are memorable because even if they are not the hero or the heroine, they are written in such a way that they have lives of their own beyond any plot-function they may be serving. They are not just a reward for the hero's quest or a self-sacrificing sidekick.
Perhaps we need another word than 'strong', with its potential for blurring the boundaries between these entirely different things, to describe this?
What is meant by 'strong' anyway? I'd been thinking for some time about the tendency of writers to put in 'strong woman characters' in sense B, who are very far from being strong characters in sense A. These are usually women in some non-typical female role (leatherclad ninja amazon bodyguard, daring guerilla fighter, ship's captain): but they don't actually do anything. They're just set-dressing. Or, if they do do anything it is simply for plot purposes to facilitate the endeavours of a central male character(s).
The whole question of 'strong woman characters' generates troubling questions about what is strength in women - is it only women-in-roles-traditionally-conceived of as male who can qualify, and does strength in more traditionally female forms, for example as a matriarch, simply replicate longstanding stereotypes, or get dismissed as the kind of stock trope that figures in female and/or domestic fiction.
When women in sff are depicted in more traditional roles they often have a distressing lack of agency: this tends to be excused on the grounds that 'that is what it would be like for women in a society like that'. The remedy for this is to go away and read some history, both biographies of specific women of the past and works such as Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter, Norma Clarke's several studies of networks of women writers and intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a whole range of works both recent and older (Alice Clark's and Ivy Pinchbeck's pioneering studies are still worth reading) that demonstrate the fallacy of simplistic notions of 'separate spheres'.
There are also issues about what constitutes a strong character in sense A: are fictional characters who are already shining exemplars of certain qualities particularly interesting, does the reader empathise and engage with them? More flawed, less perfect, conflicted, struggling characters who make mistakes or fail to do the right thing at the right time, characters who are questions rather than answers, are surely 'stronger' in this sense because more vivid, more interesting.
Literature is full of characters who remain in the memory even if the author is not setting them up as models to be imitated. Sometimes, indeed, they are meant to be an awful warning. But they are memorable because even if they are not the hero or the heroine, they are written in such a way that they have lives of their own beyond any plot-function they may be serving. They are not just a reward for the hero's quest or a self-sacrificing sidekick.
Perhaps we need another word than 'strong', with its potential for blurring the boundaries between these entirely different things, to describe this?
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Participating in a long tradition
I'm delighted to be a part of this blog, because one of my interests as a historian is in virtual communities before the internet. We tend to think of the way people relate in a computer-facilitated fashion as a completely new thing, but in my work on women and progressive movements during the earlier 20th century I've come across a number of phenomena that one could legitimately call 'virtual communities', involving connections and discussions between individuals who were not physically present to one another.
Many of these centred around periodicals. In Doris Lessing's 'Children of Violence' sequence, Martha Quest, living in a backward British colony in Central Africa, believes she has identified a kindred spirit when she discovers that the man she had just met is a reader of the New Statesman. But as well as providing a means of recognising sympathetic others, radical periodicals provided a forum for debate and connection in themselves.
In 1911 the suffragette Dora Marsden established The Freewoman to discuss a range of issues relating to women's position in society that she believed were being ignored by the suffrage organisations in their focus on obtaining the vote. It was regarded as a dangerous and subversive publication even among feminists, in particular because of its determination to discuss matters to do with sexuality. Its correspondence columns provided a vibrant forum for vigorous discussions, and the facilities it offered for the ventilation of seldom-mentioned issues eventually led to the setting up of real life, real time Discussion Circles. But it also provided a means by which isolated feminists could feel themselves part of a wider community.
Recently published in the UK, Jenna Bailey's Can Any Mother Help Me? Fifty Years of Friendship Through a Secret Magazine provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of a group of women who formed a correspondence club following a letter to the magazine Nursery World from a lonely young mother seeking other women interested in reading and discussing ideas and thoughts. These women, who at that time found no other outlet for their education and ambitions, wrote and circulated letters about their lives, commented on those of others, and kept this going for several decades. They wrote under pseudonymns, but one of them is identifiable as Elaine Morgan (The Descent of Woman) and another is known to be Rose Hacker, a politically active north Londoner who was involved in the marriage guidance movement and a pioneer in sex education. Bailey's book gives a tiny glimpse into the rich surviving archive of the Cooperative Correspondence Club and the importance of this kind of virtual community to its members. (There are reviews here, here, here and here.)
There are other examples of similar circles finding commonalties and sympathies over distance and through time independently of actual face to face encounters (though these sometimes resulted). The internet has certainly brought vast changes to the processes by which this has come about, but I think there is this longer history of people, and perhaps particularly women? reaching out to find the like minds that they did not find in their immediate vicinity.
Many of these centred around periodicals. In Doris Lessing's 'Children of Violence' sequence, Martha Quest, living in a backward British colony in Central Africa, believes she has identified a kindred spirit when she discovers that the man she had just met is a reader of the New Statesman. But as well as providing a means of recognising sympathetic others, radical periodicals provided a forum for debate and connection in themselves.
In 1911 the suffragette Dora Marsden established The Freewoman to discuss a range of issues relating to women's position in society that she believed were being ignored by the suffrage organisations in their focus on obtaining the vote. It was regarded as a dangerous and subversive publication even among feminists, in particular because of its determination to discuss matters to do with sexuality. Its correspondence columns provided a vibrant forum for vigorous discussions, and the facilities it offered for the ventilation of seldom-mentioned issues eventually led to the setting up of real life, real time Discussion Circles. But it also provided a means by which isolated feminists could feel themselves part of a wider community.
Recently published in the UK, Jenna Bailey's Can Any Mother Help Me? Fifty Years of Friendship Through a Secret Magazine provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of a group of women who formed a correspondence club following a letter to the magazine Nursery World from a lonely young mother seeking other women interested in reading and discussing ideas and thoughts. These women, who at that time found no other outlet for their education and ambitions, wrote and circulated letters about their lives, commented on those of others, and kept this going for several decades. They wrote under pseudonymns, but one of them is identifiable as Elaine Morgan (The Descent of Woman) and another is known to be Rose Hacker, a politically active north Londoner who was involved in the marriage guidance movement and a pioneer in sex education. Bailey's book gives a tiny glimpse into the rich surviving archive of the Cooperative Correspondence Club and the importance of this kind of virtual community to its members. (There are reviews here, here, here and here.)
There are other examples of similar circles finding commonalties and sympathies over distance and through time independently of actual face to face encounters (though these sometimes resulted). The internet has certainly brought vast changes to the processes by which this has come about, but I think there is this longer history of people, and perhaps particularly women? reaching out to find the like minds that they did not find in their immediate vicinity.
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