Hitting Like a Grrrl April 26, 2009

I was caught off guard a few weeks ago when my four year old son came home from preschool saying things like, “Mommy, I don’t want to hear that story.  It’s a girl story,” and “I don’t play with girls,” and “That’s a girl toy!”  He emphasized the words “girl” and “girls” in a way that made me cringe…its a particular kind of sneer that I became familiar with back when I was, well, just a girl. Today, I’m not just a girl.  I’m a wife, mother, writer, educator, daughter…but above all, a woman.  And the kind of woman that I’ve become is the kind of woman who is concerned with all women…a feminist.  Maybe it was the first time I heard some boy on the playground sneer out girl like it was a curse word that I began to glean some vague idea of sexism.  I got used to that sneer, even hearing adult men, my peers, chastise one another for their degree of masculinity by using the word “girl” like an epithet:  “What?  Are you going to be a little girl about it Sean?” and “He’s got the handshake of a girl scout.”  But I got a nice, fresh shock when I heard my four year old use the word in such a way.  I must admit, it shook me, hurt me, pained me in ways that I’m not even ready to totally confront.  I felt like I had been slapped.  I was back on the playground in an instant.

Obviously my son didn’t see me as one of these kinds of horrible, stinky, cootie-infested animals because he wouldn’t have said the word “girl” in such a way in front of me.  My son loves me.  I’m not a “girl” to him.  He’s affectionate and loves to kiss his mom, dad and brother just for the heck of it…whenever he’s feeling particularly lovey-dovey, which is pretty often.  He’ll come up and say, “Squeeeeeezy hug!”, bear hug you to near death, then plant a slimy kiss right on your smacker.  It’s pretty cute.  And I love that my husband doesn’t push our son away, make him feel ashamed for kissing his daddy on the lips.  My good man bear hugs our boy right back and then offers up his lips for kissing. Our family (I’m the only woman in the family) is affectionate and we like it that way.  But over the past few years I’ve occasionally received comments that have a slightly critical and/or puzzled inflection about how my son “is so, um, affectionate and sweet.  He’s really sensitive, isn’t he?”  It doesn’t happen often, but from time to time a family member, or a new teacher at his preschool might make a comment, and when they do, they look to me, at me, and seem to suggest that I’ve done something to make my son “like that.”  My son is normal and healthy.  We just allow him to express his full range of emotions…including affection, which is something most American men probably have needed in their lives for a long, long time.

We’ve never intentionally tried to cultivate any particular gender leanings with our boys.  While I am a feminist, I guess I just sort of forgot (maybe selectively) how gender socialization would eventually come to claim my sons.  Sociological theories of gender identity development posit that “gender is a social construction rather than a biological given” (Bussey & Bandera, 1999, “Social Cognitive Theory of Gender Development and Differentiation“).  In other words, biology plays a part in the development of a child’s sense of their gender, but society plays, perhaps, an equal part.  We tell our children what behaviors, appearance, toys and media are appropriate to their sex based on the norms of our society.  Behaviors and appearance that vary from the norm are considered taboo and to be avoided, and there is a large amount of social pressure to conform to these norms.  If, for example, Johnny decides that he wants to watch the Cinderella movie instead of the dinosaur movie, we tend to steer him toward the dinosaur movie, sometimes in subtle ways, and sometimes in not-so-subtle ways.  We might tell Johnny, “Dinosaurs are for boys.  Cinderella is a girl’s movie,” or “You don’t want to watch the dinosaur  movie?  But dinosaurs are cool!”  Subtly implying that Cinderella is not “cool,” or that certain stories and movies are off-limits for Johnny if he really wants to be a boy.  Our fear is that if Johnny watches Cinderella-type movies too often, he will be confused about his gender identity and act more “like a girl,” a negative outcome for the parents of boys concerned with fitting into the norm.

I think of Simone de Beauvoir famously saying, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”  What de Beauvoir says is applicable to men too.  When it comes to my feminism, it has been mainly, erroneously, focused on women, not men.  Though lately, that’s been changing.  But back when our oldest son was about 20 months old, I wasn’t really too worried about sexism affecting him.  I went on many a play date where the mothers of toddler boys would say, “There’s just something different about little boys.  He just naturally goes for the cars, trucks and robots.  It’s biology, I guess.”  While I felt skeptical when I heard other mother’s saying such things, I noticed that as soon as my son was finished with his baby toys, he moved very easily, seemingly naturally,  into trains and cars and dinosaurs.  Then again, we didn’t buy him any dolls, or playthings that were particularly domestic (like a toy vacuum cleaner or kitchen set). I remember, though, entering Toys R Us for the first time in years.  I was astonished, perhaps naively, at how gender segregated the toys were.  While the girls’ section was amply supplied with pink kitchen sets and mini baby strollers…the boys’ side had no such boy version.  There weren’t any blue strollers with daddy-n-baby sets.  The girls’ side had very few pink cars, or bulldozers, and not even one policewoman dress-up outfits.  Likewise, the boys’ side had no nurse practitioner dress-up outfits, despite the fact that there are plenty of men who are nurse practitioners, and women who are law enforcement officers, and plenty of dads who push strollers, cook dinner and clean-up around the house.

My son has a slightly older cousin who he idolizes.  If cousin liked dinosaurs, our son liked dinosaurs.  If cousin liked Transformers, our son liked Transformers.  I didn’t see any problem with this.   It seemed natural enough for our son to look up to his older, cool cousin.  I didn’t think about the toys themselves…only that our son wanted to be like his cousin.  We just sort of went with the flow…he had Thomas the Tank Engine toys, mini soccer balls, Star Wars action figures, Pokemon, every Matchbox race car you could possibly imagine, cowboy hats and play cap guns, puzzles, robots of every kind…his closet was full of boy stuff, and I say that without a sneer.  He had all kinds of boyish movies in his collection; his favorites being Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Cars, Shrek, Toy Story (I and II) and Transformers Animated.  We signed him up for soccer class through the city recreational program.  He wrestled extensively with his dad.  We paired him up with other little boys to make friends with.  We dressed him in very boy-oriented clothing…shirts with guitars, baseball bats and skateboards, pants and long shorts, race car shoes, baseball caps…a wardrobe mainly made up of four colors: blue, green, black and red.  My son has never been deprived of stereotypical models of American manhood.  And he’s got active male role models in his life: a guitar-playing, WWII trivia-loving, teacher dad, two grandpas (both who served in the military during wars), and my husband’s band mates (one married, one not).

But then our son went to preschool and began to make friends with a group of boys in his class.  Being slightly on the anti-social side in middle and high school myself, I suppose a part of me really wanted my son to fit in with the kids at preschool.  I encouraged him to make friends and play with the other boys in the class, and I saw preschool as an opportunity for my son to learn about sharing, community, leadership, empathy, discipline…and other relatively benign virtues.  It became clear, very quickly, that there was one little alpha-pup that boy-o-mine latched onto immediately.  Alpha Pup was the leader of a mini-gang of preschool boys who went around the playground imitating the Power Rangers, making potty jokes and generally proclaiming that certain things were for “girls” (with a sneer).  I have to admit, I was taken aback by how early and immediate this kind of socialization begins.  At first I sort of went with the flow, trying to convince myself that it was all just a “normal” part of his process of becoming a boy, but then I started noticing that Alpha Pup got in trouble more often than the other boys, and on a regular basis.  I felt guilty for encouraging my son to befriend someone who seemed to get him in trouble so often.  Alpha Pup hit, swore, taught boy-o-mine to give us the bird!  All at the ripe age of FOUR.

When I went to friends and family about this issue, many just brushed it off as “boyhood.”  But I couldn’t shake the image of my kid flipping me the middle finger.  In fact, it’s not just my friends and family who dismiss my concerns about the social environment that we’re raising our boys in.  There’s a new breed of scientists who increasingly believe that the differences between boys and girls are more biological than social.  Over the past few years there have been a rash of books that attempt to address the “problem” of the “boy brain.”  Says Peg Tyre, in her 2006 Newsweek article “The Trouble with Boys,” “Thirty years ago feminists argued that classic ‘boy’ behaviors were a result of socialization, but these days scientists believe they are an expression of male brain chemistry.”  It’s that old nature vs. nuture argument all over again.  What frustrates me is that researchers, parents and scientists seem to want a definitive answer to that old battle…and there isn’t one.  It seems obvious to me that boys are driven both biologically and socially.  Isn’t that obvious?  It seems obvious to me that girls are driven both biologically and socially.  To underplay the role of socialization in the process of a child’s development is to be ignorant…no matter how many PhDs or children you have.  For example, while human beings across the planet share a particular biological design, we seem to all behave in different ways, with different social norms that pertain to sexual norms.  Diffrent cultures set down a wide array of different social norms for members of social groups, despite the fact that a great majority of us were born with two arms, two legs, a brain and a vagina or a penis.  I have to ask, why tell my son to watch the dinosaur movie instead of Cinderella if it’s all biology?

Answer: because it isn’t all biology.  And if that is the case, then socialization is very important to the shaping of a child.  I have to wonder, ask, explore this (and many other) questions because my own child’s selfhood is at stake.  I’ve gotten some pretty intense reactions to some of my questions.  The idea that a feminist would try to actively shape her child’s (particularly a boy’s) worldview as feminist brings about the following responses: scoffing, throat-clearing, eye-rolling, laughing, the statement “You are sick,” and one face slap.  Yes, a face slap.  Yet, rightwing Evangelicals fight with tooth and nail to raise their children the way they see fit, and seem to believe pretty firmly that socialization has a very important influence on the development of the child.  I am about to write something that I hope I never write again; I couldn’t agree with the Evangelicals any more.  They are right.  I understand why very religious parents want to control and shape the kinds of things that their children are exposed to.  It is a parent’s job to show children the correct (right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, fair or unfair) way to behave in relation to other people.  For me, it’s not the Christian ideology that forms the basis of my moral compass…it’s feminism.  It’s an extremely subjective call to say that feminist principles and mothers have “hurt” children, or even devleopmentally disabled them.  I suppose I could say the same about Evangelical principles and mothers who selectively eliminate aspects of a curricula (Darwin’s theory of evolution, certain parts of history, the Big Bang theory) to fit the Christian ideology.  But I wouldn’t do that, because I respect a parent’s right to raise their children the way he or she sees fit, even if the principles that parent uses to guide him or her are different from my own.  This is America, isn’t it?

Gloria Steinem, My Hero, on Sarah Palin September 15, 2008

I love Gloria.  She just rules.  I just don’t think I could have said it anywhere close to better than she did in this LA Times Op-ed piece:

Palin: wrong woman, wrong message

Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

By Gloria Steinem
September 4, 2008

Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing — the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party — are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women — and to many men too — who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the “white-male-only” sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won’t work. This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

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  Photos: Sarah Palin, north star

• Join the reader discussion on Gloria Steinem’s Op-Ed article

• Sarah Palin as Alaska National Guard commander

• Palin appears to disagree with McCain on sex education

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for — and that Barack Obama’s still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, “Somebody stole my shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs.”

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can’t do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn’t say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden’s 37 years’ experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn’t know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, “I still can’t answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?” When asked about Iraq, she said, “I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.”

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she’s won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain’s campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate’s views on “God, guns and gays” ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let’s be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can’t tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves “abstinence-only” programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don’t doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn’t just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn’t just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn’t just echo McCain’s pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, “women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership,” so he may be voting for Palin’s husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can’t appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

Thank you so much Gloria for clarifying those points for me, and for many other voters.

Palin’s Myth of Urban Immorality September 4, 2008

Sarah Palin did a good job last night. She came out swinging and, as a liberal, that makes me nervous. She’s a surprisingly good speaker, considering that her usual audience is much smaller. I’m liberal, but I try to stay open-minded. A lot of what Palin addresses, I’m just not decided on yet…take Alaskan oil drilling. I think Palin and the Republican party might have something there…there is something to be said for using our own resources, rather than expecting developing nations to ruin their ecosystems and deplete their resources.

But there was something else that Palin said that shocked and angered me…

Said Sarah Palin:

“A writer observed: ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.’ I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.

I grew up with those people.

They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America … who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars.

They love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America. I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town.”

I grew up in a small town too. But I don’t live in one now…and for very good reasons. The kind of small town that Harry Truman came from is very different today, and even very different than the one I grew up in in the mid-80’s, during the Reagan years.

It may be true that many small-town Americans grow our food, and even some run our factories…but people who live in the city fight our wars too. People who live in the city work hard too. It IS a privilege to live in a small town. Many people who live in the city can’t afford to live in those rural communities. That’s why they are in the city…for the jobs. Many live in cramped quarters because they can’t make a living in those rural towns. There are factories in small towns and in big cities. Big cities are where those products made in factories are sold and distributed to the world. Big cities are where you can see the ingenuity, the ambition, the hard work and the industry that America is famous for demonstrated in the daily comings and goings of every resident.  We are a busy, industrious country and there’s no better place to witness that than in the city.

Palin would have us believe that people who don’t live in small towns aren’t patriotic, don’t work hard, and don’t fight our wars. She’d have us believe that small-town people are somehow morally better than “city folk,” as if all small-town residents spend their entire lives in small towns, as if “city folk” didn’t come from small towns, as if living in the city taints you and makes you a bad person. Well, there is more crime in the city, isn’t there? I mean, don’t people in the city do bad things?

In the small town that I grew up in, a man was murdered during a drug deal, there was prostitution, there was drug smuggling, there were gangs. There were also class divides and corruption of city officials. There were illegal immigrants, and just about every farm employed them, along with the restaurants and businesses in town. Not everyone was religious, but the good people who went to church were often at cultural war with those who didn’t share their brand of faith. There were also many wonderful things about that small town…it was beautiful, many people truly were hard-working and up-right people. (Then again, that small town was in rural California, and according to many conservatives in other states, California isn’t really in America, or on this planet.)

When I moved to the city to go to college, I met the love of my life and we stayed. It just seemed right that we settle where we fell in love. It felt like home to us. I’ve lived in the city now for about ten years, and I find that many of the hard-working and up-right people I knew in my small hometown are here in the city with me too. My neighbors love our country just as much as the Americans who live in those little towns in Alaska and the Heartland. On holidays the American flag flies proudly from our lawns and flag holders. We have families and jobs. We get married and go to church. Young men and women straight out of high school enlist in the military. City people even pray.

Cities are a part of America. Cities provide our military with enlisted men and women. Cities facilitate industry. Cities provide jobs for millions of people. American cities are part of what make this country great. I’m sorry, Sarah Palin, but small-town America isn’t the only America. Think of the Big Apple. Think of the port of Los Angeles, shipping and bringing in all those goods from the coast to the center of America. Think of the gorgeous majesty of San Francisco. Think of the rich history and legacy of cities like Chicago and Detroit. Think of the home of our president, Washington D.C. Sure, there are downsides to these places, but I think Palin is overlooking some of the reasons why cities are so attractive to millions of Americans. Small-towns aren’t without their share of problems. Oh, and one more thing…people vote in cities too.

Palin’s Daughter is Pregnant?! September 1, 2008

What kind of an example are we setting for teenagers across the world when we endorse a candidate who couldn’t seem to model the very morals and socially conservative platform that she hopes to sign into law for everyone else in the nation?  What conclusion can kids come to except, “What’s good for Bristol Palin must be good for me.”

This ticket is becoming too much like a Jerry Springer episode.

What’s Wrong with this Palin Picture? September 1, 2008

Many of the pictures I’ve seen of Sarah Palin, Republican vice presidential candidate, on the internet have been very close to cheesecake shots. In fact, I’ve seen already some air-brushed pin-ups of Palin in a thong bending over a football. I’ve also seen her hot-to-trot head shot baring her shoulders, and I’ve seen her up-do’s, the Vogue cover and family photos with the Alaskan landscape beautifully rolling itself out behind them. There’s no doubt she’s a beautiful woman. Very photogenic. Her family looks like a happy and healthy one. But pictures can be deceiving.

She’s being marketed as a perfect mother, qualified statesman and the dressed up version of those bikini-wearing, machine-gun toting babes who smile at us from websites like Gungirls.com. I’m wondering today, how that represents middle America exactly. Yes, it may be that Americans living in the Heartland want the right to tote guns and consider themselves pro-family, but how many middle American women would leave their three-month child with Downs syndrome home with Daddy (or nanny?) to campaign on the road…even for the vice presidency? Where are the family values there? I know we need women to represent in politics, but this seems to fly in the face of all the “family values” rhetoric that has been slung at working mothers for the past few decades…basically as a backlash against the women’s movement, and the idea that women can work and have a family.

Don’t get me wrong…I believe that women can work and have a family, but we need the rest of society to get in line with that idea, mainly so that women, like Sarah Palin, can spend the time with their newborn babies without having their careers penalized. I’m all for the ‘whole package’…husband, family, career…I think we can do it. But when we have groups of Americans (mainly conservatives) slandering women who work (whether they have to or not), and then Palin, who presumably represents these Americans, on the campaign trail with such a small baby…well, I have to ask, where are the critics now? Working women, like Sarah Palin, need support…both from their families and from institutions…in order to make the ‘whole package’ work.

We need government institutions and individuals alike to support paid maternity and paternity leave for all mothers and fathers of babies under one year. I think it’s wonderful that Palin is working and has the support of her husband and family (and maybe even a nanny, that remains to be seen), but not all American women have that kind of support. Not everyone has the family structure and support that Palin does.

Take me for instance.

My mother helps my sister to raise her son alone. Like Palin, when my sister found herself pregnant, but in a less than ideal situation (Dad wasn’t really around to help and wasn’t sure he wanted to participate), she decided to have the baby anyway. As a result, our whole family had to woman-up (as I call it). We rallied around her. We babysat while she finished her college degree. We took turns shuttling my nephew around town. After college my sister moved back in with our mother and went to work, and now my mother and our other sister help offset the outrageous cost of childcare. When I decided to get married and have children of my own, I had to take time away from my career as a college instructor and writer to stay home with my children. That also meant that there was one less babysitter for my sister. While I wanted to be close to the kids for the first year anyway, even if I hadn’t wanted to stay home for the first year, I had to because my family was centered around helping my sister…and rightly so since she needed the help more than I did. Our entire family makes do. I make enough at my job to necessitate working to help pay the bills (our mortgage being increasingly difficult to cover), but the childcare that we must pay for in order for me to work is just insane.

Nevertheless, you can see the difficulties there. You can call me a “whiner,” but I’m not whining. I think we are lucky, because I’ve heard from women in much more difficult and desperate situations.

I hope that when Palin’s riding that anti-abortion platform in the next couple of months that she thinks of the consequences of reversing Roe vs. Wade. How will all these women support their saved babies? With divorce rates settled around 50-60%, how will all these single mothers work and raise their children without affordable childcare, health benefits and government institutions that help single mothers and fathers afford food, shelter and utilities? I hope Palin thinks about all those dreaded taxes and government institutions that the country will need to help support the families that are created with such legislation.

I also wonder how good it is for Sarah Palin’s little child to have his mother campaigning at such a critical juncture in his life. Before we all start calling Palin “one of us” let’s think about what our lives are really like as mothers. How much is her life like ours? Clearly, she’s a politician first and foremost, and her other roles take a backseat. That’s fine with me…but how do social conservatives feel about that? I’m just wondering out loud.

In Praise of Liberal Guilt by Ron Rosenbaum for Slate.com May 24, 2008

I couldn’t agree with this article more.  Thank you Ron for illuminating the many reasons why a progressive worldview is a moral one.

In Praise of Liberal GuiltIt’s not wrong to favor Obama because of race.

By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2008, at 5:34 PM ET

When did “liberal guilt” get such a bad reputation? You hear it all the time now from people who sneeringly dismiss whites who support Obama’s candidacy as “guilty liberals.” There are, of course, many reasons why whites might support Obama that have nothing to do with race. But what if redeeming our shameful racial past is one factor for some? Why delegitimize sincere excitement that his nomination and potential election would represent a historic civil rights landmark: making an abstract right a reality at last. Instead, their feeling must be disparaged as merely the result of a somehow shameful “liberal guilt.”

If you Google “liberal guilt” and “Obama,” among the nearly 32,000 hits you get are a syndicated Charles Krauthammer column under the headline “Obama’s Speech Plays On Liberal Guilt“; a Mark Steyn post on the National Review Online that describes “a Democrat nominating process that’s a self-torturing satire of upscale liberal guilt confusions”; a column by self-styled “crunchy con” Rod Dreher, who suggests the mainstream media coverage of Obama indicates that “liberal guilt will work [on them] like kryptonite.” Even liberals make fun of liberal guilt. A couple of years ago, Salon coyly proposed supplementing the Oscars with the Liberal Guilt Awards and awarding political dramas with “Guilties.”

Since when has guilt become shameful? Since when is shame shameful when it’s shame about a four-centuries-long historical crime? Not one of us is a slave owner today, segregation is no longer enshrined in law, and there are fewer overt racists than before, but if we want to praise America’s virtues, we have to concede—and feel guilty about—America’s sins, else we praise a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue. (I’ve run out of metaphors, but you get the picture.)

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Guilt is good, people! The only people who don’t suffer guilt are sociopaths and serial killers. Guilt means you have a conscience. You have self-awareness, you have—in the case of America’s history of racism—historical awareness. Just because things have gotten better in the present doesn’t mean we can erase racism from our past or ignore its enduring legacy.

Critics of Obama supporters who use the phrase “guilty liberal” or “liberal guilt” in a condescending, above-it-all manner suggest there’s something weak about feeling guilt; they paint a trivializing, Woody Allen caricature of it.

Actually, I think it requires a kind of strength, not weakness, to face the ugly truths of history and to react to them in an honest way. “Liberal guilt” isn’t a reason one must automatically support a black candidate, but that doesn’t mean that liberal guilt—better defined as an awareness of the need to contend with, and overcome, a racist past—shouldn’t be a factor in politics.

Of course, it’s not enough just to feel guilty or to act on guilt alone. But guilt can often spur us to deal with the enduring consequences of the injustices of the past and force us not to pretend there are none.

It’s especially surprising to hear “guilt” being disparaged by conservatives, since they present themselves as moralists; they are quick to decry liberals for seeking to abolish guilt over various practices conservatives deem immoral. But was slavery not immoral? For those conservatives who make a fetish of “values”: Was not the century of institutionalized racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of “flawed values” that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? For those conservatives who are forever speaking of the way they value history and memory more than liberals: Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they’re no longer legally institutionalized?

Do we abolish its memories and its effects? Do we abolish the very consciousness of the past and pretend we have a clear conscience? Pretend that on the question of racism, there is no problem anymore? America is impeccably virtuous? This sounds more like Jacobin “Year Zero” thinking than true conservatism.

What I don’t understand is why there doesn’t seem to be any conservative guilt over racism. Contemporary conservatives could learn from their revered godfather William F. Buckley Jr., who, early in his career at the National Review, wrote a pro-Jim Crow lead editorial—little remembered in liberal and other encomia to the man—titled “Why the South Must Prevail,” in which he argued that segregation should persist even by illegal means because “the White community … for the time being … is the advanced race.”

A valuable essay on this question by William Hogeland in the May/June issue of the Boston Review reminds us that even Buckley felt guilt—if not precisely “liberal guilt”—about this editorial, guilt that he expressed in a 2004 Time interview. “Have you taken any positions you now regret?” Time asked him. “Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.” Why can’t conservative wiseguys (especially at the National Review) stop sneering at liberals long enough to learn from the admirable guilty wisdom of their sainted leader?

Shouldn’t conservatives feel guilty about slavery and racism and the consequences thereof, or must they disdain such feelings, however moral, because they are associated with liberals? Do they choose their moral priorities because of their popularity among others? That doesn’t seem like a conservative way of thinking about moral values. It sounds like a form of relativism. It’s the kind of thinking that treats values as a brand identity. Guilt over racism is not part of the conservative brand identity. The more shame if that be the case.

(The conservative brand identity also doesn’t have much room for opposition to sexism, another legitimate source of liberal guilt. But Hillary Clinton’s problems, it seems to me, stem less from sexism than from Clintonism.)

Or could it be that conservatives disdain liberal guilt about race because they have historically more guilt to bear for the perpetuation of racism and segregation?

I’m not talking about Republicans per se. The fact that the GOP was the party of Lincoln and most strongly supported anti-lynching and anti-Jim Crow legislation in the first half of the 20^th century is to its eternal credit, just as the “Southern strategy” was much to its discredit in the second half of the century. And, needless to say, liberal Democrats collaborated with a stone-cold racist wing of their party when they needed electoral votes for most of the century.

No, it’s not a Democrat or Republican issue; it’s a liberal and conservative issue. And there are those on the conservative side who understand that the first step to justice is an acknowledgment of guilt. Just not many and not very vocal.

This is what I don’t understand about the conservative attacks on “the ’60s.” They willfully ignore, in their rote denunciations of the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll aspect of that decade, the great movement of moralists known as the civil rights movement. The movement that brought deserved honor and pride to America. The movement that may well have been motivated (among whites participating) by liberal guilt. But so what! The guilt was justified. The truly guilty were the ones who didn’t feel guilt. Such as the conservative movement of the day that largely stood on the sidelines making carping augments about states’ rights that were a shamelessly transparent defense of institutionalized racism. Where’s the conservative guilt about that? No wonder they ignore the civil rights movement, one of the great epochs in American history, when they demonize “the ’60s.”

The question of liberal guilt and guilty liberals often comes up in discussions of reactions to “black anger,” unfortunately expressed most loudly and bitterly in this campaign by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But it’s all too easy to dismiss the legitimacy of black anger merely on the basis of the Rev. Wright’s sadly twisted version of it.

Do the people who dismiss black anger think there’s nothing to be angry about? As a Jew, I think I have a right to be angry, still, about the Holocaust, even though it happened before I was born. It would be hard for me to understand an African-American not being angry about 400 years of murder, rape, and enslavement on the basis of race. Anger, like guilt, shouldn’t be the endpoint, but anger at injustice is not illegitimate and can be a starting point, a spur to moral action. Where you end up is, alas, often a different matter.

But it seems to me that some people use the Rev. Wright’s ugly expression of anger as a fig leaf to discredit Obama, who has clearly ended up at a different place from the Rev. Wright (largely due, one imagines, to the civil rights movement). Yes, Obama may well have an understanding of the Rev. Wright’s anger, but if you can’t see the difference between the two men historically, culturally, generationally, and temperamentally, then I’d say you just don’t want to: It’s a kind of willful blindness that seeks to find ways of discrediting Obama and his “guilty liberal” supporters by holding up the Rev. Wright as the true face of black anger. I think intelligent people are able to make these distinctions.

But I wonder whether there’s something deeper going on here in the delegitimization of guilt and anger. I wonder whether it’s a misbegotten legacy of the long-discredited but still-lingering influence of Freudian theory. Which alas too many otherwise intelligent people still take seriously, despite the pseudoscience of his method, his misogyny, his malpractice, and his coke-addled arrogance. (If you’re unaware of the extent of Freud’s fabrication of evidence to support his pseudoscience, I strongly recommend you read Frederick Crews’ anthology, Unauthorized Freud.)

Nonetheless, the popularized version of Freud that has embedded itself into culture sees guilt more as a symptom, a mental disorder rather than a virtue or a legitimate reaction to a crime that one is, in this case—by enjoying the privilege of being American—implicated in. To pop Freudians, guilt is “neurotic,” the product of the “oedipal struggle” fairy tale Freudians take as gospel or, worse, “science.” (It’s amazing to me how many forthright opponents of creationism still buy into the pseudoscience of psychoanalysis.)

And the medicalization of guilt by psychoanalysis is echoed in the psychobabble of this era’s pseudoscientists, the “new-age healers” who demonize guilt as the source of disease, blame you for your illness if you don’t exorcise it.

People who lack guilt also lack humility, which is another one of those virtues conservatives are always flogging (although not with a lot of humility).

I’m always amused, listening to the Sean Hannity radio show, how the host and caller frequently salute each other with the phrase: “You’re a great American.” (There’s humility for you!) What’s so great about being “great” if it depends on historical ignorance or denial? Again, to love America truly, one has to love the America that is and was, not a fantasy America free from flaws.

To be a truly “great American,” one doesn’t have to be a guilty liberal, but one has to know guilt.

Why the Word Progressive is Synonmous with Family Values April 18, 2008

One reason that I started this blog is that I’m so tired and sickened by the continued claim that progressives don’t have family values. As a married, left-leaning citizen of the United States with two children, I decided to add my voice to the ‘family values’ discussion happening in the blog world. I don’t think it is crazy to support the equal right for a homosexual couple to marry and be married myself. I don’t see what is so weird about being a married feminist. I don’t believe that the best way to teach a child morals and ethics is through Sunday School. I also love my children and my husband. I want our family to be safe and happy. I want the same things that most Americans want for their families.

Anyway, I’m not the most eloquent one leading these debates. There are many others who say, and have said already, all of this before. For example, there’s a blogger named Nichola Torbett who lays down the bottom line when she says, “There are certain words and phrases that trigger in me a Pavlovian fury, and ‘family values’ is one of those phrases. I suspect I’m not alone in reading this phrase as right-wing code for the hatred of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people; opposition to reproductive choice; discomfort with sexuality in general; preference for male-dominated households; stigmatization of single people; and even uneasiness with women in the workplace. What’s more, families are hardly the sacred refuges the right would make them out to be; far too often, the mores associated with the “sanctity” of the American nuclear family serve to conceal an array of physical, emotional, and sexual abuses, as well as myriad less egregious ways that family members damage each other.” Torbett argues that a progressive family-friendly culture is a happier, healthier culture. I couldn’t agree more.

I also really Matthew Blackham’s take on progressive family values in his column from The Utah Statesman. Blackham makes a very persuasive case for the inclusion of gay marriage into law when he says, “Imagine a world where building families is not the exclusive right of heterosexuals, where welfare policies favor families and help parents spend more of their precious time with their children and spouse than at the office, where parenthood is better planned, a world with fewer teen pregnancies and abortions and is the progressive vision for America’s families.” I like this college junior’s vision of the world. That is a world I want to live in.

Perhaps the Rockridge Institute best spells out how progressive values can be family values in the “Nurturant Parent Family Model.” In part two of their three-part “Nation as Family” series, Rockridge Institue defines what a Nurturant Parent Family Model is and how that model is informed by progressive values: “In the Nurturant Parent family, it is assumed that the world is basically good. And, however dangerous and difficult the world may be at present, it can be made better, and it is your responsibility to help make it better. Correspondingly, children are born good, and parents can make them better, and it is their responsibility to do so. Both parents (if there are two) are responsible for running the household and raising the children, although they may divide their activities. The parents’ job is to be responsive to their children, nurture them, and raise their children to nurture others. Nurturance requires empathy and responsibility.” And, posits Rockridge, empathy and responsibility are cornerstones to progressive values. “The values inherent in the Nurturant Parent model of the family,” argues Rockridge, “translate directly to political values. Progressive political positions are based on a responsive morality that centers around Empathy and Responsibility—responsibility for oneself and social responsibility. These values are to be promoted in every area of life, both public and private. For progressives, these values are typically unconscious, but the more we understand them, the more we can articulate and work towards a society that is consistent with and extends our values.” In other words, the basic thrust of progressive politics, in fact, naturally and directly relates to parenting because it isn’t just politics that the word “progressive” applies to…it is a worldview, one that has been literally demonized by conservative right-wing politicos.

There are many other voices out there promoting progressive family values. I hope to be another mother working for a family-friendly world.

The Perfect Grocery Store April 18, 2008

If I had known at the age of sixteen that I’d be blogging about grocery stores and cloth diapers I think I would have become very, very depressed at my future prospects…but here I am. I accept my life. I am thirty-three, married with two kids and a stressful job.

Nevertheless, one thing I refuse to accept is defeat in the face of my search for the perfect grocery store. Square as it may be to discuss grocery stores seriously, I can’t help it. I am in grocery store hell. I can’t think of a more disorganized, intense, sweaty, frustrating, exasperating, mind-numbing, pocketbook-draining, horrible task than going to the store. And I have to go to the store constantly. I think I go to the store every day, if not multiple times a day. I wish I didn’t. I wish I didn’t have to. One reason that I’m constantly going to the store is that I can’t remember a damn thing. After a lengthy trip to the store, after unpacking and storing all of the goods I’ve just purchased, while at the same time trying to appease the tiny tyrants at my feet demanding things from me, I’ll find my grocery list and scan it only to discover that the one thing I really needed on my list I forgot to get. It’s always some crucial item too: toilet paper, tampons, bread, water. At that point I take out my imaginary twelve gauge and blow out my imaginary brains right there in the kitchen. My brains are so imaginary. I don’t know in what realm my brain exists, but it isn’t this one.

I digress. While it is true that I am your typical scatterbrained mommy/professor type, I have to lay some of the blame on the grocery stores that I frequent, which are Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Albertson’s, Ralph’s, Stater Brothers, Target and Fresh & Easy. When faced with a death-sentence style grocery list, I try to go where it’s most convenient, but see “convenient” can be a sticky word. Do I go to the nearest grocery store? How about the store with the best prices? Do I go to the grocery store that is most easily accessible? Should I go for the most family-friendly store? What about the grocery store that has my bank branch in it? Or, do I go to the store with all the items on my list? And there’s the rub…there isn’t one grocery store in my area that carries all the items on my list. Not a one.

I’d drive to the other side of town for a store that had all the items on my list. I love completing a task and I’ll go to great ends to do it. I’ll be honest though, my list isn’t easy. I try to buy organic food products and environmentally friendly paper and cleaning products. I sometimes like an “exotic” food or two. I’m shopping for a family of four and I need to satisfy their widely varying needs and wants. I’m trying to get the lowest price on top of all of that. Trader Joe’s very nearly meets all my requirements. I love the range of items and the prices are competitive with other stores. I can get a good wine for under $10 and soy yogurt for less than $.90. There seems to be an emphasis on healthy, organic and/or vegetarian items at Trader Joe’s…which is wonderful for us because both of my sons have milk allergies. What isn’t wonderful is that Trader Joe’s doesn’t carry baby items at all. If I want to purchase diaper cream, baby food, baby wipes, sippy cups or diapers I have to visit another store. This means lugging my three-year old and my fifteen month old in and out of their car seats and then into another store. If I forget to visit the other store first, then my Trader Joe’s goods sit in my hot car while I race (as fast as one can go with two children of that age) in to grab some diapers. Needless to say, I’ve locked an unusual combination of things inside my car on Shopping Day: baby/keys only, toddler/purse, toddler/baby, frozen grocery goods/toddler/purse. Multiple grocery store shopping days can be a tad confusing.

If on Shopping Day I go to Trader Joe’s, that means the closest store for diapers is the dreaded (and ironically, loved) Target. Lucky for this mother, the diapers at Target are competitively priced. Unlucky for the Mother Earth, Target does not offer cloth diapers…oh, pardon me, they do offer cloth diapers…the kind that no one uses anymore! You know, those white prefolds that you used to cover with steamy plastic pants, but then leaked all the time anyway? Well, today we have a wide selection of cute, easy to use, washable cloth diapers. I love cloth diapers. I tried to sell everyone in my family on their value, both environmentally and economically. Plus, they are so much cuter than disposables!!! Squeal! We went for it for the first few months of my second son’s life after watching our first son’s diapers pile up and up and up, imagining our baby’s nightmarish contribution to the local landfill. It was a change, but once I got the hang of it, I saw that cloth diapers were easily much cheaper than disposables and much better for the environment (as long as they are washed with detergent that is planet-friendly). But after a while I became worn down. The drag about cloth diapers is that your children eventually grow out of them and then you have to move up a size…which wouldn’t be so much of a drag if cloth diapers were offered in grocery stores. Maybe my head is in the sand, but I couldn’t find one local store that sold contemporary cloth diapers! Not even the high end granola-stomper stores like Whole Foods were willing to charge me exorbitant prices for cloth diapers! Instead, you have to buy cloth diapers online and wait for weeks and weeks to get them. I broke down after the manufacturer that sold our brand withheld shipments from their online stores, making them unavailable and back ordered until our son is scheduled to enter his freshman year of college.

But “Wait!” you say, “don’t they sell ‘green’ diapers at Target and other local grocery stores?” Why, yes, in fact, they do. G-diapers, Seventh Generation, Tushies and other environmentally friendly diaper brands are, in fact, available at your local Whole Foods…but not at Trader Joe’s, Ralph’s, Von’s, Albertson’s, Fresh&Easy or Stater Brothers. In fact, Target sells its own brand of eco-friendly diapers, but they come in such small packs and they are considerably more expensive than the nationwide diaper brands. It’s not just Target that opts out of the eco-friendly and cheap diaper products. Cruise the aisles at your local nationwide chain…Pampers, Huggies, generic brands…would it kill them to throw in one brand of eco-friendly diapers?

In defense of the nationwide grocery store chains, they are starting to figure out that there are alot of women like me shopping their stores. Recently our local Albertson’s remodeled to compete with the new Fresh & Easy that opened across the street. I was very excited about Fresh & Easy despite the fact that I didn’t know much about it. All the brand-associated logos and fliers looked very “green” and there was a buzz around the neighborhood, however upon my first trip into the British-owned store I found that the look was very “green” but the product offering didn’t even rival our local Albertson’s. After their remodel, Albertson’s had an entire section dedicated to healthy foods, including soy products (don’t ask how much their soy yogurt cost though)! Neither store carries eco-friendly diapers, but Fresh & Easy did have special parking for “adults with young children,” and that’s more than I can say for Stater Brothers or Ralphs!

My ideal grocery store, the perfect grocery store, my Xanadu of grocery stores, would be located right around the corner from my house with special parking for “adults with small children”(Fresh & Easy), contain products that are eco-friendly for low prices including “green” diapers and perhaps (am I dreaming too big?) a branch office for my bank.  But I’m not making the decisions here…I’m just the customer.

Why We Didn’t Circumcise Our Sons January 10, 2008

In 1994 I wasn’t much concerned with that “extra” flap of skin sometimes found on the end of a penis. I was just leaving my teen years in 1994. I had seen exactly seven naked men (I hadn’t even seen my father or stepfather’s genitalia) and all were circumcised. I heard nasty rumors about uncircumcised men from my friends…none of whom had ever seen an uncircumcised penis firsthand. Men with uncircumcised penises were “dirty” and “unclean” and you could get V.D. from them! They were weird. The sex was different, not as good (though there was no real explanation for this). Then there were the stories about the foreskin growing together, debacles with zippers and hangers and, of course, the infamous story about the foreskin that wouldn’t retract around an erect penis…the trapped erect penis causing much pain…or that’s the way they told it. I believed much of this until I had a boyfriend with an uncircumcised penis. I didn’t even know that he was uncircumcised until months after we started dating. We had already had sex many times. The sex was good. We did it in the dark, like most 19 and 20 year olds. I hadn’t given him oral sex yet. There was nothing that would have indicated to me that he still had his foreskin intact. Then he told me one day, when I suggested that we have sex during the day. His parents were gone (both of us still living at home confined most of our sex to night time hours) and I wanted to take advantage of this rare moment of privacy. He soberly looked at me, and in that brief moment I thought for sure that he was going to break up with me, tell me that he had a venereal disease and/or suggest that we try some wildly perverse sexual act. He wanted to prepare me because he had had bad experiences with springing the foreskin on past girlfriends. I didn’t know what to think. I was silent for a short while, thinking about all the dangerous and scary images that arose from the rumors and stories I had heard from friends and friends of friends. Enflamed and trapped penises danced in my head. Oozing, disgusting, dangerous V.D. ridden penises taunted me. But we had been tested for venereal diseases before we had sex…together, in fact. I didn’t even notice all these months…how different could it be?

He unzipped his pants and pulled his penis out of his boxer shorts. In the light of day, there it was. Flaccid, his uncircumcised penis looked like a small elephant trunk. I imagined the ends of his foreskin strong enough to pick up objects from the ground…a pencil, a coffee mug. It definitely did not look like the penises I had known, but there, beneath the foreskin I could see the outline of a familiar shape. A friendly dome lurked there, draped by this thin layer of skin. When I saw the familiar shape of a penis head I felt safer, more relaxed. This moment, this relaxation, was more important to my future than I could have known then. With all the examination, my face scientifically scrunched, he started to get erect and we picked up right where we left off, before I knew he was uncircumcised.

The boyfriend and I didn’t last for more than a few months but the experience of seeing an uncircumcised penis stayed with me. My friends treated me like a penis guru. Because it was so uncommon for men to be uncircumcised in America, I was the only one among my friends who had ever seen an uncircumcised penis in the flesh. My friends told their friends and eventually it became typical to have girls outside my circle of friends come up to me at parties, at school, at coffee shops…shyly asking questions when the topic opened up in conversation. They acted as though my ex-boyfriend’s penis was exotic, special, unusual.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I started reading the works of Edward Said, a Palestinian-American literary theorist. His specialty was postcolonial studies and I found a connection between my ex-boyfriend’s uncircumcised penis and these postcolonial critical premises. Circumcision is a custom, a cultural practice. Here in America we talk about the medical benefits of circumcision…attempting to badly and inaccurately rationalize why a great percentage of the world does not circumcise (including Western countries) and we do. But ultimately when pressed to answer why an American parent has circumcised their child, more often than not the answer is that they prefer their children to look like their fathers and fear social stigma if they do not adhere to the norms of society. Said, in his book Orientalism (1978), talks about a process by which the Western world has, intentionally and sometimes subconsciously, undermined the customs, value and culture of the East through faulty assumptions in order to further imperialist and capitalist impulses. To make something exotic or “oriental” is to make it different from the norm, to marginalize it, categorize that practice or that something as weird, different…Other.

When we think about those who are Other or things that are Other, we often feel fear because we find ourselves in a territory that is uncomfortable, not home. Those on the fringes of a society are usually feared. Cultures that we don’t understand and are foreign to us are feared. Fear is a big part of our lives in America. While many people from different cultures come to live in America, rarely do we embrace the cultural practices of the immigrant…rather the immigrant becomes “Americanized” and this is seen as a good thing. We tend to become resentful and fearful of immigrants who retain their culture rather than adopting our American customs. It is fear that drove many at the start of the 20^th century to begin circumcising their baby boys.

The germ theories in the early 1900’s and new advances in medical technology spurred the growth of hospitals and increased the significance of the role of medical professionals. Procedures and events like births or even illnesses, otherwise handled with home remedies or overseen by specifically appointed members of society (midwives, apothecaries, local healers) were now handled by doctors, with drugs and specialized tools, in hospitals and offices. Medical care was expensive and generally the poor continued to use more homespun methods of dealing with illness, had home births and rarely went to see doctors at all. As a result, getting care from a doctor became a mark of social status. To make money, the medical world began to create a culture of fear of disease and infection, which were real threats, but perhaps were exaggerated with the hope of increasing profit. The same social forces that pushed childbirth out of the home and into the hospital helped create hysteria in the parents of baby boys. An uncircumcised penis was a symbol of the “backward” East (this idea mainly presented by an imperialist British medical community, which spread the idea to American doctors), a haven for germs and infection, whereas the circumcised penis symbolized the new Western medicine, modern science…clean, germ and infection free. Propaganda was used to further these ideas. Women and men were told to forgo their instincts and, instead, put their trust in medical professionals who “knew better.” Circumcision is yet another procedure that is unnecessary and a tool of the medical world to generate money.

As modern medicine advanced, the idea that doctors knew a person’s body better than the owner of that body became more prevalent, so much so that today we sometimes forget that the body is a relatively self-efficient organic machine, which generally needs little intervention. Enter me in my graduate school phase. After reading Derrida, Foucault, Friedan, Said, Greer, Paglia, Said, Spivak….I decided that there was no way that I would entrust, without question, my body or my mind wholeheartedly to any institution. I would question authority throughout. So when I got pregnant with our first son in the middle of the last year of graduate school, I thought long and hard (no pun intended) about the issue of circumcision.

My husband is cut. When the issue of circumcision came up it came up early in my pregnancy and my man brushed aside the notion that we would do anything different to our own child. He had never even thought about the subject. He had never even really thought about his own circumcision. I was in a strange position. Having strong feelings about questioning Western medicine’s approach to the body, but not a man with a penis myself…I didn’t even know if I had a right to push the issue. He is the dad, I thought to myself, this is his area. But the further my pregnancy progressed, the more I could feel my son move from inside my body, the more I felt that I should have a say in this decision too.

We started doing research. We talked to our friends. We took impromptu polls. Like many American men, my husband responds much better to statistics and numbers than to emotional appeals. The more we researched and talked and debated and polled, the more we became convinced that circumcision was not the way for us. Many of my own preconceived notions about circumcision were challenged during my personal investigation of the practice. During this process our friends and family members questioned our motives for resisting circumcision.

Don’t you want your son to look like his father?

After reading many horror stories about botched circumcisions I practically laughed at this question out loud. Doctors are not sculptors. As far as aesthetics go, I trust Nature to make things beautiful and doctors to help heal us when we are ill. I’ve yet to see doctors create anything that comes near the perfection of Nature. There is nothing sickening or ugly about an uncircumcised penis. The body is beautiful when it is born, in it’s many different emanations. We need to be aware of the ways in which we are conditioned and socialized. Familiarity does not always equal “normal.” And you have to ask yourself, “How did I get familiar with this ______ in the first place?” I know that when I first saw a penis in the flesh, I wasn’t exactly comfortable with it. I had to become familiar with it before that could happen. Furthermore, as my husband pointed out to me, every penis, circumcised or not, looks different from the next one. There are black penises and white penises. There are short, pale ones and fat, pink ones. Some look like the head is a mushroom, or a helmet or a cap. Also, penises change over time. A man starts out with no pubic hair with smooth skin, turns into an adult, grows hair, grows old and his skin wrinkles, his pubic hair turns white. Line up one hundred naked fathers and sons and I think you will find that it is difficult to identify who is related merely by the “look” of their penis.

Won’t he get teased in the locker room? Women won’t want to have sex with him!

Absurdity! Children can be cruel, teenagers more cruel. They will find any reason to tease if they want to tease you. As a child I was made fun of for a host of reasons that could and could not be controlled by myself, or my parents and the bullies were always searching for material. Why give bullies the material to mock my child, you ask. We will never be typical in our house. There’s a high chance that regardless of whether or not we allow our sons to be circumcised, they will be teased. We have tattoos and listen to punk rock. We are unconventional in our values and beliefs. There are many reasons. And many circumcised boys, with very traditional families, who are well-liked by classmates are also teased. In fact, the majority of people I know were teased in school, while the bullies remain in the minority. Why succumb to bullies when they are the minority? My husband did not see another man’s penis (other than his father’s as he climbed out of the shower once) until he was in high school. By then, most of these fifteen year olds were too shy and afraid to get caught looking at another young man’s genitals, straight or gay. Glancing at another person’s genitals in the high school locker room is a much worse sin than merely having an uncircumcised penis.

A circumcision is a cut by which the foreskin of the penis is removed. Cutting, by any person in any environment, incurs risks. A cut must heal. Not everyone heals the same. Scarring and infection can occur, though rarely, in circumcision. However low the risk, I reasoned with my husband and myself that if women are going to avoid our sons, if people are going to make fun of them because of the look of their penises, I’d rather that happen without having to subject them to pain and possibly life threatening infection. And there are many incidents in which newborn babies have died, become ill and/or come away from circumcision with a scarred and disfigured penis.

As for women and whether or not they would want to have sex with my uncut sons…see my anecdote about my ex-boyfriend. When I asked him once about whether or not women thought his penis was “weird” or “disgusting” he laughed. In short, most were curious and that gave him an advantage over many other men with circumcised penises. Not one woman had ever been repulsed by his penis. Surprised, yes. Repulsed, no.

Uncircumcised penises are difficult to take care of.

Whoever came up with this one is just a dunce. If you can’t wash your own genitals with water, what are you doing making decisions for a newborn baby? Additionally, infants and toddlers don’t need any kind of special care for their uncircumcised penises because their penises aren’t retractable until approximately the age of 5. Even then, the only extra care that a boy with an uncircumcised penis needs to take is to wash the area periodically to remove smegma. That’s it. Pretty simple. All you need is water and a clean washcloth. Is that difficult?

One night at a party, when I was eight months pregnant with our first son, my husband was asking his friends about their opinion on this issue. Our friend Chris’ inhibitions were lowered due to the consumption of many, many beers. He recounted the following cautionary tale to Shannon:

“So this uncut dude was like camping out in the woods all rudimentary style. He just had like his tent and some camping supplies and shit. He was waaaaaay out in the middle of the desert, like no lakes or rivers around. And he got real dirty and you know what, man? That guy’s Johnson got all infected and nasty because he couldn’t clean it properly out there in the desert.”

Uh huh. I’m sure that happened. Question: was this genius camping out in the desert without any kind of water? Without one clean piece of cloth? Excellent reason for us to subject our tiny baby to a shiny sharp-ass scalpel.

Isn’t it cleaner to have a circumcised penis?

Yes and no. We tried not to laugh at these questions, we really did.

What would be extremely clean for all human beings, and in order to avoid infections, is if we could find a way to eliminate all dark, moist, enclosed areas of the body. That’s right! How about we start with our ear holes? The vagina is next. Nostrils follow. Oh yes…the mouth last. Any dark, moist and enclosed space is a haven for germs. We do not remove our ear openings or nostrils merely because there’s a risk that we might get an infection, in fact according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ear infections in children account for more than 30 million physician office visits per year! Should we remove our ear openings? I don’t remember the last time one of my boys needed to be seen by a doctor multiple times in one year for a penis infection.

Perhaps that’s a false analogy…we need our ear holes for hearing. Alright then, does the foreskin have a purpose? It does. According to Dr. George C. Denniston, in his paper “Functions of the Foreskin”(presented to The Second International Symposium on Circumcision back in 1991) “The male foreskin has three important physiological functions that circumcision irreversibly destroys.” Dr. Denniston’s paper outlines those three important functions. First and foremost, the foreskin protects the glans of the penis while it is flaccid. It also allows for the male penis to fully elongate during erection. When the foreskin is removed, the penis glans develops another layer of dermis to protect it, since during circumcision its only line of defense was removed. Since this layer of dermis is slowly grown on top of the glans, it stands to reason that most of the growth of this dermis is during times at which the penis is flaccid. Ultimately, this limits the extent to which a penis can elongate during erection…which, in turn, can limit that man’s ability to inseminate sperm into a female partner. Furthermore, the glans is a very sensitive part of the penis. With another layer of dermis grown on top, sensitivity is decreased, which, in turn, decreases pleasure during sex. So, the foreskin protects, aids in erection and provides sensitivity (not only pleasurable sensitivity, but also protective sensitivity). Why would we then cut off the foreskin?

Many claim that circumcision helps reduce HIV/AIDS. This is true to some extent. However, most of the studies on this issue are based in developing nations where participants in the studies have little to no access to sex education or healthcare. In these places, birth control and condoms are often hard to come by and rarely used (which also accounts for the high number of pregnancies in these nations, despite the poverty and lack of resources). Circumcision will help to reduce HIV/AIDS in men who have repeated unprotected sex. If we think about this issue logically, circumcised men who use condoms correctly have about the same odds of contracting HIV/AIDS as an uncircumcised man who also correctly uses condoms. These studies focus on men who do NOT wear condoms. Worse, the studies themselves are flawed, driven by pro-circumcision advocates who are determined to prove the medical validity of mass circumcision once and for all by linking the procedure with lower HIV/AIDS rates.

The words “clean” and “cleaner” also send up a red flag for me. They are words that have been misused for propaganda by a number of institutions throughout history. The implication is that the intact penis is, of course, dirty to begin with…something like original sin. Hogwash! As my Southern Baptist great grandmother Kate would say. The bodily fluids we excrete are not “dirty” and the human body is not born flawed or unclean. In fact, at birth we are probably the most “clean” that we’ll ever be in our lifetime. The fluids excreted by the body, the semen and the smegma excreted from the sebaceous glands, have a purpose. So does menstrual blood, mucous, sweat, ear wax, saliva…and all those other icky things that come from our bodies. This desecration of the body, treating its natural state as unclean and profane, is a disservice to humanity that spawns all sorts of ills, both medical and social. To continue to believe that our bodily functions are unclean or disgusting is, at best, hearkening back to the Victorian era, a time when doctors were conning wealthy families into handing over their bodies and cash to do with what they pleased in the name of science. What the Victorian families couldn’t have known is that sometimes science can be more painful and complicated than the natural processes of our bodies.

Babies can’t even feel circumcision. They don’t remember it anyway.

Any parent of a newborn becomes attached to that particular baby’s cry almost from the moment of the first utterance. I knew my first son’s voice immediately. Something in me recognized and memorized his sound. My husband too became immediately attached to the sound of our son’s voice. So when they took him down the hall of the maternity ward at one day old to give him his first immunization shots, we jumped and winced when we heard the long sharp peal of his cry at the prick of the needle.

Now, for a moment, visualize a masked person coming at your newborn baby boy, a little infant who has had very minimal contact with the world, who only wants to eat, sleep and defecate now and then. This masked person holds a sharp shiny instrument between gloved fingers. A nurse holds his little arms and torso down as he struggles against these people who are clearly not his Mommy or Daddy. He screams out. Over and over he screams. You do not come to his aid. They apply some local anesthesia which numbs his penis…a strange and disorienting feeling. He is still screaming and you are still not there for him. Then they cut into his small little penis, pulling and stretching out the foreskin so that they can get a cleaner cut. He bleeds. They disinfect the cut and apply antibiotic. Your baby is tense with screaming now. His face has turned beet red and you can hear his calls from down the hallway. They return your baby to your arms and he is shaking, traumatized, breathing irregularly…he barely knows that he’s in your arms. It takes several hours before he returns to calm.

It remains to be seen as to whether or not newborn infants remember the pains they feel later in life. Claiming this memory loss as a good reason to move forward with a very painful procedure is just cruel and unfeeling. There are a lot of painful things that we could subject babies to, but it isn’t in our moral code to do them. Merely because an infant might not remember the pain of circumcision is hardly enough reason to go ahead and do it. But this didn’t even matter to Shannon and I. Our son was in pain just being immunized and his cry told us that it really really really really hurt bad to be stuck by a needle…let alone have a portion of his penis removed. That pretty much did it for us. When the nurses came by to ask about circumcision we emphatically said “No!” To us, the procedure of circumcision became a barbaric practice that we refused to participate in.

The circumcision decision is a highly personal one. I was scared to question the tradition that seemed so prevalent in our society at first. I didn’t want my sons to be stigmatized by society or angry with me for making a decision that would potentially negatively impact them. But once I gathered my courage and gained the support of my husband and family, it became much easier. It was a breeze once I held my sons in my arms and looked into their faces.

While there are many cultures that make male and/or female circumcision a spiritual tradition or a rite of passage, tradition and history are not enough of an excuse to blindly follow the masses. We should never turn over our bodies, or the bodies of our children, to any institution wholesale. As responsible parents we should question these institutions. Whether or not one chooses to circumcise their male child, the decision should be an informed one because it is a decision made for another human being who cannot choose for himself. I encourage every expecting mother to seek out information on circumcision, both pro and con. I am very clearly against circumcision, but there are advocates for circumcision out there and they too have a perspective to share. Making an informed decision about circumcision is a responsibility that we need to take seriously for the health and well being of our sons.