The Radical Housewife

What are you still doing here??

2011-08-31T10:12:00.001-05:00

You need to be HERE: http://theradicalhousewife.com/

And now for even stranger things...

2011-07-28T12:26:00.003-05:00

I've been blogging as The Radical Housewife for a long time--so long that my first platform was on MySpace (remember MySpace? The hottest spot on teh interwebz during the Dubya years? Me neither). Things are a bit more complex nowadays, both online and in real life. Hell, my firstborn is in middle school, checking his chin and pits daily for signs of impending pubescence. It's time for a radical upgrade.

Watch this space, fans! The New & Improved Radical Housewife Blog is coming your way!

Strange things are afoot in Minneapolis

2011-07-27T13:07:00.008-05:00

Why happening, Prince? Have we offended you? Consider:

Neal Krasnoff has closed up most of his blog, leaving behind only four posts: an "apology" for offending anyone with his SlutWalk rantings, his resignation from local Democratic Party leadership, and two posts from 2008 about.....ME! Read and chuckle along.

http://loyalopposition.wordpress.com/

The smartest reporter in Minneapolis, Andy Birkey, was named as a co-defendant today in the defamation suit being brought by Bradlee "gays should be jailed and/or executed" Dean against Rachel Maddow and MSNBC. Birkey is the writer who first exposed the links between Dean and local pols, including Tom Emmer and Michele Bachmann. MSNBC calls the suit "baseless." Duh. I hope the whole mess makes Birkey extremely famous. He deserves it.

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/07/bradlee_dean_suing_andy_birkey_minnesota_independent_rachel_maddow_msnbc.php

Did you ever wonder what kind of feminist you are? Well, a couple of Minneapolis women have figured it out for us (thank goodness!). I guess this was first written last May, but since I get all my information from Amanda Marcotte's Twitter feed, I didn't hear about it until yesterday. Now, I enjoy witty stereotyping as much as the next Angry Feminist, but these bitches put me in the Stay at Home Feminist category with Our Lady of GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow. If I see these two munching tots at Grumpy's, I will douse their filmy Forever 21 dresses with non-organic ketchup, may Betty Friedan forgive me.

http://www.philolzophy.com/2011/05/the-different-types-of-feminists/

FUN FACT! My kids have only two days left of summer camp. Things in Minneapolis are only going to get stranger!

Amy

2011-07-23T15:58:00.008-05:00

She had me at "what kind of fuckery is this? You made me miss the Slick Rick gig."*

I have always been drawn to women who balance precariously on the thin line between brilliant and crazy--women like Courtney, Judy, Sylvia. Women who embarrass themselves regularly. Women who say things that no one wants to hear. Women who are (to borrow a phrase from Eve Ensler) emotional creatures, yet somehow remain firmly in control of considerable intellectual and artistic power.

But a line that thin can be very hard to straddle. Like everyone who was knocked out by Back to Black, I hoped Amy could wobble her way through, making more brilliant songs for us like "Love is a Losing Game." NPR played a snippet of that song this afternoon and I started to cry.

RIP.

*"Me & Mr Jones," 2006. Watch Amy sing it live here.

What a male ally looks like

2011-07-20T13:10:00.007-05:00

While I continue to sift through the fallout from my July 18 post, in which I asked male-identified folk to speak out to end rape culture, I invite my readers to enjoy a video featuring a fella I've admired for a very long time. In this particular clip, MY Senator (I love saying that) reminds Focus on the Family of the importance of getting your facts...erm, straight.

This is relevant to our rape culture discussion because when FoF saw the words "nuclear family" in a research study, they assumed it meant only opposite-gendered parents and used it to support their bogus claims. They were wrong. Similarly, when certain members of our population learned that a woman was seen drinking a cocktail with the man she would later accuse of rape (as Jamie Leigh Jones, who has worked with Sen. Franken, did), they assumed she deserved what happened to her. They were wrong, too.

To our male allies: a challenge

2011-07-18T14:25:00.024-05:00

Two years ago, I participated in a MPRIG-sponsored panel on sexual violence during the University of Minnesota's Welcome Week. To their great credit, a large number of earnest 18-year-olds showed up to discuss an issue far less appealing than learning the forehand frisbee throw. During both the morning and the afternoon sessions, I heard a question that I remember from my own college days, asked the bravest straight male in the room: "This is really upsetting. Are women actually assuming I'm a perpetrator just because I have a penis?"

I'm sorry if it feels that way, I said. But don't blame women. Blame guys like Neal Krasnoff, author of the blog The Loyal Opposition.

Now I'm not saying that Neal is a perp any more than those college guys were, but I do know that he has a mean streak a mile wide, and he vents said meanness on his blog. Normally, I'm of the mind to let creeps like him be. Why send him the web traffic? But today, the circumstances are different than when he called me a "matriarchic supremacist" back in 2008. I can handle personal trashing, but when I read his new post about SlutWalk Minneapolis (called "If she dresses like a slut, and acts like a slut, is she really a feminist?"), I felt a response was necessary.

Last week I wrote a post about frustration with rape culture that was borderline misandrous, and I was called out as such by a secret fan of mine who linked to it on a Modern Radio discussion forum. Since Jawknee also mentioned that I am "great" and "super smart," I know that he must have seen my point: that rape culture curdles the souls of even sensible women from time to time. And Krasnoff's piece on SlutWalk Minneapolis is as soul-curdling a bit of rape apologia as I have read in a long time. Set your TRIGGER WARNING alarm, then read him here:

“Slutwalk” ideology is not about rape, as the protestors claim. It is about an attempt to abrogate the moral agency of women. It posits that women can behave as they wish with no consequences for their acts. ...dressing up in a club miniskirt, dancing and grinding with alcohol-fueled, hypersexualized 20-something men at a downtown club, then going back to their apartment with them to presumably discuss the Brothers Karamazov. Or travelling without niqab in Taliban controlled territory. Or holding raw meat out in front of a starving dog.

[caption below a photo of a woman, her bra visible, holding a "no means no sign"] Does NO still mean NO if this gorgeous Asian slutwalker does everything to say "f--- me"?

I hear quite a bit from straight men about how they aren't sure that feminism is for them, while at the same time bemoaning the guilty until proved innocent phenom mentioned above. Well, guess what? It's anti-feminist jerks like Krasnoff who are making your lives difficult, fellas. What on earth could make anyone feel comfortable comparing a woman to a slab of "raw meat"? Sexism. It's not confined to small-time weirdos on the internet, either. It's everywhere.

Help us end it, guys. We can't do it without your help. We need you to speak out against this warped view of the world. You are not dogs, and we are not meat. We are all human beings who deserve respect, safety, and freedom.

What's the saddest thing about a piece of writing like this? Neal Krasnoff knows rape survivors. He's friends with them, he works with them, he even has some in his own family. He doesn't realize this, though, because no survivor would ever share her truth with a guy him. Yet he takes to his blog and condemns these very women for failing to apply "reasonable judgment and common sense." I wonder how that goes over with the women in his life who were molested by family members and/or raped by their boyfriends, let alone the ones who were victimized after a night on the town. They have my compassion and pity. Neal? Not so much.

To those who would accuse me of misandry

2011-07-13T15:18:00.003-05:00

...I give you one of my favorite scenes from "Some Like it Hot."

Trigger warning.

2011-07-11T12:12:00.007-05:00

The bumper sticker announces that "if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." I'd like to append that thought. For women, if we're not occasionally homicidal, we're not fucking human.

I am having a Valerie Solanas moment. Known to most as the paranoid schizophrenic who attempted to kill Andy Warhol, thus earning a biopic portrayal by Lili Taylor (in action above), Solanas is often trotted out as an example of misandry in the feminist movement by those who seek to undermine our credibility. Solanas wrote in 1968's The SCUM Manifesto that "civic-minded, responsible" women had an obligation to "destroy the male sex." Countless women who would like equal pay and safety everywhere they walk STILL refuse to identify as feminists, because if they did so, they'd be seen as "anti-male."

I love men. I married a man, probably the finest person of any gender I've ever known. My firstborn is a beautiful boy for whom I would do anything, including give up my life if necessary. That goes for my sweet nephew as well.

But god almighty, there are times when I hate MEN so deeply I shake. I hate them. To be a thinking woman in rape culture is to know suffering so intense it is almost unendurable. It's not post-traumatic stress, it's PRE-traumatic, formed the moment that a male doctor pulled me out of my unconscious mother's body (as was typical in 1971), took a look between my legs and declared "IT'S A GIRL!"

I have never experienced sexual violence, but this is can be attributed more to dumb luck than anything else--not the unfashionable clothes I wore, the confrontational stance I took in the public, the self-defense class I aced, the well-lit streets I have walked. I am lucky, not "better."

Women with their hearts open live in both fear and pain. Women I know have been raped in their homes, in their dorm rooms, in their workplaces. They have been raped by their fathers, their brothers, their partners, their bosses. They were raped as girls, and they were raped as women. The circumstances around the crimes were different, but the attackers had WHAT in common?

If you said they were MEN, you're right.

If you're going to argue with me about women abusers, like Nancy Garrido, and how terrible it is to wish anyone dead, even a monster like her husband Philip, you need to go elsewhere. Go to People.com and examine photos of the Duchess of Cambridge's hats. Order something from Etsy. Flame Mark Dayton on the Strib.com, I don't care.

Allow me to experience, then move forward from, this rage.

FFI:

SlutWalk Minneapolis: http://slutwalkminneapolis.tumblr.com/

Rape & Sexual Abuse Center (Uptown Minneapolis): http://www.neighborhoodinvolve.org/

Aurora Center (U of M, Twin Cities Campus): http://www1.umn.edu/aurora/

RAINN-The Rape, Incest & Abuse National Network: http://www.rainn.org/

Abortion rights and the failure of "choice"

2011-07-07T15:10:00.008-05:00

What follows is an excerpt from the original draft of The Radical Housewife. Before I slice it away, I thought I'd share it, in hopes you'll post me your thoughts on the matter. Note the second-to-last paragraph, in which I remark upon the twisted logic of what "pro-life" means in the Palinverse. It was disturbing when I wrote it, but it's even worse now that Bristol claims her virginity was "stolen" while she was drunk (for a discussion on why Bristol may have resisted calling her experience rape, read this piece at the Daily Beast). As if we needed another reminder of the power of words....

The late, great Shirley Chisholm wrote the following in her autobiography Unbought & Unbossed, addressing men on her staff who tried to convince her to avoid speaking out in support of abortion rights:

“Women are dying every day, did you know that? They're being butchered and maimed. No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women will have them; they always have and always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while poor women have to go to quacks? Why don't we talk about real problems instead of phony ones?”

Rep. Chisholm wrote these words in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, when dying from a botched abortion was a very real threat to women across the country, particularly poor women of color. Two generations later, not a lot has changed. Accessing an abortion is easy for well-heeled urban women, the vast majority of whom (as it was in 1970) are white.

In Shirley Chisholm’s day, the term “pro-choice” was used to remind people of the personal matter of the procedure. The “choice” to have the abortion should be the woman’s, centering the debate on the right to individual autonomy, a concept that Republicans claim to embrace. Senator John Kerry declared in a 2004 Presidential debate that having an abortion “is a woman’s choice. It’s between a woman, God, and her doctor.” Oh, if it were only that easy, John!

God and doctors are often in very short supply when they are needed the most. If you get accidentally knocked up in Wyoming or Mississippi, you better pray as hard as you can, because your states have no provider at all. In fact, a 2008 report funded by the Guttmacher Institute announced that 87 percent of counties in the United States do not have an abortion provider. That’s a big enough number to put in all caps: EIGHTY-SEVEN PERCENT! That makes getting an abortion seem less like a “choice” and more like a forced road trip.

Or a financial ordeal. The Hyde Amendment, passed in 1977 and reauthorized every year since, bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. Rep. Chisholm worried that poor women would have to go to quacks; she didn’t realize that when they won the right access abortions from a trained doctor, they’d have to surrender their rent checks. The Hyde Amendment, predictably, reinforces the idea that wealthy women have the “choice,” but poor women don’t. And lest we forget, the poorest women are the ones who lack access to contraceptive information and services anyway, dammit!

When I demonstrated with over one million other people on the U.S. Capitol Mall in 2004, the event was called the March for Women’s Lives, which made some mainstream feminists gripe. Wasn’t it usually called the March for Choice? Not so fast, declared a coalition of poverty activists and health care groups for women of color. The word “choice” obscures the “real problems” that Rep. Chisholm talked about: racism, poverty, and other forms of pervasive inequality.

I no longer identify as pro-choice. How can I, when Sarah Palin congratulates herself for the “choice” to carry her Down’s Syndrome child to term? Bringing a special needs baby into a tightly-knit, financially stable family that has access to health care and other forms of support is no big whoop, except for the baby in question—Trig Palin is one hell of a lucky kid. So is Tripp Johnston, the child carried to term by Trig’s seventeen-year-old sister. All four of them appeared on a celebrity tabloid in the early days of 2010, declaring “we’re so glad we chose life!” That’s that sneaky, slippery power of language again! Can you imagine a headline that read “we’re so glad we didn’t have abortions!” I can’t either.

Remember chapter one? I don’t deserve a medal for surviving life with the colicky, special needs baby I had in the year 2000. Accidents of fortune gave me everything I needed, and my child reaped the benefits. I don’t care if Sarah and Bristol Palin keep on breeding; that’s their beeswax, not mine. But under Gov. Palin’s leadership, Alaska’s rates of domestic violence and sexual assault were twice the national average. When Palin ran for office in 2006, she announced (in so many words) that if her then 14-year-old were raped, she wouldn’t allow the girl to have an abortion—a very likely scenario, considering Palin’s vocal support for parental notification laws. In yet another nimble linguistic twist, Palin averred that the issue was one of “parents’ rights.” Welcome to Palinverse, where a pre-born fetus had greater bodily autonomy than a post-born teen.

Feminists of any/every Wave, listen up: “choice” is over. It’s done. NO MORE.

What the shutdown means for our children.

2011-07-06T20:05:00.008-05:00

Happily, we spent our 4th of July weekend in the great state of Wisconsin, where booze is sold on Sundays and the lottery tickets flow freely! Whew!

In all seriousness, please read this article from Minnesota Public Radio News about how shutting down child care subsidies is already hurting impoverished youngsters, the workers who care for them, and the parents who count on these state subsidies to keep the jobs that are supposed to help them out of poverty. And a job is a path to economic stability far more reliable than the lottery--or at least it used to be. Now? All bets are off.

#mnshutdown

2011-07-01T07:37:00.008-05:00

My state's government shut down today. 20,000 employees were pink-slipped, important social services have been cut off, and perhaps most importantly for a family with two small children who are traveling to Grandma & Grandpa's house for fireworks this weekend, all rest stops are closed. Why? An impasse between the Republican-controlled legislature and our Democratic governor over our state budget. Apparently it's news to the GOP that corporations and churches don't fix potholes. As Robin Marty just tweeted: "this is what happens when you elect a bunch of people to run the government who don't like government."

All credit to the fabulous Gov. Dayton, who is holding the line against "increasing taxes on the top 2% will make companies relocate to Sioux Falls" baloney (confidential to Kurt Zellers: I've seen Sioux Falls. Neither Target, 3M nor Medtronic is leaving for Sioux Falls). The constant refrain from conservatives is that our state needs to live within its means, yet they don't have a problem with funding the construction of luxury boxes in a new Vikings stadium. Seriously?

Image via Crooks and Liars

And of course, you know what the MN GOP prioritized this session, instead of job creation, health care, taxes and whatnot: MARRIAGE! Yes, marriage! Ensuring that state marriage law is hetero-only is apparently more important than, y'know, funding domestic violence shelters! I'll leave it to someone else to research the cruel, cruel irony of all of those legally married Minnesota heteros treating their children and one another like garbage. I'm too sickened to think about, it, let alone Google the statistics that would leave me in a sweaty, crying heap on the floor.

Summer vacation just got longer, hotter, and scarier.

Guest post at MOMocrats!

2011-06-29T08:01:00.007-05:00

It is my great pleasure to announce that I have a guest post today on MOMocrats, a site dedicated to "raising the next generation blue." My fussier readers needn't point out my many beefs with the Democratic Party--we can all agree that liberal moms and kids are a good thing, yes? And let's be honest, MOM-berals just doesn't sound as good.

As is appropriate for a site whose goal is an army of progressive children, my piece is about the day my kids offended and appalled Michele Bachmann, then just a lowly state Senator. It's all true, I assure you. Also true is the story of the future Presidential candidate squatting in the bushes at an LGBT rights rally back in April 2005:

The full story on that 2005 rally, including more pictures, can be found in the Internet Way Back Machine.

Now it's up to you, MOM-gressives. Deck out your cuties in their best Planned Parenthood t-shirts and get out there. It's our duty to make candidate Bachmann so overwhelmed with queasiness that she vomits all over Glenn Beck at a campaign stop. Wouldn't that be delightful??

Are you happy?

2011-06-27T12:51:00.009-05:00

I discovered the following print, designed by Alex Koplin and David Meiklejohn, in some of my random Tumblr travels today.

As someone with a temperament that can be described, charitably, as "sensitive" (and uncharitably, "pissy") I have done my time in therapy, and this poster boils down just about everything I've ever learned there. The fact that I still go testifies to how difficult the process of changing something really is.

Today, the day after Twin Cities Pride, it's also a useful guide for how to approach the miserable process of political change. The question might be reframed as "are you happy with current state of affairs?" A generation ago, it would have been quite bizarre to see major corporations throwing out Pride-branded swag to the crowds along Hennepin Avenue. Today, my kids have all the rainbow Best Buy and Macy's crap they'll ever need.

(I have no idea why my son looks like that. I wish I could say he's emulating the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, who support social justice revolutions of the kind represented at Pride, but in truth, I think he's just pretending to hold up a stagecoach.)

Anyway.

Many years ago, someone (drag queens?) somewhere (the Stonewall Inn?), felt moved to change something (harassment of homosexuals?), and made a change. Today we are all reaping the benefits of their hard work. Why, there's even talk on Slate that the fight for marriage equality might spark in renewed interest in the Equal Rights Amendment!

Change takes courage, perseverance, and energy. It's hard. It stinks. I get a headache just thinking of all that change requires. But the flow chart asks: "do you want to be happy (with the current state of affairs)?" and honesty compels me to reply "YES."

After all, happiness is worth it!

I'm number two! ...or maybe three...

2011-06-23T11:47:00.007-05:00

I’m number two!

I mean that figuratively, for the weeks of the Circle of Moms Top 25 Political Mom Blogs contest coincided with what is always the crappiest (ha) time of year: the dead zone between the last days of school and the first days of afternoon camp.

My children, who thrive on predictability almost as much as I do, go batshit crazy for ten days every June. For an avowed pessimist, it’s odd that I’m never prepared for this. As school winds down early in the month, I find myself irrationally anticipating sleeping in late, heading out to Lake Harriet for a swim, and doing all the “fun” things that we’re not able to do because we have a school schedule keeping us on the straight and narrow. On May 31, I should be calling the pharmacy to bump up all of our meds, but I don’t until it’s past Father’s Day and the damage has been done, to our psyches and bedroom walls alike.

Indeed, the whole mess has taken a large toll on my (admittedly lame) career as a Political Mom, as I found myself utterly unable to juggle personal and professional responsibilities. Not only do I feel like a steaming pile of number two, I have the stamina of an actual two-year-old. Several months ago, I reflected on how my shy temperament complicates my life, in a piece called “The Trials of an Introverted Activist” that is finally seeing print in the current issue of the Minnesota Women’s Press. Sadly, the piece did little to exorcise the anxious, Piglet-like aspects of my personality; I remain a Very Small Animal, unconvinced of my ability to remain steadfast against the two Heffalumps screaming “I HATE YOU!” to me and to each other all day long. I just hope they care enough to publish The Radical Housewife after I’m dead, for that looks to be my smartest publishing strategy right now.

But things are looking up. I fell in love with Jersey Shore. Camp started rough (it’s never good to be phoned on the first day), but it did start. And did I mention that for a moment, I was a real number two?

Let’s back up a bit, to Monday, June 13, when the Circle of Moms contest officially closed, with the conservative Political Mommentator in first, followed by Veronica Arreola’s Viva La Feminista, Gina Crosley-Corcoran’s The Feminist Breeder, and yours truly, The Radical Housewife. It was suggested that it was really too bad that the Mommentator’s legions voted out of their concern, expressed by the Tator’s husband, that the “feminazi” Crosley-Corcoran might win instead.

Yeah, he went there.

Women on the right, I beg you: please do not tolerate the use of this slur. Ever. Do not allow the men in your lives to defend you by calling other women “bitches.” DON’T DO IT. Disagree with us about politics all you want. Call us loony, call us dumb, call us late for dinner if you want, but don’t put up with sexist stereotypes. They’re bad karma in addition to bad form. Circle of Moms agreed and disqualified Mommentator from the contest.

Then, inexplicably, Crosley-Corcoran posted on the TFB Facebook page that she was dropped from the contest herself, for somehow not being “political” enough. I don’t think they read her older posts, about raising her kids gender-neutral or her take on feminism and pornography, instead focusing on her recent posts about attachment parenting her VBAC newborn Jolene. What’s not political about that? In my confusion, I realized that with TFB out I was literally NUMBER TWO. Whoa.

But I don't want to be, either literally or figuratively. All cliches aside, I am honored just being in the company of some of my favorite online writers, including the two mentioned above, as well as Joanne Bamberger, Katie Allison Granju, Gloria Feldt, the collectives behind MOMocrats and Moms Rising, and many others whose writing I would not have discovered without this peculiar competition. Feminist mom writers are one hell of a group. I'm very happy to be in their company, and I'm grateful to all of my readers who buzzed over to the CoM site for the votes. Feminists are one hell of a group.

A group that includes Crosley-Corcoran, of course! In good news, it turned out that she wasn't dropped from the contest after all. In bad news, it's because she has a psycho stalker. * Isn't that just the way with moms? A little good, a lot of bad, all in the service of the toughest job you'll ever love and sometimes really hate.

*though I would like concrete proof that the stalker isn't a RWNJ. I'm conspiracy-minded like that.

"There is no power like my pretty power...."

2011-06-20T12:31:00.025-05:00

Who said it? "There is no power like my pretty power...there is no power like my UGLY UGLY POWER!"*

The answer appears after this exclusive (!) excerpt from The Radical Housewife, in which I expound at length upon just one of the tensions existing between Second and Third Wave feminists--BEAUTY. And the lack thereof.

Like it or loathe it, a woman’s appearance means something. Whether you wear heels or Doc Martens, no “choice” can be made independently in a consumer culture. Free will does not exist. Such was the revelation I found in my college media studies curriculum after Professor John Schott handed us syllabi that would challenge our deeply held beliefs about soap operas, Madonna videos and Cover Girl commercials. Symbolic language? The object and the objectified? Semiotics? Jacques Derrida?!! What the fuck??

Let us cool our Prada boots while we return to the thoughts that began our chapter, a consideration of the second wave’s flaws. Betty Friedan opposed lesbian leadership in NOW for many reasons, one of which is how they looked. Many lesbians of the time didn’t sex up their drag the way Marlene Dietrich did—they took off their bras, let down their hair, and rubbed off their makeup. I see no problem with this, but remember: I was born in 1971. My cultural touchstones were the rough and tumble kiddos on Sesame Street, not prim maidens like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. Once upon a time the sight of a woman in pants was so transgressive as to inspire revulsion: not because the pants were ugly by themselves, but because the act itself was so outrageous as to be unfathomable. Susan B. Anthony stopped wearing bloomers when she sensed they were distracting people from her suffragist message.

Her words didn’t matter as much as her clothing. Sound familiar?

Over time, the pants really did get ugly, and someone heard something from someone about the burning of a bra. The fact that no bras were harmed during the 1968 Miss America protest is a truth so persistently rejected that the story remains a long entry in the debunking website Snopes.com, right up there with alligators in the Manhattan sewers and death by Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola. The message was clear: FEMINISTS BURN BRAS. According to Newtonian physics, without the support of sturdy underwire, perky tits will eventually droop. According to the marketing department at Maidenform and the pages of Playboy, girls with droopy tits are gross. Therefore, feminists are gross. QED.

When I ask around for nominations for Best Feminist in America, no one names Friedan, who inspired the Second Wave, or Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who kick-started the first. Almost every single person will name Gloria Steinem. A fine feminist, to be sure: a powerful activist, writer, speaker, and thinker. But you remember her before all others because she is very, very pretty.

Much of the Third Wave has consisted of studiously breaking down this feminists-are-ugly stereotype, and not just because heterosexual feminist women were getting desperate for a lay. Women of the Second Wave who rejected consumer culture were brave in numbers. The times were a-changin’, and plenty of men were breaking down long-cherished beliefs themselves—resisting the draft and militarism, embracing androgynous hair and clothing, recognizing their part in perpetuating discrimination.

Reagan’s election in 1980 and the defeat of the ERA in 1982 brought all the marching to a grinding halt. The communal spirit of the Second Wave fragmented. Reaganites declared a new era of rugged individualism, of freedom. Not the freedom that comes from constitutionally-enshrined gender equality, though; this freedom was that of the lone cowboy riding into town with nothing but a knapsack and a gun, free to blast his way to prosperity in pursuit of the American Dream. There were no cowgirls in Reagan’s America. His pal Schlafly made sure they were all at home, boiling diapers over an open fire.

Second Wavers in Reaganland soon realized that opposing the forces of capitalism required a lot of difficult emotional work. To delve inward for clarity is much more challenging than, say, purchasing a finely woven shirt that telegraphs that confidence for you. If self-acceptance is available at Macy’s, in a Chanel bottle of beveled glass, then to the mall we shall go! Sitting in the lotus position is for suckers.

I call myself a radical in every sense, but even I gave into temptation and bought a bottle of Oil of Olay at Target. I stopped using it not because I suddenly realized that true beauty comes from within, but because the acids meant to slough off my aging (read: ugly) skin made my face break out in a rash, and rashes are not only uncomfortable, they’re ugly.

Betty Friedan suggested that liberal feminism, in which changes are made by working within the system, would result in greater gains for women. Which is more effective—the pretty power, or the ugly power? How to you obtain the power held by men—by taking it, or by convincing them to give it to you? Do you attract more flies (button or zip) with the sweetness of honey or the sourness of vinegar? Am I really the power player in my marriage because my husband’s salary pays for the Secret Powder Fresh deodorant and rounded-tip Tampax that he will never use?

Oh my god……I can’t believe I use DEODORANT. I want to smell pretty. So much for being radical.

*Come on, could that REALLY have been said by anyone other than Courtney "Pretty on the Inside" Love? She may not understand sobriety, child-rearing, or anything else about human relationships, but she sure as hell knows about power, baby!

This picture should be worth your vote.

2011-06-13T18:37:00.006-05:00

I haven't posted as much in this space, but anyone who knows me well could guess that I don't give a damn about weiners (I'm a vegetarian) or Rep. Anthony Weiner (at least as long as Sen. David "I paid hookers to diaper me" Vitter remains in office). But I am not above goofing off with the carnivores' Wurstteller from Gasthof zur Gemutlichkeit to make you laugh....and ask you for one more vote in the Circle of Moms' Top 25 Political Mom Bloggers contest.

Click on the icon below to cast one more vote before 5 pm PST tonight. I need to stay in the top five, people! Ask yourself: would the Jenny Erikson pose with two slimy German sausages to get your vote? The holier-than-thou nut who writes Little Bytes News? I think not! For only feminist moms know how to have this much fun. Check out Elliott's expression if you don't believe me.

Summer vacation has begun.

2011-06-09T09:09:00.006-05:00

Since rising at six this morning, I have already endured a prolonged glowering match with the son, a screaming tantrum from the daughter, and a pitying glance from the husband as he dashed off for work so fast he could have been in warp drive. Currently, the time is 9:15. AM.

It's going to be a long three months.

Credit: Anne Taintor, patron saint of moms all year long

The evolution of an ally

2011-06-06T07:57:00.014-05:00

An excerpt from The Radical Housewife, chapter four, shared in honor of the 12th anniversary today of my civil marriage with a fella who is not, fortunately, named Mattias Schwarz:

....neither youth nor hormones last forever. Somewhere around our ten year college reunion, everyone’s attention shifted from desire to domesticity, so it seemed natural that marriage would dominate our discussion of gay rights in the 21^st century.

Unlike the college come-outs and come-ons, Kelly and Gretchen came out by moving in next door. No one could misunderstand two women, a toddler boy, and a hyperactive mixed-breed terrier moving a truck full of furniture into a tidy Minneapolis bungalow—they were a family. For once, identifying as gay had nothing at all to do with sex. Hell, they were new parents, so we knew from experience that they weren’t doin' it! Instead, the story of their lives together was a lesson for Matt and me on a topic far less arousing: good old-fashioned civil rights.

The battle for same-sex marriage first made Minnesota headlines in July 2002, when our friendly, toque-wearing northern neighbors on the Ontario Superior Court ruled that Canada’s current marriage laws were discriminatory. Gay marriage was legal right in our backyard. “We could get to Thunder Bay in eight hours!” I exulted.

Kelly and Gretchen glanced at each other warily. “I don’t think so,” Gretchen said.

“But I want to buy you a melon baller,” I said. “Or a Jell-O mold in the shape of a giant strawberry.”

Kelly crinkled her nose with distaste. “Is that the kind of stuff you two got?” I told her that Matt and I opposed the idea of a wedding registry on principle. I went further and explained that so much of the modern American wedding constituted re-enacting traditions put in place when women were considered property to be handed from man to man in a ritual financial exchange. When Kelly regained consciousness, I returned to the subject of her Canadian marriage.

“Go ahead and buy us a melon baller if you want to,” Gretchen said. “Just don’t make us drive to Thunder Bay for it.” Her stern face told us that the discussion was over.

I cursed myself for weeks for being such a fucking idiot. The Happy Hetero just told two sensible adults that all of their problems would be fixed after ten minutes in an Ontario courtroom! I thought they’d be freed from discrimination once they signed a provincial paper, produced in a country not their own, that would mean less than nothing to the border guards they would encounter on their return trip, guards who would still log them as two single persons: one an American citizen, one a Permanent Resident. Nothing would change.

Gretchen, unlike Kelly, was not born in the United States. When we first got to know one another, she was studying madly for her citizenship exams, a series of quizzes on Constitutional trivia that I might have passed if I were still a 17-year-old student in AP American Government, but would definitely flunk today. “A test she wouldn’t have to take if I’d been a man,” Kelly grumbled.

Kelly and Gretchen didn't intend to offer me more than friendship, but they inadvertently gave me something nearly as valuable: an education in discrimination that this naïve straight woman sorely needed. For years, I thought that being an ally was about getting vogueing invites, ending the use of “gay” as a catch-all slur, and dropping my heterosexual assumptions. Through Gretchen and Kelly, I learned of the pervasive inequality that exists in state and federal law, the very legal system that Gretchen understood better than the average straight guy who was too busy scratching his balls to vote.

Kelly and I were both good American girls, born in the land of the free, rewarded with Social Security Cards and easily obtained passports. Had I fallen for a lederhosen-wearing Bavarian named Matthias Schwarz, instead of a professor’s brat born within a mile of UC-Berkeley, his road to citizenship would be assured. Kelly, on the other hand, had no such opportunity. She could not legally sponsor the citizenship of the foreign-born person she loved. “If we’re not legally married, as Kelly put it, "our relationship doesn’t exist.”

FFI:

Equal Marriage NOW

Minnesotans United for all Families

This makes me so happy.

2011-06-02T08:05:00.008-05:00

I love this picture almost as I love these three beautiful, smart, amazing women. They followed my May 31 post's instructions to the letter and purchased the Reverb issue of Bitch at True Colors Bookstore in sunny south Minneapolis. They supported feminist media, feminist retailers, and feminist writers all at once! I bet they even went home and entered a vote for their favorite feminist mommyblogger (me, of course). Thanks to these three sweeties, I am content--a not insignificant achievement in the frenzied final days of the school year. Thanks, friends!

Daughters of the '90s, mothers to no one

2011-05-31T10:48:00.013-05:00

Ah, the 1990s! I may be been a child in the '70s and endured adolescence in the '80s, but the '90s is when I really grew up. I spent the first twenty years of my life being what was expected of me: a fine student, an exemplary daughter, a sidekick to my dominant friends. If an unsettling rage occasionally bubbled to the surface, it was my fault for not playing my role appropriately. Girls weren't angry--girls were good. I identified strongly with fucked-up boy-men like Holden Caulfield and Paul Westerberg, though my cis-gendered hetero-normative temperament prevented me from imagining myself as anything but a grunge god's loyal girlfriend. I had no seething female role models save Sylvia Plath, whose example was not one I cared to follow.

Enter Courtney!

Now, one could make a convincing argument that like Plath, Courtney Love isn't a role model worth following, but in the early nineties, it seemed that the world might be ready to embrace a loud, smart, cranky, bitchy, flawed, contradictory, kickass feminist. Those were heady times! I loved (and still love) the riot grrrls with all my heart, but be honest: isn't Kathleen Hanna a little too perfect? She's the punk Anne Welles, while Courtney is Neely O'Hara, who, despite her many flaws, always says what she thinks and is the Doll you root for in the end. In the '90s, I finally learned to appreciate honesty over perfection. It doesn't make you popular--hell, it might not make you happy! But it's better than the alternative, to "fake it so real [you are] beyond fake," as Courtney warned. I remain flawed, but I'm no longer a liar, to myself or to anyone else.

I'm very excited that years of following Courtney's career have led to my first piece for what is probably the smartest magazine in the country, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. In "Nobody's Mother: Abandonment as Art in the Courtney Love Family Tree," I look at memoirs written by Courtney's mother, Linda Carroll, and grandmother, Paula Fox, to trace four generations of women who've been either unable or unwilling to care for their firstborns, all daughters. The article is not available online, so please support feminist media and yours truly by picking up the REVERB themed issue at your favorite local indie bookstore (True Colors here in south Minneapolis) or, failing that, your big box Barnes & Noble near Ms., Curve, and Bust. Your best bet? Getting a subscription for only $25. This feminist truth-teller thanks you.

Postscript: I've just learned that there are THREE different covers for the issue, featuring red, blue & black vinyl records. I got the black one in the mail, so I'm off to True Colors for the other two. My granddaughters, of the '30s, '40s, '50s and beyond, need to have them all!

Vote for your favorite feminist mom: ME!

2011-05-25T07:35:00.004-05:00

I am your favorite, right? You'd at least put me in your top ten, beside Viva La Feminista, PunditMom, Gloria Feldt, The Feminist Breeder, MOMocrats and MomsRising, right? Right??

Forgive my fragility--since the Pre-Rapture "Marriage" Debacle and the Post-Rapture Northside Twister I've been just a mess of nerves. Minnesota needs some love 'n light right now, and there's no better way for you to show it than to vote for THE RADICAL HOUSEWIFE as one of Circle of Moms' Top 25 Political Mom Blogs. Vote every 24 hours to ensure I beat my evil twin Jenny Erikson.

The Radical Housewife

Votes:

ABOUT THIS BLOG	The Radical Housewife is dedicated to revolutionizing American family values one dirty diaper at a time. A writer, at-home parent, and activist serving her fifth term as president of Minnesota NOW, she makes righteous indignation fun.
URL	http://www.theradicalhousewife.com/
ADDED	2 days ago
AUTHOR	Shannon Drury
	Visit The Radical Housewife

Raptured!

2011-05-23T13:36:00.015-05:00

It must have happened early, during my regularly scheduled Saturday afternoon benders*, for when I passed out...er, fell asleep that night, all was perfectly normal in the land of Minnesota Nice. When I woke on Sunday morning, it was to a totally different world. It wasn't heaven, and it wasn't hell (though I was, as the warning goes, fresh out of beer). It was almost as if I was in....

***POST-RAPTURE BIZARRO WORLD***

...not my home state, which as I declare as loudly as possible to to everyone who'll listen (and to many more who won't) gave the world Hubert Fuckin' Humphrey! A man who stated in 1948 that he wanted to his party and his country to"walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of civil rights." Who said "liberalism, above all, means emancipation--emancipation from one's fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination, from poverty." Music to my ears!

Late Saturday night, the Minnesota Legislature took the final step needed to place a so-called marriage amendment on our 2012 ballot. Same-sex marriage is already illegal in Minnesota, and the law has survived the "activist courts" which conservatives so deeply fear. The point of the amendment is to keep the Minnesota "Family" Council's coffers full and to perpetuate damaging stereotypes about LGBT folks and their children. Katherine Kersten, self-appointed Admiral of the Midwestern Morality Police, can write all she wants about how she and her cronies aren't bigots, but you and I know better--we read the testimony of Jennifer Roback Morse before the Minnesota Senate Judiciary committee, in which she declared that it is "brutality" for a child to be raised by same-gender parents. Smells like bigotry to me!

On Sunday, I tried to attend the Harvey Milk Rally in Loring Park (I was scheduled to speak on behalf of Minnesota NOW), but I made Matt turn the car around when tornado sirens began to wail. A mile or so north of the park, one person was killed, several others seriously wounded by the tornado that touched down, wreaking havoc in one of Minneapolis' most impoverished neighborhoods. The tornado that hit my part of town in 2009, by contrast, hurt no one at all and only made life messy, not dangerous--middle class, mostly white folk are never given a police curfew.

Post-rapture Monday? I got to hear that Tim Pawlenty is running for President because he's the one who can give Americans the "truth." This from a guy who cooked Minnesota's books and squeezed Minneapolis dry for eight years so he could tell the "truth" that he didn't raise taxes. I spent his two terms kicking myself for thinking that no one could be a worse representative of Minnesota governance than Jesse Ventura. T-Paw makes The Body look like ...well, Hubert Fuckin' Humphrey!

I don't know much about Harold Camping's theology. Tell me--do you think this what hell is supposed to look like for mild-mannered Midwestern atheists?

*don't be silly! This photo is by a winner of Regretsy's rapture photo contest. Though as a diehard Neely O'Hara fan, this is definitely the way I wanna go.

The letter that the Pioneer Press won't print

2011-05-20T08:42:00.005-05:00

Mike Burbach, Editor: mburbach@pioneerpress.com

Mike Bass, Sports Editor: mbass@pioneerpress.com

As a reader unfamiliar with Joe Soucheray’s style, I cannot tell whether his May 19, 2011 column was meant to skewer the unenlightened readers who suggested he was somehow un-masculine for protesting the dangers of modern football, or whether he aimed to prove his macho bona fides via said mockery. Whatever the intentions of Soucheray himself, the message made by the print headline was clear: “No. I’m still a man, not a woman. It’s football that changed.”

I’m a writer as well as a feminist activist—I am not interested in policing language. Yet I am keenly aware of the power that words have, particularly in the hands of a major newspaper, to perpetuate stereotypes that are at best, irritating, and at worst, dangerous. Soucheray’s column and accompanying headline reinforce the message that for a presumably heterosexual man, there is no worse offense than to be called a woman.

Thanks to a half-century of civil rights progress, it is no longer considered acceptable to use race, ethnicity, or perceived sexual orientation as a slur. No editor would approve a headline that read “No. I’m still a man, not a faggot,” for fear of significant (and richly deserved) backlash. Why is gender still, after all these years, fair game?

Rigid gender stereotypes hurt everyone, from men who are prevented from developing emotional relationships with their children to women who are stymied by sexism in the workplace. As a newspaper that hopes to survive in the 21^st century, the writers and editors of the Pioneer Press would be wise to make decisions that better reflect our changing times.

Shannon Drury

President, Minnesota NOW

Feminist link love!

2011-05-17T08:33:00.006-05:00

I love the blog Gender Across Borders, so I am both thrilled and humbled that my Mother's Day post was included in their May 2-15 roundup of feminist links from around the world. THE WORLD! Alrite!

Sisterhood is global, sisterhood is powerful, sisterhood is awesome. Thanks, GAB!

What do Minnesota family values look like?

2011-05-12T08:40:00.000-05:00

As my blog title says, I'm a housewife. I've been married since June 6, 1999, and I've loved every minute. Hell, I would have wed Matt the moment we met, in November 1997. I just love, LOVE, love marriage! I'm also a stay-at-home mom to two kids. Despite my litany of complaints about them, I am madly in love with them, too. I really, really love kids!

Look at me! I am a PARAGON of good old fashioned American family values. You are not going to find a doll in Minnesota who wrings her skinny plastic wrists and frets about "the children" more than me.

The Minnesota "Family" Council, Minnesota Majority, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and like-minded groups are of the opinion that our state needs constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Why? Let's read the testimony of Jennifer Morse, a NOMmie who gave this testimony to the Minnesota Senate Judiciary Committee on May 5, 2011:

The essential public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. We can see the importance of this purpose by taking the perspective of the child: What is owed to the child? ....The child’s rights to care and relationship must be supported pro-actively, before harm is done, for those rights to be protected at all.....The same sex partner of a biological parent is never the other biological parent. Rather than attaching children to their biological parents, same sex marriage is the vehicle that separates children from a parent.

In other words, Morse thinks that if you substitute a second Barbie for the Ken in the photo above, you suddenly have two harmed children. Unattached children. Damaged children. HURT children. And NOM's friends, the Minnesota Republican Party, believes that married moms like me, as a rule, will vote in droves to protect these vulnerable sweeties, even if they're made of plastic.

Seriously?

Unfortunately, yes. Barring some last minute dose of reality, Minnesota's 2012 ballot will allow voters to enshrine discrimination into our state's constitution, all in the name of protecting "the children." NOMmers want a culture war, and they're gonna get one, but it won't turn out the way they think.

Not in Minnesota, not ANYWHERE.

Attention "ladies": Roe v. Wade as interpreted by Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen

2011-05-11T08:52:00.006-05:00

The clip below, from a hearing in the Minnesota State Legislature on Friday, May 6, has already made its way around the Minnesota blogosphere, but it deserves national attention. It needs to go big: crazy nasty-ass honey badger big, "leave Britney alone!" big, Rebecca Black big, bed intruder big. How else to respond to the implication, made by state representative Glenn Gruenhagen, that the seven men on the Burger Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973 just to get in women's pants??!

WHAT REP. GRUENHAGEN SAYS:
"Let me just remind you, especially ladies, it was seven men that made abortion legal. Not seven women. Now what's the significance of that? Men, a certain percentage, have developed a perverted view of women and what abortion tells men is they can use women and lose them. OK? Use and lose them and run from their responsibility... Again I plead with you, ladies, help men support legislation that teaches men to accept their responsibility when conceiving with a woman. Don't support government legislation and programs that tell men they can impregnate women and run away from their responsibilities. Please ladies, think about what's been done to you in the last 40 to 50 years."

WHAT 'LADIES' HEAR:
"Forget what you may have heard in those 'womyn's studies' classes of yours--those seven men on the Supreme Court in 1973 were horny, twisted perverts. Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion to score with loose Washington chicks, not to guarantee your right to medical privacy. Thurgood Marshall, your civil rights hero? Voted on Roe to realize his dream of boinking every last clerk in the office, not to give you any civil rights of your own. Ladies, men are dirty hornballs who need to fuck everything that moves! Only abortion law keeps us in line! Heaven knows that YOU don't want sex. Justice Elena Kagan, a celibate spinster, would NEVER have voted in favor of a woman's sexual agency. I know she'll vote like a proper lady when the time comes."

An urgent appeal to Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak

2011-05-10T08:19:00.010-05:00

If every child in Minneapolis were as safe, well-fed, healthy, and appropriately educated as these two little girls, I would support your plan for a new football stadium.

But they're not. These two girls are the lucky ones.

Consider this: the poverty rate in Minneapolis is 22.6 percent. Hennepin County admits that, within its borders, "on any given night....more than 3000 men, women, children and young adults are homeless." Minneapolis Public Schools expects a budget deficit of at least $30 million, which will have devastating effects on the district's already abysmal achievement gap. Recent reports that half of mortgages in the Twin Cities are underwater should tell you that the need for social services will only rise, not lessen, in the decade to come.

Mayor Rybak, please get your priorities in order. The children of Minneapolis need you as their advocate--the Vikings don't.

Just say NO to public funding for a football stadium.

My motherhood transformation, or: on Mother's Day and every day, I can see your broken heart.

2011-05-08T12:03:00.007-05:00

How did I become the Radical Housewife?

[from the Fall 2006 issue of the Minnesota NOW Times]

I was born feminist and progressive, raised in the Free to Be...You and Me era by a couple of baby boomers who, while not quite flower children, took to heart the political upheavals of the age. In our house, all people were equal and everyone had unlimited potential. So I took my college education and became an at-home parent! I could do anything, be anything, handle anything. Only when my son Elliott was born in 2000 did I realize how wrong I was.

Elliott was not just a colicky baby. He was a screaming, hollering, kicking, squalling-until-he-ran-out-of-air-and-turned-purple baby. For hours at a time my sweet, wanted, loved, adorable baby boy would wail inconsolably, while every cell in my body went into meltdown. I crashed, mentally and physically. No one told me that parenting would be this horribly fucking hard.

Talking about the difficulties and sorrows of raising children, colicky or no, is a cultural taboo; perhaps it's a Darwinian trick that keeps us humans breeding. I love my son very much. But what could have happened if my advantages hadn't been there? What if I had been single? Addicted? Seventeen? A rape victim? Homeless? Uninsured? All of the above?

I would have snapped. And who would suffer the consequences? Me, or my kid?

You've all seen the stories on the news of parents booked on charged of grievous assaults on their children. You see their grainy mugshots and think: how could anyone do that to their child?

I knew.

I knew how such a horrible thing could happen even though I had nearly nothing in common with the sad adults on the news. I had things that many of them did not: a safe, monogamous relationship (with a man, so I had access to his health benefits in addition to countless other hetero perks); a middle class lifestyle that allowed me to be home with my child; good health; a college education; a support network and friends and family; and many more. In short, I had everything I needed to get out of my desperate situation.

I dialed my nurse practitioner, my mother and my husband for help, and I got it. But millions of other mothers and children in crisis didn't, most through no fault of their own.

If the children are our future, we need to take care of everyone, TODAY. Even if you don't have biological children, you have an investment in this too. Who repairs your car's brakes? Who prepares your restaurant meal? Who's answering your 911 call? Someone's child. We all have an interest in being sure that child was raised with love, compassion, and dignity. Every person's future depends on it.

I joined Minnesota NOW because our multi-issue organization addresses the inequalities that remain obstacles to women and families today. A popular quote says that to be a parent is to walk with your heart on the outside of your body. My motherhood experience has proved that true and then some--now I can see the hearts outside of everyone, and most of them are broken. And that, my friends, has made me radical.

Answer: Yes, the good ones WILL be reserved for the rich.

2011-05-05T10:01:00.006-05:00

(provided by the United States House of Representatives, May 4, 2011)

Question:

No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women have always had them; they always have and they always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while the poor women go to quacks?

(provided by the late Shirley Chisholm, herself a member of the U.S. House from her election in 1969 until her retirement in 1983)

Things I do for my favorite writer (and the children--don't forget the children)

2011-05-04T12:11:00.013-05:00

I love Gene Weingarten, but who doesn't? Sure, he's a Pulitzer Prize winner, but how many of those stiffs can write prose that makes you weep one week and wet your pants laughing the next? Nick Kristof and Maureen Dowd can eat their hearts out! If I could write with one percent of Weingarten's intelligence and verve, I'd be happy. Also, his Facebook profile picture looks like this:

Why am I thinking of Weingarten today? Because today, I had the opportunity to learn from what he taught me. Just a few minutes ago, I completed my purchase at my southside Cub Foods (yes, the one that blew up--it's safe now) and headed out to my car to load the bags in the trunk. Parked next to me was a jet-black Toyota Tacoma with small child in the back seat. On a sunny day. A little child, no older than 9-10 months old, tops. LOCKED IN A BLACK CAR ON A VERY SUNNY DAY.

!!!!

If you haven't yet, please read the story that earned Weingarten his second Pulitzer, called "Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?" Obligatory trigger warning: if you are a parent, this story will make you cry. If you are not a parent, it will still seriously bum you out. After you blow through a box of tissues, tell me what YOU would have done if you were me in the parking lot of Cub Foods at high noon.

I didn't hesitate. I called 911. Moments later an angry white man in his late-fifties started waving at me frantically from the garden center tent propped up in the Cub parking lot. He shouted, as he gathered up his flower purchases, that he'd been watching the little girl the whole time. I didn't get off the phone. The man, clearly well-to-do and unused to ruffians calling the police on him, came out to the car, unbuckled the girl, and carried her into the garden shop on his hip, mumbling all the while.

I told the operator that the guy was yelling at me for calling him in. "Well, I'm with you," the operator said. "That's a pretty young kid to be left in a car." The operator said that a squad car would come out for a chat with the guy, whom I described. When I completed the call and the man finished his transaction, I approached him. I explained that I (a loyal Gene Weingarten fan) felt that I had to err on the side of caution.

"Well, you didn't need to call the cops," the man snarled. "You could have asked, hey, is anyone in the garden center watching this kid? And you would have known she was fine."

"Sorry," I answered. "When I see a baby locked in a hot car, I call the police."

"You made a judgment call," he snapped. "And you did it without knowing any of the facts. I was right here the whole time."

"No, YOU made the judgment call," I yelled, furious. "You made the call to leave a kid in the car when you could have just as easily picked her up and taken her in! Look how easy that was! But this isn't about you, it's about her. I DID IT FOR HER."

I wish I could say I stormed off in righteous indignation, but remember, I am a Minnesota native who lives in fear of stepping into someone else's beeswax and who quivers when talked to harshly by a stranger. I'm writing this to justify my actions to myself, to my community, and to my writerly idol, should he have a Google Alert on his name.

Did you read Weingarten's story? What would YOU do?

"Who would want to die for a document that excludes them categorically?"

2011-05-02T10:38:00.011-05:00

News that would have given me great delight nine and half years ago is leaving me queasy and unsettled today: Bin Laden is dead, but so are 1500 US soldiers who fought in Afghanistan, and 4500 US soldiers in Iraq. I've been trying to uncover estimates on the numbers of civilians in those countries who have died from the War on Terror, but the process is giving me a headache that feels like I've had a spike drilled in the back of my skull. Each site I find has a different methodology, a different time frame, and a different number--though all are high. Let's just round the civilian deaths up to "tens of thousands." Do you feel queasy, too?

How about tearful? Heartbroken? At a complete and utter loss? These emotions and more surged through me in successive waves as I read a story in today's MinnPost about a local father testifying against the insanely awful Prop 8-style marriage amendment that's about to be passed my home state's legislature. This father, Jeff Wilfarht, speaks on behalf of his son, Cpl. Andrew Wilfarht, because Andrew cannot--he died serving in Afghanistan two months ago. Andrew was gay, a fact his father said bothered no one in his unit. Here's the photo of Andrew that accompanied the story:

Today, instead of contemplating the death of the jerk who triggered this whole war in the first place, Jeff Wilfarht is hoping to testify in the Minnesota House Civil Affairs Committee to talk some sense into the legislators who think discrimination ought be be part of the constitution. Wilfarht shared with MinnPost's Doug Grow the message he wants all legislators to hear, including the following:

Our son was gay. If you recoil from that, I will not attempt to persuade you otherwise. He nonetheless made the ultimate sacrifice--gay or not, he was your brother in arms. All soldiers regardless of sexuality bleed red.

Being gay, he was part of a minority group. Recall that as a Republic, our constitution is about keeping a majority from oppressing a minority.

The language of this amendment does not intend to enshrine a right....this language is exclusionary to a minority. That type of language should not, must not, be what soldiers die for, especially on foreign soil. Who would want to die for a document that excludes them categorically?

So I ask you, on behalf of a dead soldier, on behalf of a dead soldier's father: will you join me in speaking up vocally and loudly about this matter?

My queasiness turned into tears that have abated, somewhat, since I've written this post. Today is not a happy day, people. But I know what will be:

The tireless activists of Join the Impact--Twin Cities are organizing a march and rally on Sunday May 22 in solidarity with groups across the country to observe Harvey Milk Day. Your truly, the Radical Housewife herself, will speak at the 2 pm rally on behalf of Minnesota NOW (officially) and parents like Jeff Wilfarht and me who love their children and want a better world for them (unofficially). PLEASE join us, either in Minneapolis or elsewhere, to speak up vocally and loudly for justice, and hopefully, peace.

Thank you.

The newest Minnesota GOP attack

2011-04-27T12:09:00.011-05:00

First they came after my womb:

Anti-abortion rights bills advance in Minnesota Legislature

Nine bills introduced this session to curtail abortion rights

Then they came after my friends:

Minnesota Republicans offer constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage

DFLers ding GOP for social issue ahead of budget shortfall

Now they want.....MY SON??

From an action alert issued by the PACER Center, a nonprofit organization that provides education, support and advocacy for Minnesota children with disabilities:

Senator John Pederson (SD 15—St Cloud and surrounding communities) has introduced SF 1291. This bill repeals, or eliminates most of the sections of Minnesota law that tell schools and districts how to serve students with disabilities. In addition to the 54 sections of Minnesota law eliminated, the bill also removes 28 parts of special education rules that give further guidance to schools and districts. It would repeal most Minnesota special education law and rule, which provide needed protections and exceed Federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) law. This bill, if enacted, would cause delays in service for children with disabilities, increase misunderstanding and complaints about special education services, and strip 50 years of protections from Minnesota’s special education system.

I don't think "jaw-clenching," "tooth-cracking," or even "vision-blackening" comes close to describing the level of rage I feel right now.

Feminist families have more fun!

2011-04-26T11:47:00.008-05:00

If you didn't know that already, check out this short video, made by the kind folks at The Uptake to make plain the differences between the two groups that gather at the St. Paul Planned Parenthood on Good Friday every year.

Spending the holiday at Planned Parenthood is something of a family tradition, as I wrote last year for MPR News, in a commentary called "A Clash of Family Values outside Highland Park Clinic." Appropriately enough, the photo that introduces the clip is of MY FAMILY! I'm surrounded by my father, my son, my daughter, my nephew, and my niece. My adorable nephew, Aidan, is the cutie at the end of the clip who very excitedly asks the camera operator if he's going to be in the newspaper. The internet is better! we tell him! Wooooo!

But my bio-fam is not the only one that comes out on Good Friday. My extended feminist family was also there in great numbers. Sarah Johnston, Hamline student and MN NOW's fantastic office intern, speaks eloquently at :58, and longtime MN NOW activists Lee Janisch and Linda Green speak at 2:12. Below is a photo of my adoptive mama Barbra, my new big sister Kriss, and a feminist who would make a FABULOUS representative from Minnesota's 8th Congressional District, Sergeant Daniel Fanning.

THIS is what family values look like!

The 2011 MN NOW State Conference, in photos

2011-04-19T09:55:00.006-05:00

Originally posted on MN Feminists Speak Out!, the blog of Minnesota NOW

As a writer by profession, words rarely fail me, yet here I am, grasping for how to summarize one of the best weekends I've enjoyed in recent memory. That should give you an idea of how inspiring, thought-provoking, and uproarious Minnesota NOW’s 40th anniversary conference was! I’ll have to let these photos speak for me. All were taken by our Legislative Coordinator Jessica Trites Rolle.

The opening address was delivered by Sen. Al Franken (as we at MN NOW like to say, “first on the agenda, first in our hearts!”). Sen. Franken reiterated his commitment to fighting for equality in the Senate.
Katie Stack, star of MTV’s “No Easy Decision,” talked about her participation in the show, and how the experience transformed her from a mild-mannered college student to a reproductive rights crusader!

At a panel on intergenerational feminism, Ami Wazlawik wisely rejected a 3rd, 4th or 5th Wave label and advised all to call her “AWESOME” instead. Gloria Steinem and Rebecca Walker could not be reached for comment.

It was my great honor to present Barbra Peterson with the award for 2011 Feminist of the Year. Our Vice President is a tireless champion for equality, whether she’s hobnobbing with Senators or delivering calves on her farm in rural Sandstone.

It was also a pleasure to recognize Mary Ann Gaspar, the beating heart of Minnesota NOW, for her nearly 15 years as our Office Coordinator. Gina Schedivy, the conference organizer, holds the Charlotte Streibel Long Distance Runner Award, given to those who have demonstrated long term commitment to feminist action. Mary Ann’s work is behind the scenes, often unlauded or unrecognized, but without her we’re nothing!

After lunch, we heard from Minnesota’s First District Representative, Tim Walz. When his daughter, Hope, was born in 2001, Rep. Walz became a member of NOW as an investment in her future. His speech was so inspiring, in fact, that the conference’s southern MN contingent decided it was high time that Mankato had its own NOW chapter. Watch for your invite in the mail, Hope!

Speaking of girls, Nancy Gruver knows ‘em. The founder and editor of New Moon Girls, she reminded us that the simple act of saying “it’s not fair!” can be the beginning of a girl’s feminist consciousness. After her talk, I purchase a discounted subscription to the magazine for a very dear 11-year-old friend via this link:http://www.newmoon.com/offer/?code=MNNOW

It was a day with friends old and new, of connecting Facebook friends with actual faces, of networking, learning, and fun! Including….

CAKE! You can’t celebrate 40 years without cake, can you??

To see even more pictures, and to make friends with all of these folks and MANY more, please check out our fan page on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Minnesota-NOW/105827141908

Here’s to 40 more years of Moving Equality Forward!

Your proud president,

Shannon Drury

Just call me the Radical Hooker.

2011-04-12T08:37:00.008-05:00

On the tape below, MSNBC Lawrence O'Donnell says, "I have friends who depend on Planned Parenthood." I do, too. When I was uninsured, I depended on PP myself. I've never had an abortion, but I've had lots and lots of sex. You have, too. And so have your friends and everyone else you know. Sexual health requires responsibility, including regular exams, STI tests, and contraception. If you know anyone who's DONE IT, you know someone who's utilized the services of Planned Parenthood.

You dirty skank.

"Stop just a second," says Glenn Back on the the clip below, reacting to O'Donnell's totally unshocking revelation. "Hookers? Who? Who depends on Planned Parenthood? (whines) I've got 400 abortions that I HAVE to have.... I'm DEPENDING on Planned Parenthood."

If you can stand it, give the boys a listen, will you? You'll understand so much about how entitled, right-wing white men feel about women. In their universe, any woman taking control of her sexual health is a prostitute--and that's A Bad Thing. A burn-in-hell kinda thing.

Adding to the moral confusion, these white men proceed make fun of people who need condoms, then they will make fun of people who want to take the Pill instead of using condoms, and THEN they will make fun of people who don't want to wear condoms. Huh?

Perhaps Barbara Kruger could shed some light on the subject?

I would also add: "100% of them will never be shamed for their sexuality." Fuckers.

A roundup of recent writing, with illustrations by Anne Taintor

2011-04-04T13:02:00.011-05:00

LITERARY MAMA:

I am so damned annoyed that Sonya Huber and I never met while we attended Carleton together. Happily, MySpace succeeded where Sayles-Hill failed, and I was able to interview her about her 2010 book Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir. Sonya not only gave birth to Ivan and changed his diapers, she managed to write a great book about class warfare that has a half-naked person on the cover. You should buy it.

MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO NEWS:

Idiots in my legislature, most (but not all!) of them male, inspired this commentary piece: Concern for the unborn, not so much for the born but homeless. Even my 11-year-old knows that "pro-life" doesn't include all life--especially not life that's kinda yucky looking.

ELEVATE DIFFERENCE:

In my review of Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life by Claudia Welch, I reveal that, like the glamorous lady pictured above, I have lost my hormones and do not know where to find them. Welch thinks they might be hiding in some Ayurvedic herbal concoctions, but I'm not so sure. I'll just have to keep looking.

The Radical Housewife on white female privilege

2011-03-30T08:01:00.008-05:00

I wrote this in one of the thousands on comments on this subject: "As my profile picture shows, I am white. I wish I knew everything about everyone everywhere, but I don't. I also wish I knew why humility is so often confused with weakness, and arrogance is equated with intelligence."

In other words, it helps nobody to deny it. It's not helpful to splutter away in every corner of the interwebs, "BUT BUT BUT...I'm not racist!...I mean, I have all of Sharon Jones's records!!" Acknowledging privilege isn't racist, it's honest. Being born white confers privilege, and unpacking that privilege is a lifelong process.

This goes for you too, whitey. If a person of color has something to say about the matter, shut your mouth, keep your hands off the keyboard and PAY ATTENTION.

For further reading:

"Go After the Privilege, Not the Tits" Racialicious

"Afterthoughts on Alexandra Wallace and White Female Privilege" Feministe

"Stop Denying White Female Privilege" Womanist Musings

Kate Bornstein on privilege

2011-03-29T08:35:00.005-05:00

"I can understand men looking baffled when women accuse them of exercising male privilege; it's like many white people who look blank when confronted with their racism....

"I didn't 'lose' my male privilege so much as I made a conscious decision to get rid of it, and I didn't get rid of it all at once; it's an attitude that is insidiously pervasive....It took my becoming a woman to discover my 'male behavior'--that is, exhibiting male privilege.

"Male privilege is woven into all levels of the culture, from unearned higher wages to more opportunities in the workplace, from higher quality, less expensive clothing to better bathroom facilities. Male privilege extends into sexual harassment, rape, and war. Combine male privilege with capitalism (which rewards greed and acquisition) and the mass media (which, owned by capitalists, highlights only the rewards of acquisition and makes invisible its penalties), and you have a juggernaut that needs stopping by any means....

"Male privilege is, in a word, violence."

From Bornstein's 1994 book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us.

It is killing me that this book has been in print for over fifteen years and I'm just reading now. Better late than never, I suppose.

An open letter to Mary Pilcher-Cook, Kansas legislator

2011-03-21T18:24:00.015-05:00

Dear Sen. Pilcher-Cook,

Your campaign website states that part of your commitment to women and children includes "listening to women who have had abortions and their resulting experiences," yet you fail to add that you will only be respectful of those whose experiences fit your narrow view.

Tiffany Campbell had an abortion that saved the life of her son, diagnosed with Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome, but you called her a "killer." Do you respond to all women with such rudeness? Or does your compassion extend only to "resulting experiences" that are negative? It may surprise you to learn that one in three American women have terminated a pregnancy--safely, legally, and for many, gratefully.

I am not a Kansas resident, so I will not have the pleasure of voting you out of office. I will, however, be making a substantial donation to your opponent.

Sincerely,

The Radical Housewife

SEN. MARY PILCHER-COOK, "PROTECTING" WOMEN BY SHAMING THEM

Her earthly contact info:

http://www.kslegislature.org/li/b2011_12/year1/members/sen_pilcher_cook_mary_1/

Panic!

2011-03-18T13:36:00.005-05:00

So many reasons to be a Panic Kitteh lately: earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns. Revolutions turning into bloodbaths. The Uterus Police. Unspeakable violence against 11-year-olds and other children. American Muslims on trial for their faith. Double ear infections , TMJ, and peculiar intestinal maladies.

WORLD! Stop being fucked up! Some of us have book proposals to finish, ya know!

What 11-year-olds look like.

2011-03-10T08:22:00.006-06:00

This is a picture of my son on his eleventh birthday. He and his sister (and his cousin, not pictured) wore orange so we could identify them in the chaos that is the amusement park inside the Mall of America.

While I of course see my 11-year-old as an unusually beautiful specimen, he is actually pretty typical of the species. While he is marketed to as a "tween," suggesting that he is on the brink of pubescence, he's more child than teen, and nowhere near adult. For his birthday he requested and received a set of emo-skate-punk fashions from the Tony Hawk line at Kohl's, but wearing these did not suddenly transform him into a cast member of Jackass. One look at the roundness of his face tells you that this 11-year-old is absolutely, unmistakably a child.

As a longtime feminist activist, I know about slut-shaming and victim-blaming. But as a mother of an 11-year-old I slumped over and wept when I heard about the now infamous coverage of the 11-year-old Texas gang rape victim in the New York Times.

Residents in the neighborhood....said [the victim] dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys on the playground, some said. "Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?" said Ms. Harrison....

Yes, James C. McKinley Jr. can hide behind the fact that the statements were made by people in the community itself, but he didn't bother to include a counterpoint from a sexual assault counselor, who may have reminded McKinley that a victim's clothing is irrelevant to the horrific crime perpetrated against her. And the child's mother is not responsible for the behavior of 18 rapists. Interestingly, McKinley placed this quote near the beginning of the story:

"It's just destroyed our community," said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. "These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives."

McKinley doesn't provide a voice that muses what the 11-year-old VICTIM will have to live with for the rest of her life. Why? I'm a writer, not a journalist, but even I know that it would only take one phone call to a domestic violence shelter and/or sexual assault hotline to find someone willing to speak up for this 11-year-old child. Hell, McKinley could go to a large mall and find a mother of an 11-year-old willing to go on record. This is what she'd probably say:

My heart is breaking for that little girl. I hope that she gets the support she needs to recover from this terrible crime and that the perpetrators are brought to justice. By "justice" I mean significant jail time and education about rape and its effect on survivors and communities.

Then she'd hold her own 11-year-old and cry.

Petition: Tell the New York Times to Apologize for Blaming a Child for her Gang Rape

Collin Peterson is an embarrassment to Minnesota.

2011-03-03T08:48:00.007-06:00

...and that's saying something! At least Michele Bachmann drains resources from folks I wouldn't hang out with anyway. No one from St Paul has the stones to ask me to pay for her loony mailings and ad buys. John Boehner doesn't pester me for cash to support Bachmann as she yanks federal funds and programs away from the rural women who desperately need them.

But guess what? Because Collin Peterson is a Democrat, Nancy Pelosi does.

"LOOK EVERYBODY! I think I found a job in that woman's panties!"

Now that Sarah Jaffe is exposing Peterson's embarrassing politics on a national level, do you think anyone in the DFL will start taking our complaints about him seriously? Or do we have to wait until there really are jobs discovered in the vaginas of the 7th district and beyond?

Meet the HR3 Ten: Collin Peterson, the Original Blue Dog

by Sarah Jaffe, RH Reality Check

It's National Eating Disorders Week, so let's talk about it.

2011-02-25T07:50:00.011-06:00

I'm usually a cynic about "awareness" campaigns, due in large part to my tendency to vomit every time I see a product made of cancer-producing chemicals painted pink to raise "awareness" of the cancer that everyone seems to be getting from all the chemicals in the environment. Indeed, "awareness" failed to keep cancer from killing one of my dearest friends, so in my truly dark moments I lash out at "awareness" for falling down on the job.

But this cause is different--in this case, "awareness" is what kept another of my dearest friends alive. National Eating Disorders Week is February 20-26 this year, and though it's officially ending tomorrow, there's hope that the new Let's Talk About It campaign, sponsored in part by the National NOW Foundation, will continue changing (and saving) lives.

From the NEDA website: "Our aim is to ultimately prevent eating disorders and body image issues while reducing the stigma surrounding eating disorders and improving access to treatment. Eating disorders are serious, life-threatening illnesses--not choices--and it's important to recognize the pressures, attitudes and behaviors that shape the disorder." One of those talking about her recovery from an eating disorder is that dear friend, Erin Matson. Anorexia came close to ending her life while she was in her teens, years before she and I were introduced at our first Minnesota NOW meeting. The fact that it didn't is something I should never take for granted.

In the spirit of talking about body image, I'm reprinting "The Stories Bodies Tell," a column that appeared in the June 2009 issue of the Minnesota Women's Press. It refers to an essay for HipMama from March of that same year, and to another MWP column from the summer of 2007. All of the body anxiety I wrote about then remains with me. I struggle EVERY DAY to hold back the negativity that bubbles to my lips when I look at myself in the mirror lest I speak them aloud to Miriam, who still thinks that every lump in her mom's body is just fantastic. "Your tummy is big because it used to be my home," she says, patting me lovingly. Below is a 2005 photo of her brother kissing that home--the one that used to be his.

And now, that column:

Last April, HipMama.com published an essay of mine inspired by a childhood memory of hugging my mother’s soft tummy. Sharing that memory with her twenty years later ended in disappointment, I wrote, for her reaction was shame, not tenderness. To her, the belly fat that gave her child comfort was a source of embarrassment, one so deep she couldn’t fight past it to remember her daughter’s love.

I don’t blame her. I’ve put on weight lately, and now my young daughter has a soft playground of her own. She enjoys a good stomach squish whenever she can, and it takes a superhuman effort to allow her explorations, to fight the urge to push her loving hands away from my own source of shame. I’m no longer the same size as when I wrote the column “Perfect Diet,” published in these pages in July 2007. These last two years have tested my sanity like no others, with estrangement, serious illness, and death all part of my reality. My body tells this story to anyone willing to hear it.

Ironically, that 2007 column challenged the assumption that a thinner frame equaled health; everyone told me I looked fabulous when devastating jaw pain meant I couldn’t eat. Nowadays, I look for refuge from stress in the snacks I munch while streaming “30 Rock” on Hulu. My balance is off, I realize, but my body itself is fighting my efforts to right it: these 37-year-old knees aren’t as excited about step class as they used to be. I remind myself that a certain amount of softness can’t be that bad, but I don’t believe myself any more than my mother did.

The chasm between the child’s adoration of her mother’s softness and that same mother’s hatred of her own flesh provided the spark for the HipMama piece. If bodies tell stories, my own could speak to the way I was raised, and the different way I want to raise my children. I don’t blame my parents, or their parents for that matter, for the accidents of genetics that left the family tree touched by chronic anxiety and depression. Even without this hurdle, no one can live free of powerful cultural messages about our bodies, embedded as they are in every aspect of American life. These struggles will own us if we resist naming them.

I write my columns at my desk, in a pose identical to the one I held in my fourth grade classroom, the first time I remember sucking in my gut for acceptance. Today, my belly bumps up against the cherry wood beneath my computer and is significantly larger than the one I was teased about. Do I hate myself more or less? At 37, I have the twin gifts of wisdom and perspective, yet I also have 27 more years of Madison Avenue programming. When I don’t fit into my 2007 pants, I listen to the judgments of the magazines before I honor the story my body tells of my emotional pain.

Making things worse is the fad of the “Yummy Mummy.” Today, 50 is the new 40, is the new 30, and so on. Once upon a time, a woman up to her elbows in the work of raising little kids could reap at least one reward—a ticket off the body hate treadmill. No more. Valerie Bertinelli claimed that Weight Watchers got her bikini ready for People magazine, but in the accompanying article she admitted to starving herself in the seven days before the shoot, just in case. Valerie is 48, thirty years past what was once considered the anorexia danger zone. Her flat tummy even sports a perky little belly ring, driving home the message that to be the mother of an 18-year-old, you need to look like one.

It’s hard enough to worry about your body in fourth grade, but age used to provide an exit strategy. In hindsight, I was naïve to think that my mother would welcome a memory based upon the roundness of her body, when voices so much louder than mine shout that her abs should be as tight as Madonna’s. When I shared this memory with my mother, I wished to affirm our connection. As a mother myself, I have her softened shape to offer my own children. Instead, my mother affirmed a different connection—the sisterhood of shame. Both are inheritances we pass on to my daughter Miriam, a girl who has just turned four.

It’s a burden far heavier, pound for pound, than anything physical.

Virginie Despentes on the Mommy Wars

2011-02-22T07:57:00.004-06:00

"....motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others. Giving life is where it's at. 'Pro-maternity' propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern version of the double constraint: 'have babies, it's wonderful, you feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever,' but do it in a society in freefall in which paid work is a condition of social survival, but is guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women.....

Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible. It is essential that women feel like failures--that they be made to feel as if they've made the wrong choice. We are held responsible for a failure that is in fact collective and cross-gender."

From King Kong Theory, translated from the French by Stephanie Benson

Love in the time of contraception (if you can get it)

2011-02-16T07:36:00.009-06:00

It's safely after Valentine's Day, so you know I'm not posting about L-O-V-E in hopes that a certain Radical Husband buys me cupid-branded chocolate and teddy bears (the fact that the only stuffed toys we've ever purchased for each other were Terrance and Phillip dolls tells you all you need to know about our relationship). No, my essay on my weird sexual history was written long ago, timed for publication in the Sin issue of the fabulous Skirt! magazine, whose crack designers came up with the logo above. I wish that the print version of the mag were available up here in the frozen tundra--why should our sisters in the southeastern USA enjoy warm weather AND a beautifully designed publication of their own??

My essay, called "Love in the Time of Contraception," details one hetero woman's lifelong struggle to get it on without getting the clap, knocked up, or worse....mortally embarrassed! To any Jill Stanek fans who might be lurking, I will quote directly from the piece: "Should we have postponed sex until marriage? While it's true that many of my friends married their college sweethearts, no sane person buys a car without taking it around the block for a test drive." Word.

As much as I complain about the inconvenience of contraception in this piece, I always, ALWAYS had access to it. My dorms had condoms for a dime apiece, Today sponges & spermicide were easy to pick up at the More 4 pharmacy, my experiments with the Pill were courtesy of Minneapolis' Planned Parenthood, and my IUD was covered by insurance. I'm a middle-class white person; there will always be resources available for me.

This is not true for lower income women, many of whom are women of color, who rely upon federally funded community clinics for health care services. Our increasingly unhinged House of Representatives has introduced legislation that would strip federal funding from many of these clinics, including the Planned Parenthood that I visited when I was an uninsured college grad, simply because SOME clients go there to obtain abortions. I was at that clinic for cheap pills precisely because I DIDN'T want an abortion, but try telling that to the Republic of Gilead....oops, I mean representatives including Minnesota's own Michele Bachmann and John Kline.

For more on why stripping Title X funding from community clinics is a "public health disaster," please watch my baby sis Erin Matson on the following CSPAN clip. Her appearance on this program is a big fat Valentine to anyone who cares about women's health. If you have candy money left over, why not make a donation to help her keep up the good work? Tell her that Cupid (or a renegade sperm!) sent you.

Reports from the online battlefield (aka WWSD, part three)

2011-02-07T17:41:00.009-06:00

Surely, my Shirley would get carpal tunnel from all the furious typing. I have the sorest right wrist in town right now. Here's why.

1. The original version of a letter to the Minneapolis StarTribune:

I am writing to let you know of my strong opposition to the provision in HF 7/SF 159, the proposal to abolish local government mandates, that would repeal the Local Government Pay Equity Act (LGPEA). This common sense legislation, on the books since 1984, is still necessary to ensure that Minnesota women are paid fairly for their work.

I have heard that the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce feels this law is “archaic,” but research by the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, in partnership with the University of Minnesota’s Center on Women & Public Policy, found that women in our state are still earning less than their male counterparts. Their 2010 report showed that white women earn only 76 cents for every dollar earned by a white male, while Native American, African American, and Hispanic American women earn far less–69, 61, and 51 cents for every dollar earned by a white Minnesota man.

(Source: http://www.wfmn.org/press/WFM_StatusOfWomenGirlsMN_17June10.pdf)

Clearly, pay discrimination is not a thing of the past! The LGPEA needs to remain a part of Minnesota law to ensure that Minnesota women receive fair compensation.

Women are now the majority of the American workforce, due in part to the recession’s disproportionate toll on men. In simpler terms, women’s paychecks are crucial to families’ survival. Repealing this law takes money out of women’s wallets, which in turn hurts Minnesota families. I urge you to speak out against this legislation and to vote against any change to LGPEA.

The printed version elided non-white women's salaries into the words "far less." I am CERTAIN that the Strib did not MEAN to make me look like I don't care about women who DON'T LOOK LIKE ME. Oh, no. What a racist assumption that would be. Geez.

2. Posted in response to the Minnesota Independent's article "Minnesota GOP introduces three more bills to ban state funding for abortion":

Three more bills? I guess the jobs are for the clerks writing out all these separate pieces of paper. All joking aside, Doe v. Gomez is a legal decision based on the inherent unfairness of denying poor women access to a legal medical procedure that is available to women of means. The MCCL feels comfortable going after the “choices” of poor women, because they’re unlikely to come to the capitol to make a big stink about it. This is economic discrimination, with women’s lives on the line. I’m disgusted by it.

3. Another response to a MnIndy article (I get all of my news from the great Andy Birkey), "Kline, Bachmann sponsor bill that could allow hospitals to refuse emergency abortions":

It is absolutely beyond my comprehension why our Congress would propose such a bill ANYTIME, not simply in a session that was supposed to be dedicated to solving economic problems. This “conscience clause” gives rights to a fetus (not a “baby”) that are denied to an adult woman. It’s an appalling bill.

4. Working on a piece for MPR News, so watch this space! After I get a wrist strap and some Advil.

HR 3 is still a terrible bill, and here's why (aka What Would Shirley Do? part deux)

2011-02-03T13:39:00.005-06:00

The word is that Kristen Schaal, better known in my house as a woman who has actually touched Jemaine Clement (soooo jealous), ripped into the dreadful No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act so soundly on The Daily Show that the "forcible rape" business was dropped. Do we cheer? Tell ourselves that a MoveOn petition worked? Let us return to the question I posed two days ago: what would Shirley Chisholm do?

From Unbought & Unbossed, her 1970 memoir:

No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women will have them; they always have and always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for rich women while the poor women go to quacks?

Shirley isn't here to comment on Kermit Gosnell, the murderous quack who preyed upon impoverished Philadelphia women, many of them women of color. But in pre-Roe America, she knew all about dangerous, unlicensed abortionists, and about the kinds of clients you were likely to find there. It is ethically wrong to prevent poor women from accessing a legal medical procedure that is readily available to women of means. What Shirley would do is speak this truth to anyone and everyone who will hear it.

THAT's what Shirley would do.

Hey Democrats! Stop confusing enemies with friends (aka What Would Shirley Do?)

2011-02-01T09:58:00.008-06:00

If you know me, you know that I come from a long line of old-fashioned Minnesota liberals who put the "farmer" and "laborer" in the name of our state's Democratic Party. My Grandma Rose revered FDR like a god. My own political shero, Shirley Chisholm, wasn't treated wonderfully by the party back in the day, but she remained convinced that reform from within was the only way to go. In her spirit (call it What Would Shirley Do?), I felt moved to respond to a new campaign of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Since all of my readers are well-informed, I don't need to tell you that the newly introduced bill HR 3 is a disaster for women's rights, essentially codifying the Hyde Amendment into federal law while gently peeling away what qualifies as "rape" for woman needing a funding exemption. You know: HR 3 is bad, bad, bad. So when you receive a message like this one from the DCCC, asking for you to sign a petition called "Rape is Rape: Denounce Republicans' Extremist Anti-Choice Legislation," you think it's something good to support. From the petition:

House Republicans are proposing to drastically narrow the definition of rape that qualifies for health care coverage. H.R. 3 would redefine rape in these cases to only include "forcible rape," a definition that rules out a woman being drugged, children who are victims of statutory rape, and many date rape scenarios.

No matter what Speaker John Boehner and House Republicans want to call it, rape is rape -- women should have the right to health care following a rape.

Fightin' words, you think! It's about time, especially since you haven't quite trusted the Democratic Party since the debacle of Stupak-Pitts. You're probably kinder to them than I am, as I don't trust them at all since that mess. For good reason, as it turns out. Several Democrats are co-sponsors of HR 3, including Minnesota's Collin Peterson. So why am I being asked to lash out at Republicans for this misogynist measure when there are DEMOCRATS sponsoring it? WHY?

I went to the DCCC's Facebook page to pose the question. Politely, I thought.

Collin Peterson, a Democrat, is a co-sponsor of this bill. Get his name off this bill and I will give my name to your petition. Otherwise you are hypocrites.

Hey, the truth hurts. As I watched the flurry of messages on the page, I saw my comment get a thumbs-up. Nice. Others ignored my question, so I tried to post it again. This time I was blocked. For telling the truth? Did they think the photo of blonde kindergartener on my Facebook profile meant I was a Mama Grizzly plant? Seconds later, my comment was gone.

A few days ago, I friend whom I cherish asked me to please, please tell her if I had any difficulties or problems with our relationship. She trusted me, she said, and I told her that I felt the same way. For any relationship (even one with a political party) to thrive, there needs to be respect and honesty on both sides.

So now What Would Shirley Do? It's hard to say, especially since she didn't have Twitter at her disposal. I'll mull it over while I retweet the hell out of @DCCC.....

No Excuses!

2011-01-27T17:38:00.009-06:00

In the halcyon days pre-tonsillectomy, pre-New Year detox, pre-holidaze, I spent some time perusing the blog of the great Gloria Feldt, bestselling author and former CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 2010, Seal Press released her latest book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. The book challenges women to rethink their part in perpetuating inequality. As our feminist foremother Sojourner Truth once said, in a quote that Feldt attaches to the book's prologue: "if women want any more rights than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it." Ouch. These are tough words for a shy activist who prefers blogging to marching.

Anyway, one of Feldt's 9 Ways is to Wear the Shirt. She writes:

Declare publicly your gut-level commitment to whatever you decide to do with your one "wild and precious life." What's happening and why? What's your vision of what you think should happen? How can you make it happen? Go stand in your power and walk with intention to make it so.

With that in mind, Feldt launched a contest in which fans sent in photos of themselves in message t-shirts. Her own shirt boasted Laurel Thacher Ulrich's motto "well-behaved women seldom make history." How could I resist the chance to share the photo that in the masthead for my website--that of my daughter in her great shirt from Sticker Sisters? I couldn't. I didn't. AND I WON!

Well, Miriam won. Cute feminist five-year-olds are pretty tough to beat. The prize was an autographed collection of Feldt's books, including the the spankin' new No Excuses, which is EXACTLY the kick in the butt I need during this dreadful time of year.

Even without tonsillectomy patients to care for, January is a tough month. The darkness! The cold! The eggnog bloat! The (hopefully) detoxifying salads! The last thing I want to think about is what's on my shirt--namely, The Radical Manuscript and my gut-level commitment to find it a publishing home. With Feldt's help I plan to stand in my power and quit making excuses for why I'm not yet the published author of my dreams.... that is, if I can wrestle the book out of a certain feminist five-year-old's grubby little hands.

Blog for Choice 2011: One Heart

2011-01-21T18:16:00.007-06:00

An excerpt from The Radical Housewife, chapter one:

Our obstetrician explained that a first appointment focused more upon completing paperwork than much else; as proof, she handed my husband a stack of insurance forms and an official Fairview Hospitals publication entitled Your Pregnancy and You. On the cover, a hollow-cheeked supermodel pressed her lips to the downy head of a doughy-looking newborn. “But since someone left the mobile unit in here already,” she said, nodding towards a contraption in the corner of the room, “we could take a peek, if you like.” I assented eagerly. Dr. Farber switched on the machine, a combination of wheels, PCU, keyboard and monitor that resembled a plastic version of the robot Clonky from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

By the time Dr. Farber finished rattling off the list of things I could no longer enjoy (alcohol, blue cheese, ibuprofen, regular bowel movements), her hands had warmed up the tube of K-9 jelly to her liking. “Shirt up, now,” she ordered, and I obeyed. She squeezed a great dollop of lube on my stomach, then squashed down my innards with the sound wave wand as she watched snow undulate on the video monitor. “Ah,” she said, satisfied. “Here we are.”

Here, indeed: on the screen was the first picture of the baby I’d carry until the following February. It looked more like a salamander than a human child, with a fifth nub that was definitely a residual tail. The tiny creature writhed in its liquid home, thrashing about eagerly as the doctor pressed in firmly for a clearer picture. Somewhere below the bulbous, bean-shaped head we saw a soft flutter, like the quiet gray wings of a miniature moth. It was a heart. This thing was alive.

Not far from the Minneapolis office where we sat, on a grimy east-west throughway called Lake Street, are billboards featuring outsized photographs of babies. Some of these children open their mouths into gummy smiles; some gaze heavenward, their eyes round and damp with guileless gratitude. These billboards sell neither diapers nor formula; instead, they provide factual information. They announce that an embryo, from whence each of these babies came, has a beating heart 21 days from its conception.

It’s a fact. I can’t dispute it. Yet when my car rumbles down Lake Street, I shake my fist at those babies. I curse their sponsors, the Pro-Life Across America campaign, for reducing the explosive emotions behind a wrenching issue to the simplicity of a baby’s smile. On the far west end of Lake Street, closer to the gentility of Lake Calhoun than the chaotic halal markets of Little Mogadishu, stand clusters of bundled-up white women and men, their gloved hands clutching trifold pamphlets adorned with babies, but these babies do not smile; instead, they glower “j’accuse!” from faces streaked with blood, a dire warning to all who might enter the local Planned Parenthood.

In the United States of America, it is legal to terminate a pregnancy at nine weeks, to take action to stop the fluttering heart of this salamander-like creature I watched on the ultrasound screen. Medical terminology labels it embryo or a fetus. On the billboards, it’s a baby. There’s no room for that slithery, amoebic time in between that technology made visible to me, my husband, and our doctor .

In Exam Room 12, in a flickering series of black and white images, I too saw a baby—my baby. My husband squeezed my hand. Dr. Farber printed out a picture that I showed to my mother, my father, my in-laws. Still, the sight of this heart did nothing to change my lifelong support for safe, legal abortion, available on demand and without apology.

The abortion debate, like any other, pits chilly science against hotly contested theories, many so deeply felt as to attain near-factual status. Pro-Life Across America wishes us to understand the fact of a baby’s heartbeat proves the theory that nine-week-old wrigglers are conscious and sentient, however diminutive. Certain factions go back even farther, claiming that the fusion of two cells, spermatozoa and egg, require as much protection as a smiling baby.

I believe our fascination with where life begins has its source in our terror of how it ends. No person owns a memory of the dawning of her consciousness. To define the self, then, we must work backwards from life’s second great mystery: death. Our collective dread may have inspired the idea of an immutable soul that has the power to transcend that which we fear most. An unchanging soul at death, therefore, requires a unique soul at birth—or, as some believe, much earlier.

I will never forget the sight of this tiny heart’s flutter, yet I wonder: was there a consciousness swirling about that pinpoint-sized brain? Were there thoughts? Emotions? Scientists know that farm experience emotions, yet millions are slaughtered daily to satisfy our hunger for their meat. I could not rationally argue that a nine-week-old blob in my belly contained the mental powers of the average full-grown pig, so what makes the blob a more valuable object? But does it have a soul? This agnostic vegetarian dares not guess.

What I do know is when my infant son came home from Fairview Riverside Hospital, he did not smile. His wet mouth twisted as he screamed without regard for the poor, anxious heart of his mother. No billboards announced to me Hang in There, Mom, It’ll Get Better!, and nobody stood on the sand-crusted snow bank outside my house in Sorel boots, much less rosaries, handing me pamphlets of support. A heart can set things in motion, but cannot finish the job.

Lacking the framework of faith, I seek not perfection, but balance. When I looked my blob, I understood him as the culmination of countless events and choices, the sum total of my years on the earth. My years, and no one else’s. I also saw a creature that drew sustenance from me and me alone. He lived on my blood, my nutrients, my oxygen, my energy: all of it mine. If I died, so did he. His tail could not wiggle outside the safety of my womb.

I gave him life. I also gave him meaning.

When does life begin? I suspect it is a process requiring a complex engagement between both the being and its world, much like a story requires a reader. Otherwise, the words remain only a series of unintelligible scratches on a page. If we accept that a story has different meaning for a different reader, we may understand that no person will approach either their soul, or a zygote’s, identically.

Googling TOM HACKBARTH (and other misogynists)

2011-01-19T19:34:00.000-06:00

I noticed an unusual amount of traffic on Ye Olde Blogge lately, most of it centered around my November post about Minnesota representative Tom Hackbarth. Remember him? He's the exurban pro-lifer who was caught packing heat in the parking lot of St. Paul Planned Parenthood, then defended himself by admitting that he was stalking a woman he met online (an alibi that Scott Roeder's attorney regrets not dreaming up first). Here's what Tom Hackbarth looks like:

Nothing too interesting there--just the typically smug expression of an entitled white dude, (amirite, Cackle of Rads?). He lacks the clearly cuckoo-bananas visage of alleged murderer and admitted misogynist Jared Loughner. Ahh, I get it now! Journos, looking for a fresh angle on the Loughner story, are digging for stories about other well-armed men who get crabby when women tell them NO.

Loughner: "Its funny....when..they say lets go on a date about 3 times...and they dont...go...."

Hackbarth: "She gave me some line of baloney, and I thought, 'well, she's fibbing to me.' You could tell, and I thought 'well, I'm going to check it out.' And I went there to see if she was around and her vehicle was not there. And I was just checking on her."

When Googlers remembered ol' Tommy and revisited his case, they found ME! To my delight, my blog post ranks just above Tom's Wikipedia page on a Google search. At last, I have found how to increase my readership: TOM HACKBARTH! TOM HACKBARTH! TOM HACKBARTH!

Welcome, new readers! I hope you'll return to my site in the future, as my goal of redefining family values includes exposing what Amanda Marcotte calls "anxious masculinity" and its part in perpetuating violence against .... everybody. Men, remember: this is your problem, too. Three men were killed when Loughner attacked. A man named John Green buried his nine-year-old daughter; other men lost loved ones, too. Sexism hurts everyone. Google that if you don't believe me.

Gone rogue? Hardly.

2011-01-13T18:08:00.012-06:00

Don't fret that I've been recycling old posts. I may have gone around the bend and back, but rogue? Not yet. I'm working my feminist tail off on a number of wonderful projects, all of which are distracting me from preparing for my son's poorly-timed tonsillectomy on MLK Day. First up? NETROOTS!

This Saturday, while The Radical Hubby strips the Richfield SuperTarget of its ice cream and pudding, I will be moderating a panel at Netroots Minnesota. The theme? "Feminist Activism in a Gone-Rogue Age," a concept pitched long before that shooty-killy thing in Arizona (how's that workin' out for ya?). The panel description, lifted directly from Netroots Minnesota's sessions page:

Feminist Activism In A Gone-Rogue Age

2:10-3:00 PM

Sarah Palin once tweeted that feminism was “hijacked by a cackle of rads” who dared question her commitment to women's rights. Palin has successfully exploited rifts in the feminist movement to her and her party's advantage. Feminists appear fragmented in their response, rather than a united force for broad-based (pun intended) social change. This panel will lead a brainstorming session on how Minnesota feminists can unify their messages in an increasingly hostile political landscape. Groups such as the Minnesota Family Council. Minnesota Majority, and even the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce are itching to roll back the hard-fought civil rights gains of the last twenty years. It's going to take some strong and sustained cackling to stop them.

PANELISTS: Shannon Drury, Farheen Hakeem, Ami Wazlawik, Solome Tibebu

I'm very excited to discuss how feminism is a vital part of the larger movement against oppression in all its forms, as well as how the progressive movement still has to work to combat sexism within its own ranks.

WHAT, you say? Progressives can be sexist?! Hell, even some women are sexist. Cackle, cackle, cackle.

Guns, tears, and American manhood

2011-01-11T11:22:00.008-06:00

Another post from the archives, this one from a more innocent time: 2007.

May 2007

I am happy to admit it, totally honestly, without a trace of irony: I'm a Fanjaya. That is, an honest to goodness fan of Sanjaya Malakar, the 17-year-old American Idol contestant whose wacky hairdos and wobbly vocals made him a target for derision from the web to the grocery tabloids to network news. I participate in pop culture silliness as much as anyone (I still have my Spice Girls dolls), but I really do love this kid. In fact, I’ve had a mom-crush on him ever since his first audition in Seattle, long before he shocked the nation with his pony-hawk.

Shall I break for another pop culture definition? A mom-crush occurs when an adorable kid provokes a powerful desire to pinch the object's cute cheeks and serve him or her homemade cookies. In common usage, one might say: “I hope they never recast the stars of the Harry Potter movies. I have a mom-crush on all three of them.” And Sanjaya definitely had the toothy grin and the goofball charm to win over the stoniest mom in America. When he wept openly after his older sister was cut from the competition, I felt a bit teary myself. Who sees a boy cry on television any more, much less out of genuine tenderness and emotion? I loved it. He was my Idol pick, no matter how he styled his hair.

But fellow moms and Idol geeks like my friends Pam and Liz thought I was nuts when I confessed that I was dialing for Sanjaya. “Are you serious?” Pam squawked. He was terrible! Liz e-mailed. These are sensitive, loving women who are both capable of serious mom-crushing. But eventually, I realized what made them immune to Sanjaya's charms.

Neither were mothers of sons.

Now someone else’s son is in the news, and for something far more disturbing than off-key singing: on April 16, 2007 Seung-Hui Cho opened fire on his university campus in Virginia and killed 32 people before turning the gun on himself. Media coverage after the massacre followed a predictable pattern, with a parade of pundits expounding on gun control laws, why students ought to own guns, pervasive mental illness, the rights of the mentally ill, violence on television, violence in video games, the logistics of campus lockdowns, and more. All that changed the day NBC announced it had received a package from the killer himself, containing videos and photographs of himself decked out in his murderous finery. In one image, Cho brandishes two firearms, holding them from his ammo-clad body at right angles, his face glowering with rage. It’s too perfect. It could have easily come from any grindhouse movie; hell, it could have come from the movie Grindhouse. This is not to blame Hollywood, but to recognize the image’s brutal allure. In America, we love power. We need it; we feed on it. The power that comes from violence is the cheapest and easiest available to those who are the weakest among us.

I was pregnant with my first child when the home video footage made by the two Columbine killers was made public, to be shown 24/7 by news outlets in a desperate attempt to understand what these boys had done. Not long before, a fuzzy black and white ultrasound had shown that I was going to have a little boy of my own. Two television screens, showing two separate images of boys in America. My typical first-time mom jitters gave way to full-blown panic. There was no chapter in What to Expect When You’re Expecting about this. What on earth was I going to do with my American boy?

Fast forward seven years and I still don't know. No one else seems to either. Seung-Hui Cho, despite a youth spent in South Korea, idolized the Columbine killers as “martyrs.” I adore my boy, but I fear for him. No talk show or how-to book is going to sort this mess out. But maybe one boy's spontaneous tears on the country's most popular television show will help.

I know I had best not pin all my hopes on this one American boy, a reality TV star at that. Of all media icons they tend to have the shortest shelf lives. I have a lot of difficult, ugly parenting work ahead of me, and Sanjaya will be busy just growing up. I thank him for the courage he displayed on the show week after week—and I’m not talking about the spectacularly funny hairdos. It takes guts to be yourself in America these days. It takes strength to take chances, to stand up to criticism, and to cry when it’s all over. That’s a kind of power that is neither easy nor cheap, but it will last him a lifetime.

I hope his mother is proud.

You are a target.

2011-01-08T17:01:00.007-06:00

Below is an excerpt from a blog that I posted on October 27, 2010*:

My friend shared some distressing news with me: last weekend, persons unknown vandalized her campaign signs with the slogan [WEDGE ISSUE SLUR].

[WEDGE ISSUE SLUR] is a term that successfully whipped a lunatic like [POLITICALLY MOTIVATED ASSASSIN] into a homicidal frenzy. It transforms a debate into a fight, a discussion into a brawl, a disagreement into a head-stomping melee that puts someone in the hospital.

It means something to use those words. It means the same thing to Laurie and me as it did to [POLITICALLY MOTIVATED ASSASSINATION VICTIM]: you are a target.

I don't mean to suggest that this vandal means to kill my friend, any more than she truly believes that Laurie has committed [AN IDEOLOGICAL CRIME] herself. But isn't it something that this angry woman didn't write "fuck off"? Nor did she scribble "you suck" or "I hate you." She chose her words very carefully. She wrote what she did to scare the shit out of someone who put herself in the public eye to protect the rights of others.....

*I reprint this not because I think I am so wonderfully prescient that I predicted the attack on Representative Giffords months ago. I reprint because I am at a loss for words. And like many of you, I am very confused and very afraid.

Feminist + feminist = awesome

2011-01-04T08:05:00.008-06:00

I posted the following in reply to Jill at Feministe, who wondered, while reading her New York Times last Sunday: "are feminist marriages more satisfying?"

I’m a hetero feminist woman married to a hetero feminist man. On paper, we look like a “traditional” pair, as he earns our family’s living while I tend to our two kiddos.

But thanks to feminism, we understand that home-based caregiving, while unpaid, is a job like any other. My at-home parent status does not give my husband license to lounge on the couch after work while I scrub myself silly. The household grunt work is still everyone’s responsibility, just as it would be if I worked outside the home. Feminism upends “traditional” expectations, to everyone’s benefit: my kids have a close and loving relationship with their dad, who puts in quality time AND quantity time with them; my time building a freelance writing career is not seen as a detriment to our family; our foundation of mutual trust and respect gets us through the times in our relationship that are shitty.

FEMINISM is our secret! Pass it on!

Winter break is over!

2011-01-03T13:40:00.003-06:00

Why, I just might pour myself another cup of coffee! Yippeeeee!

Fiction, truth, and the best book of 2010

2010-12-29T10:51:00.017-06:00

"You should never just read for 'enjoyment.' Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick 'hard books.' Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for God's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, 'I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth.' Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of 'literature'? That means fiction, too, stupid."

Such is the wisdom of John Waters, culled from his 2010 book Role Models, which I am enjoying so much that I know I will flip back to page one as soon as page 294 rolls around. Waters is a American treasure ( though he'd hate to be described as such), and I truly hope he's willed his brain to the Smithsonian. In my parallel universe, John Waters is on the Supreme Court and a pencil-mustachioed Antonin Scalia is skulking around Baltimore in a Comme des Garcons ensemble, Super-8 camera in hand.

The only addition I would make to the above observations is that nonfiction (the category which includes Role Models, as it is a collection of essays, all of them GREAT) can be just as fake as fiction is true. Stories are how we make sense of this filthy world of ours. Even a "nonfiction" "political memoir" like The Radical Housewife has a few, er, moments of inspired creativity--though the story about Michele Bachmann yelling at my son and nephew is as horrifyingly true as it is truly horrifying. Bachmann, the real person, is so outrageously bizarre that if she didn't exist, Waters would have invented her. As long as a loony like Bachmann wields power, Waters' declaration that "fiction is the truth" will hold....well, true.

May you create a few tales of your own this new year--the taller the better. Onward to 2011!

Snowed out, wracked with doubt

2010-12-19T12:22:00.008-06:00

I was born in Minneapolis and have lived nearly all of my life here, so I don't fear snow. What I do fear are snow days, and last week the kids had two. I am fortunate that I don't have a 9 to 5 work schedule that required me to take unpaid leave to keep an eye on the little goofballs--I'm unpaid all the time! Sadly, I was hoping to use last week to change that (have I mentioned The Radical Housewife, my completed manuscript, lately? Yes? No? Maybe?). Still, I was able to scratch out a little time for writing, with the following treats now available for your online enjoyment:

CD Review: Nu Shooz, "Pandora's Box." Elevate Difference, December 15, 2010

Won't somebody think of the employment discrimination? I mean, the children? Feministing Community Blog, December 17, 2010

Now all intellectual activity has been suspended until January 3rd, that blessed day when Winter Break is over. And if you haven't guessed, I am that uber-correct liberal who calls this time of year "the holidays," mostly because it drives Christian fundies crazy. I continue to marvel at how knotted up these folks get at THE VERY IDEA of children not being required to decorate trees in their classrooms, for this will endanger their own personal relationship with Jesus, their Lord and Savior. I'm no biblical scholar, but I imagine that if you're on Team Jesus, skipping tree-decorating in favor of making non-denominational ginger bread people (not ginger bread men, mind you!) isn't going to hurt you a bit. If Jenny Erikson of The Stir lived down the block from me and plopped an enormous Nativity scene in her front yard, it would only bother me if I were questioning my own atheism. I might find myself irrationally (pun intended) hostile towards it, tempted to kick Joseph's cold plastic butt to reassure myself, in vain, that it meant nothing, nothing....such is the m.o. of the defensive hypocrite. Why did George "rentboy.com" Rekers work so hard to curtail the rights of gays and lesbians? Why does Jenny think that PC liberals like me are out to ruin Christmas? You're obsessed with what you fear.

Me? I'm obsessed with writing and rewriting the shit out of my not-totally-radical-yet book proposal as I am, in fact, terrified of the whole process. I act tough, but if the mighty Metrodome can deflate, a housewife can too.

Blizzard people

2010-12-12T06:58:00.004-06:00

We will return to your regularly scheduled feminist blog posts once we recover from... Snowmaggeddon 2010.

Doing it anyway

2010-12-06T09:56:00.017-06:00

I attended two very different activist gatherings last week. One consisted of parents and administrators at my kids' school, while the other brought together local feminists (aka Cackle of Rads, Twin Cities chapter), a number of whom are involved in Democratic party politics. At both meetings, I heard the following:

"The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing."
"Is anyone looking a the big picture here?"
"We're talking to a brick wall half the time."
"Is this sabotage? Or just idiocy?"
"I'm exhausted."
"All of this work was for nothing?"
"We're not even talking about the same thing."

"What is wrong with people?"
"They want to wear us down so we will give up. And it's working."

Luckily each meeting came with some of my favorite treats in the world (coffee and mini-scones, Surly Bender and popcorn) to soothe my growing agitation. In the very cold light of Monday morning, though, it's obvious to me that we'll need more than snacks to get out of this.

What do we need? INSPIRATION. My most recent post for Elevate Difference could not have arrived at a better time, for Courtney E. Martin's new book Do it Anyway provides just the kick in the butt all of us need. Martin subtitled her book "the new generation of activists," tailoring her message to activists under 35 and the baby boomers who dare mock them, but as I wrote in my review, this is a book for everyone.

We all need to be told that even though improving our communities is hard, we have to do it anyway, especially when times are bleak. For example: instead of drowning in coffee this morning, I wrote a long letter to the Minneapolis Public Schools' Out 4 Good program, requesting that my son's middle school get some sorely needed anti-bullying support. Lately, when Elliott speaks out against sexist and homophobic teasing, he gets relentlessly teased for his trouble. I see him tiring of being That Feminist Fifth Grader. And like the times I tell him to brush his teeth or finish his salad, when I tell him to "do it anyway!" his eyes glaze over (I wonder if Courtney would consider writing a version for middle schoolers?).

The book would make a delightful holiday present for any activist burnout you know, be s/he feminist, PTA volunteer, phone banker, social worker, candidate, advocate, angry letter writer, all of the above and more. Order it online through the link at Elevate Difference and ED will get a little dough from Amazon for your trouble. DO IT! Anyway!

In the heart of a mother

2010-11-29T17:43:00.026-06:00

Minneapolis is justifiably proud of its many hometown institutions, but none are more precious than our parks and lakes. Coming in close second to these natural wonders might be the annual MayDay Parade, brought to us since 1975 by the artists who comprise In the Heart of the Beast Puppet & Mask Theatre. Back then, the company called themselves the Powderhorn Puppet Theatre, in honor of the large park that gives the neighborhood its name. To most people in south Minneapolis, my home and hometown, Powderhorn Park is synonymous with this yearly celebration of community, an event so grassroots you can see dirt under the fingernails of everyone involved.

Powderhorn Park is an urban neighborhood, to be sure, not an idyll. Peace, love and gigantic puppets rule one day out of the year, but the other 364 days are about just getting by.

Until the unthinkable happens.

Four boys, all 14-16 years old, attacked a woman and her two children in the park last week, sexually assaulting the woman at gunpoint with her children nearby. Police following their tracks in the snow discovered the boys in a nearby garage in the act of assaulting two teenage girls.

What's your first instinct when you hear about these crimes? After you black out momentarily from rage, of course. Do you want blood? Explanations? Systems to blame, like the talk radio men who wondered why this happened? (their conclusion: these kids should have been locked up in juvie the first time they shoplifted candy. That woulda learned 'em!)

I couldn't stop thinking about what drives a fourteen-year-old child to commit such a horrific act of violence. My life in feminist activism has been about exposing the hypocrisy of a society that claims to worship both "family values" and "individual freedom," even if the latter implies the freedom to be poor, to be desperate, to abuse one another.

But I write and think these things a mile outside of the Powderhorn Park neighborhood. No one has attacked me lately. When I shed tears of frustration reading an interview with Sister Helen Prejean in the August 2010 issue of The Sun ("To some extent violence is part of our nature," she said, "but compassion is too. Seeking justice for everybody is also part of human nature") I was on the treadmill at the YWCA, not lying in a hospital bed. What the hell do I know? Not much.

Yesterday afternoon, "the mother in the news" shared what she knows. Excerpts:

I find it ironic to have had this experience as I currently study nonviolence, restorative justice and the healing of childhood trauma. I got to put my studies and my practice of mindfulness into play as the incident unfolded. The
whole time I made a conscious choice to see the boys as human beings, not to see
them as evil or bad. I focus my attention not on the boys' actions but the pain
behind their actions. I see those boys as hurting, scared children who didn't
get the kind of nurture, love and care that they needed. I try to hold them now
in compassion and hope that they might get the support they need to reconnect to
their essential goodness. With the system of justice that we currently use, I'm
hopeless that will happen.

This is exactly what Prejean told David Cook, her interviewer: "as a society, we have to examine our belief that sever punishment is the way to restore order. The main objective of prisons is to keep society safe, not to cause prisoners pain simply because they caused others pain." Similarly, the Powderhorn mother wrote:

At one point the boys asked for our skis. I wish they could have taken them and used them and experienced the pure joy of gliding in the fresh snow, getting winded from exertion and breathing in cool, fresh air. Please send them all the love you can muster. I think they really need it.

To wish joy and love upon the one who has damaged your body and soul is an act of strength so confounding, so beyond comprehension, that it could only have come from a mother. Not a mama grizzly, mind you, a creature prone to violence and homicidal rage: A MOTHER. A caregiver. A nurturer. A person who is connected, not isolated. A mother is what I am, but it's also what I hope to be.

Thank you, Powderhorn mother, Powderhorn Park, and all in my Minneapolis family.

Tom Hackbarth, armed and jealous (but still pro-life)!

2010-11-24T11:44:00.010-06:00

That my beloved home state has gone to the crazies is no longer news; the level of bizarre behavior, on the other hand, is what makes even a not-very-liberal-newspaper-anymore stand up and take notice.

From the article "Armed Lawmaker Stopped by Police in Highland Park" (StarTribune, November 23) by Chao Xiong:

A state representative said it was a misunderstanding when he parked his car in the Planned Parenthood lot in Highland Park and was later stopped by St. Paul police because of the revolver he was carrying near his waistband.

A misunderstanding happens over Thanksgiving dinner, when your relatives make snide remarks about your vegetarianism. When a pro-life legislator from waaaaaay out in the exurbs is found chillin' with a loaded gun in the parking lot of a big-city PP where surgical abortions are performed, even my carnivorous cousins know better. But let's allow Tom Hackbarth to explain himself, shall we?

[Hackbarth] didn't know he was at Planned Parenthood when he pulled into the empty lot so that he could look for a woman he had met online.

It's been a long time since I was in the dating pool, but I don't remember arranging rendezvous at Planned Parenthood. And I'm pro-abortion, remember??

Hackbarth said he had coffee with the woman on Nov. 15, and asked her to dinner the next night but she told him she couldn't because of a commitment she had with a female friend in Highland Park. Hackbarth said he felt that she might have been seeing a man instead, so he parked his car and walked around the block looking for her car. (The security guard spotted Hackbarth's gun when he got out of his car and put on a winter coat.)

I see the misunderstanding now. He wasn't threatening to shoot up the clinic, the doctors, the staff, the clients; he was stalking someone! That's cool, right? Pat Kessler, a reporter with the local CBS affiliate, connects the dots that Xiaong wouldn't:

Police say Hackbarth exhibited the behavior of a stalker: angry, looking for a woman, with a fully loaded gun.

Not much to misunderstand, there.

Hackbarth was apparently on the hunt for his girlfriend whom he’d recently met online.

Lest you misunderstand: I did not use the word HUNT in the sentence above. Pat Kessler did, the naughty boy. Hackbarth told him:

“She gave me some line of baloney, and I thought, ‘well, she’s fibbing to me.’ You could tell, and I thought, ‘well, I’m going to check it out.’ and I went there to see if she was around and her vehicle was not there. And I was just checking on her,” he said.

No misunderstanding here. MORE dirt comes to us from the St Paul Pioneer Press, the town that had the honor of hosting the arrest!

Police reports note officers found extra ammunition for the revolver, a map and binoculars in the front of Hackbarth's vehicle.

!!!!!

Hackbarth provided officers the name of the woman but said he had no contact information for her and could not recall the website where he met her. He said he uses "maybe three or four" different dating sites and couldn't remember which one..... He said the woman he was looking for was the only one he had ever actually met face to face through online dating. "You don't get a lot of responses when you say you're separated," he said.

Or when you're a really, really big asshole.

No misunderstanding here: a recently divorced jerk met a woman online who was wise enough to keep her phone number and address to herself. Said jerk, convinced that this woman could not possibly be immune to his charms, drove down to the big city to stalk her. Sadly, there are dicks like Hackbarth everywhere, armed or otherwise.

I don't relish the fact that a guy who votes with the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life 100% of the time is shown to have little respect for post-born life. It happens all the time. To this crowd, a woman's body is property: of the state, of heterosexual men, and especially of heterosexual men who run the state!

As Minnesota gets nuttier, all I can say is: Jesse Ventura, come back! ALL IS FORGIVEN!

My thoughts on this thing called "mommyblogging"

2010-11-22T07:54:00.008-06:00

...are reprinted below, originally written in reponse to a Blue Milk post on the subject, that was itself inspired by a post by Her Bad Mother that got a good snarking on Jezebel (whew, these ladies DO get around!):

Thanks to consumer culture, we live in a world in which it’s assumed that a woman with a child cares only about her nest--fuck everyone else. Thus the “mommy blog” label, which is useful for marketers who want to feed those insecurities with products that will ensure our children are the best/happiest/smartest/ babes in the world, which in turn perpetuates the myth that mommies must not be paying attention to the larger world around them, unlike the men who are writing about Important Things like Politics.

The job of feminist bloggers (like you and me and millions more) is to fight this narrow view of what mothers are tuned into and are capable of.

Now, to a REAL mommy blogging problem. I got so excited about all this stuff that I nominated myself for Babble's Top 50 Mom Blogs of 2010, an embarrassing thing to do much less admit to, but no more embarrassing than the horrible realization that when I filled out the form I SPELLED MY OWN WEB ADDRESS INCORRECTLY.

Yes, I did. The link up on Babble now sends you to a dead page in the interweb ether. I can type without using my brain, I guess--so much for fame, fortune, and/or a contract from Seal Press. I am so humiliated that, like Garfield, I want to hide under a lasagna until Monday is over.

If you care to surf to that site yourself to nominate me WITH THE CORRECT ADDRESS, I would appreciate it. I have some other, more Important Things to do today, which may or may not include Italian food and writing pissy letters to the StarTribune's editorial staffers. We mommybloggers have to get our kicks anyway we can.

I demand equal pay reparations!

2010-11-17T12:59:00.007-06:00

Money! it's what I want! Specifically, I want the money that should be summarily deducted from the Republican women in the United States Senate who voted to block a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Have you not heard of this bill? You must be a white cis-man, then. For everyone else outside of that small but powerful category, here's the summary in bumper sticker form: EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK! Did you know that in the United States the wage gap for white women is 77 cents to every white man's dollar? That African-American women get 62 cents? That Hispanic women get 53 cents? The Paycheck Fairness Act is designed to help correct that. It would strengthen the existing Equal Pay Act of 1963 and would allow employees easier access to salary records without fear of retaliation. No brainer, eh?

Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Kay Bailey Hutchison have the same jobs that Al Franken, Henry Reid, Mitch McConnell and handsome former Cosmopolitan model Scott Brown have. The salary for the job is $174,000 yearly. All of the aforementioned ladies are white, and they are all Republicans who failed to break ranks to vote for this legislation (well, Murkowski didn't vote against it--she failed to leave her precious write-in ballots to show up for the vote. Same diff). The dreaded filibuster killed it. That must mean that these four women do not agree that women employees need this kind of legal protection. Hmmmm.......

GRAB YOUR CALCULATORS! What should Collins, Snowe, Bailey Hutchison and Murkowski be paid? And how much money do those four owe back to the federal government now that their hypocrisy has been exposed? I'll take an Ativan while I wait (the sheer stupidity of some people gives me anxiety attacks).

Ready? I was an English major, not a math major (I'm a GIRL, silly!), but my numbers tell me that each of these women should only be paid $132, 240 per year. Let's subtract that from $174,000 and see what we get. Oh mercy! These four, who do not believe that women have the right to equal pay, need to remit back to the federal government $41, 760. EACH. For every year that they have served.

I'm starting a campaign to get my money back, because $41K times whatever might be just enough money to ensure that my public library, its hours slashed due to budget cuts, could reopen on Mondays. Luckily, most of the staff are women, and we know they work cheap! Start dialing, girls!

Kay Bailey Hutchison: (202) 224-5922

Olympia Snowe: (202) 224-5344

Lisa Murkowski: (202) 224-6665

Susan Collins: (202) 224-2523

What we don't talk about when we talk about health care

2010-11-16T07:55:00.012-06:00

I am going to repost the following blog that first appeared here in 2009, just as the "debate" (prolonged screaming match, really) about health care reform was really picking up speed. I think it's worth rereading not only because today is the third anniversary of Liz's death, but because there are still yahoos in this country who think socialized medicine is a bad idea. They voted in staggering numbers for leaders who want to repeal the teeny, tiny steps taken towards health care equality in this country, probably because they persist in the belief that terminal illness will never happen to them or anyone they love.

I recently had the pleasure of reading the new book Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, written by fellow Carleton grad Sonya Huber, and interviewing her for an upcoming piece in Literary Mama. I can't recommend the book enough. Sonya writes beautifully, and her tale of cobbling together coverage for herself, her husband, and her infant son through a series of soul-draining but morally noble non-profit jobs and graduate programs will be recognizable to anyone living on the fine line that separates the almighty middle class from ....well, everyone else. Sonya writes with humor and grace, but also with urgency, painfully aware that lives are on the line--and deaths are, too. Liz would have loved it.

Gone daddy gone

August 9, 2009

Not long ago, Matt commented on something he'd read in the newspaper: "It says here that heart disease is the leading cause of death in this country," he said. "If that's true, then why do we know so many people with cancer?"

Good question. I wondered if it was because of our demographics--as thirtysomethings, we tend to hang with folks whose cholesterol profiles have not yet caught up with them. We eat cheese and drink beer with abandon. "That still doesn't explain all the cancer," he grumped.

This weekend Matt is on the east coast visiting a good friend and cancer survivor. It is a trip I made several times myself, before my own east coast friend succumbed to the disease in late 2007. This week alone we experienced both of cancer's schizophrenic extremes: a diagnosed family member received wonderful PET scan results, while an old friend from high school had a five hour operation to remove a tumor from her brain.

I'm at a breaking point. I AM QUITE LITERALLY SICK TO FUCKING DEATH OF ALL THIS CANCER. It doesn't help that the national nightmare that is health care reform in this country has brought end-of-life care and medical rationing into the debate.

I keep having flashbacks to the one time I accompanied Liz on her chemo day, at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. One tiny positive through her whole ordeal was the fact that her insurance picked up the tab for all of her treatments. Avastin alone, she gasped, would cost over a hundred grand to someone who didn't have insurance. Liz had Avastin, and a seemingly endless string of chemo drugs in addition to radiation, several surgeries, and many long hospital stays.

Liz was 33 and a half years old at the time of her diagnosis. She died two years later. How much did those two years cost her insurers? I don't know. What would it cost not to pay for them?

Take a guess. It's been nearly two years since she died and I can't type this without feeling the too-familiar panicky clutch in my chest, the stinging tears welling up in my eyes. I would do anything, anything, to have her back again.

I think about her a lot. At times I smile when I think of the venom she would spew at those who believe that a single-payer system would limit access to the treatments that kept her alive--she knew that these treatments were out of most people's reach already! Liz knew that our health care system was a moral disgrace. She had no doubt that thousands of other people with colon cancer would love to sit in her chemo chair at Dana Farber, but couldn't. She knew those people would die more quickly, less hopefully, and certainly a hell of a lot poorer than she would.

Of course, she never planned on dying at all. I last spoke to her on October 29, 2007, when she called from her hospital bed to wish me a happy 36th birthday. She sounded frail, both physically and mentally. I was too afraid to ask about this strange thing called "end-of life care", and she never mentioned it. All I could tell her was that I loved her, and that would have to be enough. She died two weeks later.

What DON'T we talk about when we talk about health care? Death. Money. Economic class. Equality, or the lack thereof. Fear. Mortality. Losing the illusion of control that we all hold so dear.

I can't think about "health care reform" and not think about all the fucking cancer. I can't hear "end of life" and think that death is going to happen to someone else. Death is coming, and death is real. Death is in the future for you, for me, for my children, for President Obama, for Rush Limbaugh, for everyone who panics at the idea of a single payer system. Death is a certainty. No one can escape it. The existence of death ought to humble us and make us more respectful of life. After all, if a dying woman can muster the strength to give a shit about the uninsured, why can't everyone else?

Today's writing brought to you by....karma!

2010-11-15T07:49:00.007-06:00

I don't believe in a Santa Claus-style universe that keeps tabs on every little naughty or nice thing I do in order to sort out my just rewards, but I do believe that approaching others with positivity (or in my case, keeping my natural assholery in check) will reap benefits. But sometimes, you just get lucky. The November issue of the Women's Press is home-and-hearth themed, and my column acknowledges that it takes more than bricks and mortar to make a home: it takes a random group of strangers who are committed to being nice to each other. Or as one of my street-mates says, "it takes a village, but not the Village People."

My Street: It Takes a Neighborhood to Make a Home. Minnesota Women's Press, November 1, 2010.

Of course, my neighbors are more than just polite. As I note in my column, they are funny, smart, caring, generous, and most importantly, kind enough to keep silent about they times they've seen me naked.

I was polite, if not completely kind, in my latest work for Elevate Difference (formerly Feminist Review). But I was sorely disappointed in my subject, a book I hoped could provide practical advice and ideas to a burned-out social justice activist. Instead, I had to read 300 pages of warm fuzzies with all of the depth of an "ELECT ME!" campaign postcard. Ugh.

Review of Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out the Best in America. Elevate Difference, November 9, 2010.

In the review, I note how guilty I feel for "nitpicking" a nice fellow like Alan Khazei for the crime of writing a boring book. I wrote the piece several weeks ago, yet the words appeared online when I was deep within a literal nitpicking of my own--my daughter brought home a infestation of kindergarten lice that upended our household for the better part of ten days. My husband, a neatnik who has learned to tolerate his wife's sloppiness, blew through our house with a combination of toxic shampoos and sprays that did little to prevent my karmic retribution. Yes, Alan Khazei, your nitpicky reviewer had to be nitpicked herself. Karma's a bitch!

Now I'm off to check my unpublished stuff for any hints of nastiness to come. I fear my manuscript may include cursing Michele Bachmann with an unending urinary tract infection....

A post-mortem on sanity (and my once-liberal home)

2010-11-08T13:29:00.013-06:00

Who is this proud Minnesota political nerd? Why, your Radical Housewife, of course!

I'm only moments away from delivering a short speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity Minnesota on October 30, 2010. I'm so excited I'm wearing my new shirt from my favorite local store I Like You. The message inside the Minnesota outline? I CAME TO GET DOWN, natch. No one parties like a native blue stater.

At about one o'clock that afternoon I stood at the podium and gave the following remarks:

I speak to you today on behalf of the statewide membership of Minnesota NOW, an activist group that is strictly non-partisan, though as the Pioneer Press kindly noted in a story yesterday, we do have an agenda. Since NOW has been in the game nationally since 1966, this shouldn’t surprise anyone, but no less a political luminary than Sarah Palin lashed out at women’s rights activists a couple months ago, labeling us with the very peculiar term Cackle of Rads.

(This is where I paused for laughter that never came.)

Cackle of Rads was Palin’s strange Alaskan slang for women who, in her words, "hijacked" feminism from...I don't know, a roving band of grizzly bears or something.

(Silence.)

I know this rally isn't supposed to be partisan, and I agree with that noble aim. However, the truth is not partisan, and the truth is that Sarah Palin, no matter often she repeats it, is not, in fact, the designated mouthpiece for American women. Palin is also laying claim to speak for the protective mothers in American by coming up with another gimmick just as weird to me as the Cackle of Rads: the Mama Grizzlies. According to Palin, the Mama Grizzly is an uber-mom who will “rise up” to protect her children the only way she knows how… by voting for a woman like Sharron Angle who thinks pregnant sexual assault victims need shut up and use their rape lemons to make fetus lemonade. That’s totally insane.

(I thought "fetus lemonade" was really fuckin' funny, but the crowd sure didn't.)

We all know that Sarah Palin is a mother—it’s a big part of her sales pitch. I’m a mother too. My son is ten and my daughter is five. When I see the level of insanity that has infected our public discourse, the last symbol I as a mother want to identify with is a creature known for homicidal paranoia. I don't want to run back into my cave and hide, either! I want to do something to make the world a sane place for my children, your children, and the Palin children. In short, I'm not a mama grizzly--instead, I'm a mama cow.

(Crickets)

.I'm going to tell you a story that was shared with me by one of my feminist role models, a woman named Barbra Peterson who just happens to be a bovine midwife by trade. Barbra lives on a farm not far from Duluth with a herd of dairy cattle named after her own feminist heroes: Susan B. Anthony, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Mooo-seley Braun...

(This is where I finally realized that I was absolutely, positively, bombing and I needed to signal to my audience that I was aware of this fact.)

WOW! TOUGH CROWD TODAY!

Anyway, up north near the farm it's not unusual to be visited by coyotes or even wolves, all of whom would be delighted to chew on a slab of fresh beef. Barbra tells me that when the herd senses danger, the healthy mothers will gather the children and elders, that is, the most vulnerable in their community to attack, into the center of a circle that they form with their bodies. Barbra says that this circle of care is instinctive to the mama cows, and it's something very remarkable and inspiring to watch, especially for those who consider the cow a stupid creature good for dinner, shoes, and not much else.

Today, on a day when we celebrate sanity, I ask all of you to reconsider the language of grizzly bears, cackling rads (whatever the hell those are), teabaggers, head stompers, disgusting lemonade makers, and really just slow yourself down…be like a cow.

Be calm. Eat, sleep, and take care of each other. Thank you.

(Polite clapping)

At least I fared better than the next speaker, a woman from Students for a Democratic Society who had her mic unplugged and was yanked offstage. Apparently calling the USA a supporter of terrorism (in Palestine and elsewhere) wasn't a very sane thing to do.

In hindsight, this should have alerted me to the fact that the political climate in my state was worse than I imagined. On Tuesday, to the surprise of the Rad One and the rest of the Minnesota punditry, the Republican party scored a majority of seats our state legislature--the first such win for the Minnesota GOP in 38 years. I'm 39. I don't remember a time when my state wasn't majority LIBERAL. Mark Dayton could still pull out a squeaker in the governor's race, but that fact gives me no comfort. A squeaker?! In Minnesota? Really?? Did I hallucinate those votes for Paul Wellstone? WHERE IS MY SANE MINNESOTA?

I came to get down, unaware of how down things really were. 2011 can only get worse.

I'll cry if I want to.

2010-11-03T12:39:00.005-05:00

Why cry when you can listen to Amy Winehouse singing Lesley Gore?

I'm extremely annoyed with the election results, but I'm not crying, not like I was in 2002 or 2004--those Novembers I wept until my eyes were dry. I'm irritated, yes, that Obama is talking DADT bullshit when I'm supposed to be watching All My Children. I'm beyond furious that my home state, THE LAND OF HUBERT HUMPHREY, a place that used to be ice-blue, will have a legislature under Republican control beginning in January, but I'm not crying.

I'll start crying later, for if the teabags have their way, you're going to see civil rights peeled back, tax money diverted from schools, libraries, and social programs and funneled into the fur-lined pockets of the rich, and "family values" hardening ever more into us vs. them, and gawd help you if you're not one of them.

THAT'S when I'll cry!

Terror hits home

2010-10-27T14:35:00.010-05:00

My friend Laurie Olmon, whom I've written about before ("Candidate Confidential," August 2010) shared some distressing news with me: last weekend, persons unknown vandalized her campaign signs with the slogan BABY KILLER. In lipstick, an interesting choice.

At first, I reacted as I would to any friend who'd been bullied, with words of support, all very "you go, girl!" kinda stuff. I wasn't worried.

Hours later, I watched the video of the MoveOn worker getting her head stepped on by a Teabagger in Kentucky. I clicked links that would allow me to download Rachel Maddow's documentary "The Assasination of Dr. Tiller." I started to worry, and I remain so. Very, very worried.

Obviously, this vandal knows that Laurie does not literally kill babies. I've been called this name a few times myself--in the presence of my two young children, no less. No, the term "baby killer" is not meant to be a literal accusation; it is meant to invoke fear. "Baby killer" is a term that successfully whipped a lunatic like Scott Roeder into a homicidal frenzy. It transforms a debate into a fight, a discussion into a brawl, a disagreement into a head-stomping melee that puts someone in the hospital.

It means something to use those words. It means the same thing to Laurie and me as it did to Dr. George Tiller: YOU ARE A TARGET.

I don't mean to suggest that this vandal means to kill Laurie, any more than she (lipstick, remember?) truly believes that Laurie has committed murder herself. But isn't it something that this angry woman didn't write "FUCK OFF"? Nor did she scribble "YOU SUCK" or "I HATE YOU." She chose her words very carefully. She wrote what she did to scare the shit out of someone who put herself in the public eye to protect the rights of others.....not unlike a certain dead doctor from Kansas.

What to do? Here's a few ideas:

Attend the Rally for Sanity Minnesota, Saturday October 30, in the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol. I will be speaking on behalf of the Cackle of Rads...er, Minnesota NOW around 12:45-ish, though that may change. Check my Twitter feed for updates: @radicalhw.
If you have the means, consider making donations to the following: the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers in North America; the National Network of Abortion Funds, a group "connecting rights to resources," because a woman only has a choice when she can afford to pay for it; and the radical cacklers at the National Organization for Women.
Vote next Tuesday like your life depends on it....because it does.

Autumn and impermanence

2010-10-25T07:58:00.011-05:00

From the Upajjhatthana Sutta:

Birth will end in death.
Youth will end in old age.
Wealth will end in loss.
Meetings will end in separation.
All things in cyclic existence are transient, are impermanent.

The late fall is a very difficult time for me, for evidence of our cyclic existence is everywhere. As the leaves fall, we attempt to laugh at the specter of death by hanging plastic skeletons from trees and sticking gag gravestones in the dirt. I eat tiny Milky Ways by the bagful to keep my anxieties from taking me over.

Today is the 8th anniversary of the death of Paul Wellstone, and an essay I wrote for the occasion is up at Minnesota Public Radio News, called Paul Wellstone, a teacher in life and also in death. Wellstone is only the most famous person I mourn in October. On the 29th I remember the last time I spoke to another Carleton friend, Liz, who called from her hospital bed in 2007 to wish me a happy birthday. My grief for her feels so fresh that I remain shocked that three years have passed since she died.

I like Buddhist philosophy for its insistence that all things are connected. Death exists because life exists, and life is a good thing. Fear exists because hope exists. Chocolate exists! My children anticipate Halloween so intensely they quiver, just like I did in the days when I could disconnect skulls from the heads they used to live in.

The Uphajjhatthana Sutta also includes this reminder: [The Buddhas] cannot remove our suffering with their hands....I am my own protector.

That's the way my essay on Paul Wellstone ends. I just wish that mourning Liz were as easy as joining a campaign.

Smart People Into Kicking Emmer

2010-10-19T08:05:00.012-05:00

SPIKE! Can you dig it? If you can come up with a better acronym, let me know. Tom Emmer must go down in flames come November.

There are so many reasons to detest Emmer that it's hard to pick just one. Regressive tax policy? Slashing our state's already pathetic social safety net? Support for racial profiling laws like Arizona's? Ugh. All of these positions are typical of a person who refuses, as the Native American aphorism goes, to walk a mile in another person's moccasins. If Emmer wants to experience the freedom from government that he claims to want, he ought to visit Mogadishu. While he's there, he can ask how many of the remaining citizens have relatives who emigrated to Minnesota. I suspect he'll find quite a few, as the Twin Cities area has the largest concentration of Somali expats in North America, and I don't think they came because they preferred the weather.

Last week I wrote up a press release on behalf of Minnesota NOW on what was just the latest evidence of Emmer's indifference to people who neither look, think, nor love like him:

October 13, 2010

All Minnesotans, regardless of party affiliation, are shocked by the recent spike in gay teen suicides across the nation. Here at home, 15-year-old Anoka resident Justin Aaberg took his own life in July, a desperate act his mother believes was motivated by unchecked bullying at her son’s school. Minnesota NOW, as a partner in the Safe Schools for All Coalition, hopes that renewed attention to this public health emergency will finally increase momentum for anti-bullying legislation that could do so much to protect vulnerable adolescents.

But that won’t happen if Tom Emmer is elected Governor, warns Shannon Drury, State President of Minnesota NOW.

When Rep. Emmer was asked by a Fox 9 debate moderator on October 9 how he’d respond to this crisis, Emmer said he does not support this kind of legislation. Rep. Emmer said, “we should all be able to have [our] point of view and respect each other but we don’t need more laws trying to get in between people.”

With this statement, Emmer implied that bullies are entitled to their so-called “point of view,” even as they harass and intimidate their peers quite literally to death. “Sexism and racism are also points of view,” says Drury. “Would Governor Emmer fail to enforce other Minnesota civil rights statutes as well?”

Minnesota NOW, the Safe Schools for All Coalition, and a bipartisan majority in the State Legislature supported the Safe Schools for All Bill that was vetoed by Governor Tim Pawlenty in May 2009. Today, State Senator Scott Dibble and Representative Jim Davnie (both DFL-Minneapolis) announced plans to re-introduce this bill in the upcoming special session. Minnesota NOW’s statewide membership applauds the Senators for moving this important bill forward.

Rep. Emmer claims “we don’t need more laws,” yet he supports a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage (Source: http://www.emmerforgovernor.com/issues/socialvalues/). “Apparently, Emmer does support more laws, after all—laws that reinforce his social agenda at others’ expense,” Drury says.

“Minnesotans are compassionate people. They want to do whatever they can to prevent another death like Justin Aaberg’s. They don’t want other parents to have to do what Tammy Aaberg did—bury her child.”

Dan Savage 2012!

2010-10-12T10:07:00.003-05:00

This is too good not to repost in its entirety. From Seattle's The Stranger, October 11, 2010:

Confidential to the White House
by Dan Savage

Fuck you, you pack of co-opting cowards.

Seriously. You can do a more than offer hope. You have the power to make it better. Right now. Suspend enforcement of DADT. Don't appeal the decision by a federal judge that declared DADT unconstitutional. Stop defending DOMA in court. Keep your promises. Make it better. And if you're not going to keep your promises or do what you can to make it better, White House, then you could at least have the simple human decency to shut the fuck up.

State-sanctioned discrimination against LGBT people legitimizes the kind of anti-gay attitudes and beliefs that lead directly to anti-gay bullying at the ballot box and anti-gay bullying in schools. You can do more. Enough with the speeches. Enough with the pretty words—particularly lifted ones.

Fuck you.

"Choice" is dead.

2010-10-11T08:09:00.004-05:00

...long live "choice."

Remember my Women's Press column about dropping the word from our activist vocabulary? My cat sure did. During an unusually thorough basement cleaning, we discovered my beloved sign from the 2004 March for Women's Lives in sorry condition indeed, for Brixie had pissed all over it.

I had no "choice" but to throw it in the garbage. Appropriate, don't you think?

Who cares about Minnesota girls? I do.

2010-10-05T07:46:00.003-05:00

Today in Minnesota Public Radio News:

Girls need the right to confidential reproductive care, a commentary by Shannon Drury.

The hardest part of parenting is letting go, as Khalil Gibran recognized. I wrote on this subject a year ago for HipMama.com, in a piece titled "Growing Up is No Rainbow, or: Childhoodphobia!" Clearly I have some anxieties about how to raise a healthy, self-possessed daughter.

Her stubbornness and determination were on full display this morning, when she decided that, since the sun was not yet up, she wouldn't have to get ready for school (try explaining the earth's rotation to a grouchy five-year-old). As Matt always says, our job is to build her confidence to unrealistic levels so that when the outside world tears her down, she'll have plenty left over to survive, even thrive. I wonder if that's why she thinks she can control time.

Who cares about Minnesota women? I do.

2010-09-29T16:25:00.004-05:00

...but Nick Coleman doesn't know me, and the StarTribune doesn't care.

Coleman wrote a well-meaning column in the September 19th edition called: "Women face challenges, but who cares?" His jumping-off point was the current governor's race, featuring three well-off white dudes, none of whom are particularly excited about how Minnesota women are faring these days.

Like I said, Coleman clearly means well. But goddammit if I'm not ALSO annoyed by the fact that Coleman himself is a well-off white dude (though not nearly as well off as Mark Dayton). My gut reaction to the piece? THANKS FOR CARING, DAD! He felt like HE was the only person on the staff at the Strib who could tackle this issue? Couldn't he pass the subject along to a female colleague? There ARE women on the Opinion page who aren't Katherine Kersten, ya know.

I e-mailed the paper a commentary submission the afternoon of the 19th that was deemed unfit for print....AGAIN (perhaps due to the fact that I badmouth the paper whenever possible). What follows is the essay in its entirety.

Who cares about Minnesota women? I do. I'm not the only one, either.

By Shannon Drury

Nick Coleman issued a challenge in his September 19 column: who will speak for Minnesota women? I can’t claim to represent every female in our state, but I can speak on behalf of the more than 2000 women and men who are members of our state’s chapter of National Organization for Women (NOW). The statistics quoted by Mr. Coleman, while disturbing, are not new to us; they are the reason that we do the work we do.

Unfortunately, Minnesota NOW and our allies are increasingly fighting against a culture that sees gains made by individual women as evidence of gains for all women. The electoral victories of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin are laudable, but as Coleman points out, these wins have done little to end domestic violence or close the wage gap. The appointments of Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan won’t truly make history until their review of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 renders the 2007 Ledbetter v. Goodyear ruling null and void (for those not up to date on feminist history, that doozy of a decision allowed Goodyear to get away with shorting Ledbetter’s salary for over twenty years).

I was born and raised in Minneapolis by Hubert Humphrey voters who believed him when he said “compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.” As Coleman wrote in his column, a disproportionate number of today’s low-wage workers are women, a large segment of whom also unpaid caregivers to children and/or elders. Quality health care (including, as Coleman notes, sexual health care), child care, and schooling are increasingly out of reach for Minnesota women, but our current governor recently likened federal health care funding to illegal drugs: toxic and corrupting. In such an environment, one can forgive Coleman for guessing that nobody cares.

What happened? I have some theories: inevitable backlash, conservative retrenchment, and a consumer culture that hijacked feminism’s language to sell us cigarettes, luxury cars, and high-heeled shoes. We’ve come a long way, baby.

It’s an irony not lost on me that the study Coleman quotes comes from the research institute that carries the name of my hometown’s former mayor. Minnesota has moved away from its culture of inclusion, towards an attitude of every man (pun intended) for himself. I commend Coleman for bringing these inequities to light, and I urge Minnesotans to ask their governor candidates what specific plans they have for eradicating them.

Shannon Drury

President, Minnesota NOW

Attention Literary Agents!

2010-09-28T08:19:00.004-05:00

I see that you are interested in women writers telling the secret truth that parenthood is sometimes soul-sucking hard work.

'All Joy and No Fun: The Parent's Paradox' Author Scores Book Deal

HAVE I GOT A BOOK FOR YOU!

In my book, I too reveal painful truths about parenting, but I offer something that readers can do about it! (hint: it involves scads of government money. Yep, I'm a pinko and a damned good one.)

This hilarious, informative, passionately defended, and FINISHED book is a political memoir called The Radical Housewife. Its 70,000 words describe a decade of feminist parenting by a Minneapolis-based liberal committed to destroying the myth of American "family values," one dirty diaper and Palinista at a time.

Contact me at theradicalhousewife (at) gmail (dot) com for a proposal and first chapter.

YEEEEEEEE-HAW!

Domestic violence as "other"

2010-09-23T08:32:00.010-05:00

On the afternoon of September 20, I was contacted by a City Pages writer asking for comment on an acid attack on a woman in St. Louis Park. The writer asked fairly predictably questions, including if I knew anything about acid as part of a larger trend, perhaps linked to an increase in honor attacks in this country.

I wrote him the following:

This is the first I have heard about this Minneapolis attack. The KARE 11 piece (that he linked me to) is short on information other than this was a domestic assault, unusual only in its execution. Do you have information that leads you to believe this was an "honor" attack?

Acid attacks are certainly gruesome; their very nature makes them more likely to earn headlines. A troubled woman who cuts herself won't get on TV, but splashing herself with acid will. I wonder if your article seeks to sensationalize these acts of violence as a "new" problem, when, as you're no doubt aware, statistics estimate that one in four women will experience this kind of violence in her lifetime (from a handy guide to such things at http://www.ncadv.org/files/Minnesota.pdf). I'm happy to talk about the plague of violence in this state, as well as the dearth of funding for victims and their families under the reign of T-Paw, as long as I'm able to note that less sensational stories happen ALL THE TIME. And nobody seems to care.

The author assuaged my fears about sensationalism appropriately, so I wrote him the following e-mail, which we both considered on the record (the words in bold are the quotes Van Dernberg chose to run):

This is the first acid attack I've heard of in the Twin Cities. I don't blame the local media for jumping on this story--the attacker's weapon of choice was so gruesome that they couldn't help themselves. If this man had punched his girlfriend in the face for ignoring him, no one would have noticed. The story also resonates among the many who saw the Time magazine cover with the acid-melted face of a young Afghani woman, and linking the two seems inevitable, especially since the attacker has a foreign-sounding name.

In fact, I was just reading the comments on the Minneapolis story on KSTP.com, all of which were horrifying. The victim was described as "lucky," because in her home country she would have been stoned to death. Nowhere in the article is the victim's country of origin mentioned.

And that's what I find the most disturbing about this story: that the attacker's race, his supposed foreignness, and his weapon of choice can converge to make this attack something “other,” rather than just another case of domestic violence in Minnesota.

A 2006 CDC report stated that women in the US experience around 4.8 million intimate partner related assaults and rapes. (http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/dvp/ipv_factsheet.pdf). This number is an estimate, of course, because many victims do not report their abuse. Again, I wonder if Jarso Yohannes Adem's victim would have come forward if she'd only been punched in the mouth? I sound cynical because I'm so frustrated. Our state still fails to see domestic abuse as a public health problem. Back in September 2007, I wrote an article for the Minnesota Women's Press that called for the resignation of Rep. Mark Olson, who pled guilty to misdemeanor domestic assault. Olson was ousted in the next primary, but no member of Republican leadership asked him to step down. Gov. Pawlenty stated before the conviction that he ought to step down, but failed to apply pressure after the fact.

Pawlenty, interestingly enough, is behind dramatic state funding cuts to domestic violence shelters and prevention services (http://www.ncadv.org/files/Minnesota.pdf). This is not to imply that he doesn't care at all about victims, but it tells you where his priorities are. We as a state are implicated whenever we turn a blind eye, either to a victim that we know, or to a news story about funding cuts that we fail to act upon.

I can't call any attack on a woman positive, but if this acid attack does anything to provoke a frank discussion about how inured we are to partner violence, I'll be happy.

Regarding the coverage of the woman who doused herself: as I mentioned before, acid is having a moment. A mentally ill person seeking attention while self-harming would be wise to choose such a method. The fascination with the fact that this was a hoax feeds into lingering suspicion that all domestic violence claims are without merit. Many feel that victims manipulate their stories for attention, sympathy, or advantage in legal proceedings. Even Rihanna, a beloved pop star, was thought by millions of teens to have been somehow culpable in her own vicious beating. If Rihanna can't catch a break, how can the average girl on the street hope to be believed? Domestic crimes remain hidden, perpetrators believe that their behavior is "normal," and we all just go on our merry way.

Did I make myself clear? I'm not sure.

Hart Van Denberg’s piece appeared September 22, with the two quotes above, THREE PICTURES of acid-burned victims, the words “Afghanistan, South Asia, and Africa,” and a reader comment that said I was being awfully insensitive to the St. Louis Park victim by suggesting that she’d been better off with a punch in the face.

?????

You tell me, readers: did the finished City Pages piece express my concern about these cases? Or am I justified in my worry that I became part of City Pages’ excuse for running exploitative photos of acid-scorched faces?

Things on my mind this Tuesday

2010-09-21T08:33:00.003-05:00

Acid attacks on women--abroad and at home.

http://kstp.com/news/stories/s1748469.shtml

Lame arguments for banning same-sex marriage.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/245649/case-marriage-editors

Juliana Hatfield writes better songs now than she did back in the day, but nobody knows it.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001BRZ556/ref=cm_rdp_product

I seem to have been caught up in a Twitter virus.

http://www.businessinsider.com/a-security-flaw-is-slamming-twitter-right-now-2010-9

Forever 21, a store for teens, sells maternity clothes.

http://www.forever21.com/category.asp?catalog_name=FOREVER21&category_name=maternity_main&Page=all&promotype=2&cookie_test=1

It's a gonna be a busy day!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Who don't like dishtowels?

2010-09-20T07:45:00.007-05:00

Yes, fans, I have new work appearing in a new venue: Elevate Difference, which is appropriate for two divergent reviews of products by the company Sin in Linen. Your link appears below.

Tattoo Flash Print Dishtowels, reviewed by none other than The Radical Housewife herself.

On the home page of ED you'll see that another writer took a stab at reviewing a set of bedsheets with same retro tattoo print. The contrast between Irene Wazgowska's more serious approach and mine made me laugh out loud--my snark is so thick you need to wipe it with ....well, a punk rock dishtowel.

Enjoy it with a cold one and Hole's "Plump" burning through your speakers.

Melissa Harris Lacewell 2012!

2010-09-18T07:58:00.006-05:00

By now, interested parties are aware that The Manuscript has a chapter called "The Best Feminist in the World." Tongue firmly planted in cheek, you read my case for Hillary Clinton, Jessica Valenti, Shirley Chisholm, and ME. All that changed today.

The following clip from the brilliant Rachel Maddow (a Best Feminist candidate herself) is extraordinary not simply for the fact that Maddow is bringing to light how outrageously disgusting the new crop of anti-choice conservatives are. What totally blew my mind, and should blow yours, is the passion, intelligence, and calm conviction of Maddow's guest, Princeton professor Melissa Harris Lacewell.

Says The New Best Feminist in the World:

"There is no place in the world and no time in history where restricting women‘s reproductive rights makes a people or a nation more free or more equal. These extreme positions on abortion are without any question a war on American girls and women."

"When you talk about the rape and incest clause, I suspect that many Americans, maybe even many pro-choice Americans think that rape and incest and pregnancy resulting from it is a pretty unusual occurrence. ....but the fact is that sexual assault is an embarrassingly common experience......we‘re talking about hundreds of women, thousands of women in pregnancies."

"Look, I‘m from a people who really did experience the need to hold on to a God who would see them through difficult times, including generations of black women who in slavery were forced to bear the children of their rapists. .....But I'm also an American who believes that the point of government isn‘t to make life so hard for half of our citizens that the only force there to help them is God. We, as a government and as a people, deserve and should do better."

I LOVE YOU, MELISSA HARRIS LACEWELL. You should be running for Senate, not Sharon "rape lemonade" Angle or Christine "no touchy" O'Donnell. Let's start her fanclub now!

"Parenting" as purpose

2010-09-16T07:48:00.008-05:00

Lisa Belkin, she of 2003's infamous "Opt-Out Generation" piece, wrote an essay in last Sunday's New York Times magazine that's eerily echoing the finishing touches I'm putting on The Manuscript.

You read that right: FINISHING. The end is in sight. I should be done by Matt's birthday, which is next Wednesday. I will have to buy him something extra wonderful to thank him for his patience, support, and confidence when I had none. Anyone got a line on a Favre bobblehead for the birthday boy?

Back to Belkin. In "Living to be a Parent," she writes that a gaggle of academic psychologists want to revise Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs so that parenting sits at the top. THE TOP! Belkin complains that this emphasis on "parenting," both as a verb and as a crowning achievement in life, is what's responsible for all the spoiled brats who entered college last week with helicopters in tow. "They are more dependent," she writes, "expecting trophies just for trying and texting their parents to ask for advice about what to eat for breakfast."

I take a different perspective in The Radical Housewife, the book. I'm not worried about the Yale frosh who don't know how to put quarters in the laundry machine--he'll be fine. I'm worried about what happens to all the other kids out there, the kids who don't have a chance to get to Yale because the rich folks with the means to place "parenting" at the center of their lives have diverted funds away from them.

It's a competitive culture, in case you haven't noticed. Resources are not allocated evenly. The haves hoard, and the have-nots are stuck. In my kids' school district, the only schools that consistently make Adequate Yearly Progress are the ones that receive no Title I funding anyway. In plainer terms, the better-off the family, the better-off the school, the better-off your future.

And while this seems obvious, I'll mention it anyway: putting parenting at the center of your universe is only going to make all you middle- and upper-class parents (like Belkin and other NYT subscribers) MORE anxious, insecure, and miserable, which leaves you (and me) even more vulnerable to swallowing this Mommy Wars bullshit.

Chew on that while I finish my book.

Overheard on 9/11

2010-09-11T18:00:00.004-05:00

Elliott: Why are they talking on the radio about burning books?
Mom: Oh, some clueless moron in Florida wants to burn the Koran because he thinks--

(long pause while Mom figures out how to explain all this to a very curious ten-year-old)

Mom: Let's just say that there's some guy who wants to burn a book to get attention. And it's working.
Elliott: But why would someone burn a book? What's so wrong with a book that someone would burn it?
Mom: Nothing. Books don't have feelings. They're only words on a page.
Miriam: I love books.
Elliott: I don't think they should burn it.
Mom: I don't either.
Elliott: I think they should READ it.
Mom: You're right. If more people read more books, the world would be a happier place.
Miriam: I READ BOOKS!
Mom: I'm not worried about you, honey. It's the rest of the world I'm worried about.

Book power design by Fat American.

Research is fun!

2010-09-10T09:47:00.014-05:00

While much of my work emphasizes the former half of the creative nonfiction genre, some if it has to be true. This requires research. Too often I'm bogged down in statistics from the Guttmacher Institute or my state's health and human services web page, but sometimes I stumble upon material that is too insane to keep to myself. Today's hilarity is brought to us by a pamphlet called The Christian Worldview on the Family, credited to none other than George "rentboy.com" Rekers.

BUT! Because The Radical Parasite lives to challenge you, I have slipped in a few Bible passages that Rekers forgot, courtesy of the good people at Evil Bible.com. Can YOU decide which of God's words you must follow and which you can freely ignore??

Chart by Mrs. Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian.

HERE WE GO!

We affirm that a man's authority as head of his wife is delegated to him by God; ...and that all authority is established by God and no one and no social institution has the right to exert any authority contrary to God's laws or the bounds God has set for the man's office in the family. (Romans 13:1; Ephesians 5:22-23)

All who curse their father or mother must be put to death. They are guilty of a capital offense. (Leviticus 20:9 NLT)

We deny....that wives ought to use Biblical limits on husbands' authority as opportunities to quibble and undermine their husbands' authority. (1 Peter 3:1-6)

If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her. (Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NLT)

We deny both that any man should force his wife to abandon her calling in the home for the sake of mere financial gain unnecessary for minimal physical survival, and that the wife should volunteer to do so (1 Timothy 5:8; Ephesians 5:5); that the trappings of middle-class lifestyle are necessities that justify forcing the wife to work outside the home (1 Timothy 6:8);

If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbors wife. (Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB)

We affirm that God calls the wife to submit willingly in loving obedience and respect to her husband as the Church submits herself to Christ (Ephesians 5:22-24; Colossians 3:18); and that wives with non-Christian husbands are called by God to be a testimony to their husbands by their gentle, submissive obedience, and not to weary them with constant criticism. (1 Peter 3:1-5)

We affirm that a mother's primary duty is to nurture her minor children; that the wife's responsibility is to manage the home and make it a center of ministry (1 Timothy 5:10, 14; Titus 2:3-5; Proverbs 31:10-31); that Christian media therefore should not glamorize outside careers for mothers with minor children; and that the Church ought to commend godly wives and mothers who work at home as role models.

When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment. (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)

We deny that married mothers of minor children should seek male economic provider roles; that Christian wives should put the world's idea of self-fulfillment through careers before the calling of God (Matthew 16:24-26; Mark 8:34,35; Luke 9:23-26); that following God's commands in this area exploits women; and that only women with outside careers are "working women" while others are social and economic "parasites."

I told you it was fun!