Bixi was a Hunter

Moving Is Good for the Soul

Is there a diagnosis for the horror and revulsion one can feel when confronted with physical evidence of the enormity of the debris created by one’s sprawling, uncontrollable, unmanageable life?  The sensation is accompanied by paralysis, and a tendency to lift things, consider them half-heartedly, and put them back down again.  Our move itself was relatively unplagued by this brand of disgust, even as we ran armloads of unboxed books, toys, photographs, unfiled receipts, notes with important passwords on them, extension cords, valuable electronic equipment, falling-apart furniture, and bags of spices up and down the stairs.  But now it’s scattered around me, this uncatalogued, unclassified stuff, and I can’t rid myself of it, but it brings me no pleasure.  I have taken a harsher attitude towards my various belongings in moves of late – high school cross-country t-shirt, gone! Radcliffe Rugby t-shirt, gone! theory books that only remind me how much reading I didn’t do in college – gone! – but I’ve been unable to part with two shirts from my early youth that are literally in gross, stringy tatters, and an almost never-worn butter yellow velour jacket with short sleeves is hanging unperturbed in the new closet.  And so many summer clothes that are in no way offensive, but never get worn, and same thing about pairs of pants…

The new place is nice; we’re among the treetops.  Of course, now, all I can do is wish I had the second-story view – strangely, the view on that level was greener, as we stared right at the trees, including one fir for which I’m now too high.  We also had a particularly stately, storybook-like view of the sweet little houses across the street from us, whereas now we just see rooftops and sky.  I know, it sounds better, but it isn’t, at least not right now.  I miss the pattern in the pressed tin ceiling in my old room, and notice that the ceilings are just a bit lower.  Chiefly, though, there is now no noise around me but the rattling of the hot-water pipe and the chirping of birds, which was all we wanted, and now what we have.

If moving could be good for the soul at all, it would only be insofar as it reminds me again how astonishingly wonderful my friends are.  As the going gets rougher their general good spirits take on a madcap chipper tone.  Our laughter becomes a touch tinnier but it’s more frequent.  My parents and I get along best when their visit coincides with some kind of home improvement project, when there’s manual labor involved and I’m not trying to impress or entertain them.  The same quality is evident in my dearest friends, too.  Our friendship is an intentional, desired thing, but we can draw heavily from the bank when we need to, and sometimes you can’t tell the difference between credits and debits.

The Grammarian Strikes

Over at El Rancho Deluxe My Guiding Light Twisty has decreed that any comments making use of ellipses will be held for moderation and are unlikely to be approved. Twisty hates ellipses, writing without capital letters, misspellings, and the public airing of poor grammatical constructions. Predictably, her comments section soon swarmed (if in a rather half-hearted, sluggish way) with those who suggest, not wrongly, that “grammar is oppression.” To which Twisty replies,

“Grammar as oppression?”

No! No! No! It is precisely the opposite. A treatise will follow today or tomorrow or the next, but until then: punctuation facilitates communication. It's hard enough trying to make sense of what people write on the Internet without having to watch them trail doofily off into nothingness at every turn.

 Well, this is clearly true; the Internet brims with disgustingly crappy design and incomprehensible spelling and sentence structure. Makes me shudder. And yet I would go further, to assert that it's not just on the Internet that standard English is owed respectful obedience.

But “there is no standard English, Bixi,” the masses whine, “you want to turn your own need for a reliable, unyielding universe of right and wrong into an elitist rulebook of judgement -- and you have a linguistically inaccurate and historically blind understanding of the development of the English language, to boot.”

Yeah, whatever. Grammar is a game.  And who can enjoy a sport in which, when observing foul play, the referee issues a tepid blow on her whistle, shrugs her shoulders, and says, “English is an evolving language, conventional usage says you’re both right, carry on?” That is not fun. What’s fun is the slam-dunk feeling of a conditional deployed correctly, an infinitive painstakingly reunited with itself, the adroit use of a double negative. Or even better, catching the unassuming nobility of someone else’s correct usage and sharing a high-five, or better still, reading William Safire and realizing there is an entire world of grammatical mistakes out there you are still making, and that, like with a magically unearthed unwatched episode of “Sex and the City,” you have more to discover.

It is so wrong that, for instance, “nauseous” is now defined in the dictionary as “affected with nausea” just because people have been erroneously using it in such a fashion. Dictionaries should not be populist! Other things are, like libraries, and that’s lovely. But dictionaries should hold fast as long as inhumanely possible. People are going to fuck up the language anyway, sometimes by mistake and sometimes deliberately; dictionaries shouldn’t be granting permission where they ought to be dispensing gentle but firm clarity.

And, finally, I also deeply enjoyed commenter MzNicky’s observation:

As with the wretchedly misused ellipsis, egregious lower-casing is simply passive-aggressive language abuse. Like you just can’t take the time to put your precious pinky over there on the fucking shift key already. You’re not e.e. cummings, or even bell hooks. Give me a break.

Ahhh. My day is done.

Another take on feminist urban rebounding

Apparently, the New York Times Magazine has been snooping around Catgut. Rob Walker writes,

[I]n offering a comfortable, friendly setting, Life Time [an enormous gym that offers many amenities only peripherally related to fitness] relies on a strategy that is getting quite a workout these days: bookstores, coffee shops, even Home Depot (with its various do-it-yourself workshops) are all trying to offer consumers a setting that's meant to give people a ''third place,'' aside from work and home, where they want to go. (Churches have used this term as well -- there's even a Third Place Cafe at the Crossroads Church in Southern California.) Suburban sprawl may be alienating and disconnecting, but there are any number of retail environments where you can buy a little community, or at least some sense of it; maybe Life Time is not so much a gym with amenities as an oversize Starbucks with weights.

Any desire can be turned into corporate profits, even the desire to engage in delightfully spontaneous human interaction in an ostensibly non-corporate setting. We have to be vigilant. And keep our fingernails short.

Feminist Urban Rebounding

In late August, before we moved to Jay Street, Beccah and I made a habit of wandering around our soon-to-be new neighborhood late on Sunday afternoons. Invariably, we’d end up at Vicky and Jess’s house right around dinnertime, and, invariably, they would have just finished cooking a three-course meal, and would invite us to eat with them. It was a good system, even if an entirely – I promise – subconscious one. We repeatedly made the mistake of wandering around Cambridgeport proper instead of the neighborhood that surrounded our future home, which is really Riverside, and is quite a bit shabbier than tree-lined, brightly-painted Cambridgeport – but nonetheless, our walks definitely sparked a love affair with Central Square that persists to this day.

One particular afternoon, the sun was baking the brick sidewalks, and at least one of us was wearing Beccah’s legendary Calvin Klein denim miniskirt. Our meandering took us past the Cambridge Women’s Center on Pleasant Street. We stopped outside the Women’s Center, of course, and paused to contemplate the building, glowing as it was in the languid summer sun. The painted signs that advertised its services – “housing resources,” “job listings,” etc. – filled us with sadness and nostalgia. The gorgeous, three-story building, and the bending trees in the yard along the side of the house, seemed hulking and unwieldy against the signs advertising services so much better suited, nowadays, to flat instantaneousness of the always-unsatisfying computer screen.

In Cambridge, as people who went to Harvard remember all too well, possessing physical space always means more than you think it might mean. Because land is a zero-sum commodity, its possession confers a sense of destiny, chosenness, on the possessor. You feel like landed gentry if you’ve got it. It’s stressful, in a way, just walking around, because every spare patch of scraggly grass could be used for nobler purposes and you have to think about that all the time. I was always afraid – I think many of us were – that if we actually got a Women’s Center at Harvard, we’d immediately be accused of not utilizing the space to its maximum potential, of serving too few people to justify our dominion over something as grand as the basement of a freshman dorm. And so it is with the Cambridge Women’s Center. “Justify yourself!” we reflexively think. We can get almost of all of what we need through the ubiquitous, undulating waves of wireless internet. What do we need you for anymore?
___________________

So during the winter I go to this gym often; I’ve mentioned it tangentially here quite a bit. It’s an all-women affair, and many things about the gym make me want to blog – the atmosphere of grim, unsmiling competition for scarce resources (elliptical machines, yoga mats, square feet on the exercise room floor); the hyper-perky, hyper-blonde card-swipers, whom I generally like; occasional dyke-spottings, etc. Both this year and last year I’ve known quite a few people who go to the gym, too, and since I go on a very predictable schedule, I almost never go to Healthworks without seeing someone I know. During the winter the gym is a bizarrely large presence in my life – I’m there almost every day, and a sizable percentage of the human interaction and visual field stimulus I experience each day happens there.

So, why doesn’t Healthworks become a women’s center? In fact, why doesn’t it become the Cambridge Women’s Center? It’s not inconceivable, right? Put aside for a second the skeptical part of yourself that says, “But exercise is just a patriarchal plot to make women lose weight and disappear.” Any institution, in possession of a building erected out of bricks and mortar, charging fees and requiring its members to get out of their houses and go somewhere, that also turns a profit, can only be admired. We all gather, in a manner of speaking, for two hours, nearly every day, in an age in which humans are singularly difficult to motivate to take part in civic and political life. Surely that presence can be harnessed for something beyond slimming down.

Healthworks already makes a few good-hearted stabs at being more of a community center than just a gym. There are several opportunities for the imprimatur of its members, and there could be more – there are colorful bulletin boards, with some space dedicated to volunteer opportunities and benefit marathons; members are encouraged to donate magazines of their choosing to the gym; some classes are open to community members, not just paying members. Of course, just about a million things would have to change for Healthworks to become a women’s center – a feminist women’s center, that is. First of all, I really can’t deny that Healthworks profits from and is spawn of the patriarchy; frankly, the gym’s success just proves how much time and effort women are willing to dedicate to conforming to patriarchal physical standards. The longer I think about it, the creepier it is. Somehow, we’d have to resolve that problem. Anyway, second of all, no more copies of Us Weekly or Cosmopolitan creeping out of every crevice like roaches. No more “Legally Blonde” playing on the movie channel. But – just imagine what we could have instead! NPR and Air America – whatever that is – piped into the locker room. “But I’m a Cheerleader” on the movie channel. I’d like it so much better. Duh. Whether these changes would have to be achieved by executive fiat, or whether we could have a looser, tipping-point approach that permitted Us Weekly but ensured a surfeit of Off Our Backs, could be figured out as we go along. We could have subcommittees that chose the weekly film rotation. All it requires is a little conscious application of thought, and it wouldn’t be so hard.

If only there were somewhere for us to go. But there hardly is anymore. If what we want it to get outside our dark little apartments, to pass our eyes over something pretty and unexpected, to run into someone we recognize, we had better be able to admit it, because most of the little tasks that might have drawn us out of the house, into the world, and accidentally into other people’s orbits, can be done perfectly alone. With no one to witness our small, proud undertakings, we may as well not be doing them at all.

Wednesday News Round-Up

In honor of International Blog Against Sexism Day, I decided to forgo my daily pilgrimage to the gym to stay home, drink iced mochas from 1369, order in Thai food, throw my sheets in the wash for one more anti-scabies go-around, and write you a little note. A couple short observations, with various degrees of relevance to I.B.A.S.D. –

Have you ever noticed the serious superabundance of black women judges in movies and television shows? I’ve been thinking about it lately, and last night when I happened to catch a few minutes of the silly, low-concept Ally McBeal knockoff, “Boston Legal,” I thought to myself, half-unconsciously, “I bet the judge is going to be a black woman,” and sure enough, the judge was! Either I have ESP or there’s something fishy going on. It’s pretty classic, I think – these judges are hypothetically powerful, they roll their eyes at the hotshot white male lawyer’s crazy stunts, they cluck impatiently and exhale pointedly through their nostrils – and then they get confused by the white lawyer’s ethically questionable but apparently perfectly lawful manipulations of the legal system. They’re suddenly off-kilter, held captive by white lawyer’s gross but “brilliant” power grab. The jury and the client fall for the stunts, and the judge barely escapes the courtroom with her dignity. Gee, thanks, TV. Real service you’re doing there.

Second, I was in North Carolina this past weekend, visiting my brother Edward along with the rest of my family. The cherry trees there are already in bloom, their branches swaying softly in the warm breeze, and Sunday morning we sat outside eating brunch for an hour and a half, planning my sister’s thirteenth birthday party (Hannah, in response to our suggestion that we string up a yarn spider web: “You guys are forgetting that we’re not five years old! I’m turning thirteen!” Well, I suggested a disco ball and strobe lights). Sadly, my father slipped in about one sexist comment per day, slightly hindering my ability to succumb to the pleasures of the weekend totally. My favorite, just because it’s the easiest to refute, is Dad’s choice phrase, “anti-male discrimination due to Title IX.” It makes me sad. Does he not realize what a world of sublime joy and transcendence await him as a feminist? What, exactly, is neatly taking his place in the male party line getting him? He and I could be having glorious intellectual jam sessions. Instead, we’re both terribly lonely for each other.

Maybe She's Born With It: My Obsession with Twisty Faster, vol. II

I’m still smitten, still reeling from the Twisty Faster discovery. I feel like I’ve had the religious awakening I’ve yearned for for so long. I tried to read some letters to the editor in the New York Times about a John Tierney column about women being wives or some other rot like that and I just couldn’t. I had to look away. A conversation uninformed by her rigor seemed pointless.

Was she always like this? It appears not. In my lust for all things Twisty, I discovered her blog’s previous site, and found that she used to sound younger, a little more naïve, less self-assured. She used to use disclaimers, for heaven’s sake! Some misplaced “fucks,” some over-used blog-style turns of phrase. If she can outgrow them, maybe we all can. I think I would prefer for Twisty to have sprung, fully-formed, from the nothingness, but I suppose if she had to go through growing pains, I can use them as proof that I can indeed turn into her someday.

It only makes me angry that we read (and then were encouraged to sneer at) Adrienne Rich instead of Twisty Faster for our radical feminism section of Lit 105. Look, Twisty’s not trying to tell you what to do, what movies to like, how to have sex, how to prepare your tofu. The force of her brilliance could help you do any of these things – except for how to cook tofu, Twisty seems a confirmed carnivore with little patience for substitutes of any kind – but I don’t think she’s even trying to convince you that she’s right. She just lays out certain principles, in a totally clean, uncompromising fashion. Then you can take it or leave it. Go have your “cheesy BDSM lifestyle,” says Twisty, but don’t try to get me to tell you it’s feminist. Quit your job! Stay home! See if I care. Do what you like, but don’t come crying to me for absolution.

I think this point can illuminate a conversation currently going on between Maddy and Giuleah. Giuleah is trying to get Maddy to place the titillating moniker of “bad feminist” upon her, and Maddy is refusing with all her might. Hot and heavy, right here.

 

Catgut Showdown

Yee-ha! This is fun. A Catgut showdown! Pitting Heretical Feminist Giuleah against Erratic Huntress Bixi. Tune in for the body slams, the I statements, the gentle barbs, the care we take to address each other’s points and not our personhood…

Giuleah initially referred to me and my assertions as “extremely dangerous,” and then, kindly, toned it down for republication on her own site, but still I like to think of myself as dangerous. Especially when usually people just think of me as someone who fosters others…geez, I’m glad occasionally it is recognized that I have the capacity to inflict some damage…

Anyhow. What made me “extremely dangerous” was my assertion that we just “shouldn’t do the research” that might reveal that innate differences between men and women exist. Giuleah’s sensible response was, “We can’t fall prey to the temptation to gag what we may perceive as our opposition, even when our opposition wields something as fearsome as scientific proof that women and men are innately different. The impulse to censor all experimentation on the topic will only hamstring us feminists, just as Creationsts’ refusal to acknowledge evolution relegates them to the sidelines of the debate about human nature.”

I mean, this is all true. But here’s my thought: if you’re an evolutionary psychologist, it’s your job to do this research. But why? Why did you pick the field if you didn’t want to come up with evolutionary excuses for bad behavior and social injustice? Because that’s essentially what the field is. Instead of elucidating the fine and subtle ways in which people think, change, decide, prioritize, desire, and assess themselves, it is blunt and reductive. It reads us in the ways we don’t want to be read and know that we shouldn’t be read. Although I am not personally acquainted with any professional evo-psychos, as far as I know, I do know a bunch of people who love the theories - and in general the people who feel a strong affinity to such theories do so because the theories justify their own world view, one that may aspire half-heartedly towards social equality but doesn’t get too bent out of shape if the world doesn’t get there because, after all, equality is just not in our nature.

Secondly, why is gender still considered a necessary and primary axis of inquiry for experimentation and theorization like this? Why not some other characteristic? Do we really need to know if infant girls and infant boys have different spatial reasoning capacities? If the point is to assess and draw pictures of differing brains, why not just look at brains themselves instead of first divvying up characteristics of girl brains and boy brains and making comparisons from there? If you know something about this topic and you know of a reason for this, by all means, educate me.

Science does not cut an inevitable, objective path. Ideally, the results of experimentation are objective and not politically motivated; what kind of research gets funded never is, and can’t be. Sure, there are times when drawing attention to gendered differences serves a vital public function – like in prescription drug trials, or when researching the effects of war on a citizenry. But if all you’re doing is trying to identify gendered differences for the sake of gendered differences…well, I’m not sure I see a ton of value in that.

Hey, this is kind of like constitutional law – at least according to my incredibly sketchy understanding of it (Dusty, want to weigh in?). If it can be proven that there is a legitimate state interest in discriminating against some protected class of people, then that discrimination can be considered legal. Strict scrutiny and all that. But if there is no legitimate state interest, then you better check your discrimination at the door.

As for scientists “chuckling joyfully behind a shield of objectivity,” as Giuleah assures me they are not – well, maybe that was just my dad. Although I’ve gotten distinctly similar vibes from a whole raft of New York Times articles over the years.

Thanks, Jules! This has been fun. I’m ready for round two.

Mothers, Baby Cells, and Young Female Rocket Scientists

    This morning, on NPR:

    “Babies’ Cells Linger, May Protect Mothers,” reports Robert Krulwich. Apparently, scientists at Tufts have discovered, in a teaspoon of a mother’s blood, dozens or even hundreds of cells belonging to the fetuses she has carried. What are they doing there? The first hypothesis was “not the nicest idea,” says Krulwich – scientists surmised that, since immune diseases are more common in women and men, the fetal cells may account for the disparity, actively harming women’s health. But recently, Tufts scientists have proposed a different theory, one Krulwich referred to as the “Good Fetal Cell Hypothesis,” in which case the cells remain in the mother “not to hurt her but to protect, defend, and repair her for the rest of her life.”
    Now, listen to this language: “And that’s a more attractive idea,” Krulwich says. The scientists agree with him. “It’s such a personal thing,” said Kirby Johnson of Tufts. “It does touch the heartstrings of even the most hard-nosed research scientist.”
    Because “they all have mothers!” Krulwich interjects.
    “They all have mothers,” Johnson accedes.

    It’s refreshing to hear scientists – those supposed fonts of objectivity – freely admit their biases, and proclaim what hypothesis they’re rooting for. (And how great it is to hear them admit that pregnant women get the benefits of exposure to fetal cells even the pregnancy is ended – through abortion or miscarriage – before coming to term!) Of course, it’s no accident that the Robert Krulwich and the scientists had no trouble admitting their alliances around this experiment in particular – everyone wants to do something good for selfless, long-suffering mom, after all. Motherhood – its deprivations and its slim rewards – is something we all love to feel bad about. We believe it’s our birthright to demand too much from mothers and motherhood in general; of course we’d love to find out we’ve been given a free ride on a Mother’s Day gift this year, paying back our debt in ways we couldn’t even imagine.
    If only scientists were always this forthright. We all know there’s a good outcome and a bad outcome to much of scientific experimentation, particularly of the biologically-anthropological, or cognitively-psychological, sort. I’m thinking specifically of the experiments that aim to identify inborn differences between men and women. When experimental results offer women the shorter straw – or just a different-shaped straw – you can almost hear the scientists chuckling joyfully behind their unassailable shield of “objectivity.” Let no one can refute their claims, lest the skeptic be accused of hysteria and irrationality. But let’s be honest here. We know what we want – a society in which determinations of a person’s worth and potential are not even maybe, perhaps, sometimes guessed at on the basis of their gender – and we know some experimental results help further our arguments for the cause and some don’t. Does that mean don’t do the research? Um, yes…but failing that, admit the social consequences and contexts of your work, and don’t pretend we should all take the news like heartless automatons. “We can’t be led astray by our own desire for it [the “Good Fetal Cell Hypothesis”] to be true,” says Johnson. True, true. We may want women to be just as quick and nimble as men at tests of spatial or mathematical facility, but we can’t have it that way if the results don’t bear out our political commitments. But we can proclaim, loudly, that experiments of that sort are bogus and unnecessary and of questionnable ethical standing anyway, and that we’ll redouble our efforts to support women in fields in which they are under-represented.

    Later this morning, my own mother sent my brothers and me the following email: “Meine Allerliebsten, a report I heard on NPR this morning is prompting me to write this email to you. Scientists were talking about the fact that some foetal cells remain in the mother for decades after a child is born! So you didn’t just leave me completely after I gave birth to you (which is what I have always secretly suspected!). No wonder I feel so close to you and sometimes experience your ups and downs as if they were my own... We’re planning visits. When dad and I go out in the morning, it’s not pitch dark anymore.” And now, as it nears quitting time, it’s not dark, either. Thank heaven for mothers, always the first to alert you to the waning of winter.

Stow Your Tray Tables, and Put Your Seats in the Upright Position

As I just returned to Cambridge from the Mayan Riviera, which boasts an ambient temperature of eighty-five degrees and consistent sunshine (even when raining! amazing!), the turquoise Caribbean Sea, and my parents at hand to pay for dinner every night, I would like you to be very proud of me when I say that I am actually coping quite well to being back. It’s snowy and grey, but I have my (Jen’s) cherry-red down jacket (with hood!), mittens that Beccah saved from the Goodwill pile, and new Christmas wool socks to keep me warm, and I wander the wet streets of Cambridgeport merrily. I know you were worried, but you don’t need to be.

On the plane ride back – actually, every international plane flight I’ve taken in the past few years – I’ve engaged in some soul-searching, or rather tactical reasoning, at one particular inflight moment. It’s when I read SkyMall and wonder if I will ever be sophisticated enough to own a combination cappuccino maker and water-saving showerhead. Just kidding. (I ripped that straight from Alison Bechdel. Points to whomever can identify the cartoon in particular – I’ll give you a hint, it’s what one character plans to give to two other characters on the occasion of their commitment ceremony.) Actually, it’s when the flight attendant comes over the loudspeaker and announces that customs and immigration forms will be handed out shortly, immigration forms, one per person, customs forms, one per family.

This pronouncement starts me thinking – what counts as a family? Is this one of those times, like with recognizing pornography, when no one can articulate a precise definition, but everyone knows what it is when they see it? Or if you act with enough conviction, will customs officials recognize you and your lot as a family too? On this plane flight, I got a clue about what rules they use – “Same last name, same address,” said the stewardess as she handed customs forms to one confused traveling pair. When traveling with my own bio-family-of-origin, I sit comfortably amid an easily, immediately recognizable family unit. Mother and father, and four children who look alike. It’s obvious who’s our head of household, and who belongs with us. Okay. But just for kicks, let’s speculate for a moment that I someday end up married to, cough, a lady. Let’s additionally speculate that DOMA has not yet been overturned by that point. The Commonwealth will recognize me and my spouse and attendant children as a family, but the federal government will not. As I have learned very well working where I work, what the faceless, nameless, enormous edifice of “government” will or will not recognize often boils down to what an individual human being, a clerk or data-processor or human resources professional or insurance agent or the person behind the car rental counter, thinks makes sense, and is willing to work with. And so what about this instance? If we push our luggage carts through customs looking determined and confident but innocent, will the official just wave us through? Or will the blank look shift to cognitive discord, and will he, or she, say hold on now, who’s who here, and you better fill out this extra form, because I’m not sure you quite fit…

There’s something insidious and telling about the general inability on the part of US Customs, and many other such agencies and organizations, to define what a family is, or at least the seemingly deliberate vagueness. Its inability to be defined is part of what defines it (one might call that constitutive ambiguity, but I’m not a lit concentrator anymore). One could possibly set many different thresholds for counting as a family – same parents, same blood, growing up in the same home, similar social security numbers, passports all hidden in the same place, etc. For some families, the kind that have a mom and dad and all genetically-related children who grew up together and all share one last name, it doesn’t matter what gauntlet gets thrown down – they’re going to pass every test, because the tests are written around them as the gold standard. The tests are made for them to pass and to weed out loving and legitimate (or embittered and hateful, but still very legitimate) families that happen to be defined by other means. This sense of entitlement, the sense that misrecognition is their mistake, not yours, is intoxicating, and I'm not sure you ever realize how much so unless you know what it's like to fear it being taken away.

It’s analogous to legal marriage. One of the big reasons that marriage represents so much more than the legal rights it offers, and certainly so much more than a civil union offers, is that marriage is more than the sum of its concrete and applicable legal definitions. Whenever a new right, benefit, or responsibility is identified, it will be defined in terms of the currently existing laws of marriage, not the other way around. If you’re married, it doesn’t matter what new legal issue arises, because it is presumed that the new legal issue will be structured to fit around and accommodate the parameters of your marriage.

I didn’t intend for this to be such a pro-marriage post – deprivilege all coupled statuses, I say – but still. Food for thought, I hope.

___________

Here I sit, alone in my apartment, roommates gone for New Year’s. My bio-family-of-origin is in Baltimore, pouring over the photos from our vacation, listening to the CD’s they gave each other for Christmas, and eating lunch at 4pm. They are a household, a family, it is so terribly clear. Why, oh why, how to explain it? It is possible that my anxiety about what constitutes a family links to what constitutes a household – it is more than an apartment for which you sign a yearlong lease. It is a house you live in for years and years and years, where your children’s high school friends know they can swing by for a cup of tea when they’re visiting their parents, and will always know the house phone number by heart. Where you have a Christmas tree, take phone messages for one another, and there’s always milk in the fridge and some kind of baked good for teatime. Where more than just bills and magazines get delivered through the post, where those wretched, but ultimately, I see now, redeeming end-of-year family newsletters are sent. Where you just show up and ring the doorbell, because someone will always be home.

As I, in fits and starts, grow up, my roommates, and the valiant citizens and expatriates of Central Square nation, serve as the best family of destination I could ever ask for. While I wait for them to come home, I put on Potvin’s music exchange party CD, write a blog, and think about where home is. Hello, Edward. I do miss you. May I keep going on Douglas family vacations forever and ever.

You, Maureen Dowd, May Be in a Muddle, But We Are Brave and Undeceived

My Saturday afternoon was ticking along just fine, when out of the fat stack of New York Times sections flopped the Sunday magazine, and I saw that Maureen Dowd would be telling me and the rest of New York Times-reading America something about the state of feminism in our country. “Burning your bra or padding it. Demanding ‘Ms.’ or flaunting ‘Mrs.’ Splitting the check or letting him pay. Playing it straight or playing hard to get” – the cover hinted at the gravity and profound intractability of the modern girl’s dilemma. Of course, I read the article right away.

Is it comforting or terrifying that this feels like little more than a flashback to when I was in high school and Time magazine dared to ask us, in breathless wonderment at the possibility, “Is Feminism Dead?” alongside a photo of the nervy and emaciated Calista Flockhart (then the popular Ally McBeal) on the cover? Luckily this time I have the force of Catgut behind me, and a forum in which to make my case. Here, my message to Maureen Dowd:

Betraying feminism, like betraying Catholicism, has always been an incredibly sexy sport. Like organized religion, feminism offers a set of rules that, no matter what their broader aim, result along the way in increased individual exertion (pay the check! carry the heavy bag of groceries! squint at the map! go into the basement with a flashlight and check the fuse box in the middle of winter!) and the maintenance of ideological purity of mind. “Tsk-tsk” feminism is there waiting for us when we come home from a night out tomcatting, wringing her hands at what looks to be the loss of another member of the fold. “I know I’m being a bad feminist,” we whine to her in response, “but…” I was too tired, I was too busy, I really like to cook and he just loves to grill, these four-inch stiletto heels aren’t really that uncomfortable, and anyways, I really like him… When being sexy is linked to being bad – and we all know it’s more fun when it is – and when feminism operates as a chiding moral system, then there’s not much room for a feminist to indulge in the playfulness, imaginativeness, and experimentation with gender, power, and role-play that feminism itself can offer her. Ms. Dowd and her cabal see feminism as a scorecard that they have to remind themselves to check off rather than an interpretive aid or an agent of freedom. Or perhaps, since I’m having so much fun with metaphors, rather than like a religion or a check-list, for Ms. Dowd feminism is like a diet or an exercise regimen – something that, when closely adhered to, might result self-improvement, but if you get right down to it, is repetitive, unnatural, requiring of tremendous effort, and not that much fun.

If anything, the floundering (as Ms. Dowd sees it) of feminism in America has far less to do, I think, with women tiring of exerting themselves, their identities, and their maiden surnames and more to do with the triumph of American consumerism. Feminism is not just a philosophy about the relation between the sexes but a philosophy of engagement with the world that can entail, among other things, a thoughtfulness towards the trappings of the material world and a shedding of what is unnecessary, be it a brassiere or a three-inch thick pile of slaughtered trees in the form of a fashion magazine, or a car or the deodorant aisle at CVS. Feminism is like environmentalism in that it triumphs that things that are hard are good for you, which is perhaps why fuck-me feminism, with its greedy embrace of consumption, demand, and desire, and its emphatic rejection of reflection or critical thinking, seems like the most user-friendly brand of feminism currently on the market.

If feminism is not these things - religion, scorecard, exercise regimen - then what is it? It's hard for me to articulate, for what I experience as feminism is completely foreign to Maureen Dowd's experience of what's supposedly the same thing. Maybe I'm just lucky because I'm not in my mid-fifties, a famed New York Times columnist, and looking for a man - maybe that's why feminism feels liberating, rather than like set of rules that are failing to deliver, to me. Or maybe Maureen Dowd should learn to read and think against the grain.