“please do not post any photos from last night”

I have mixed feelings about this trailer for the documentary, Sexy Baby – a film about developing your sexuality in the digital age – but as I have not yet seen the film it would be unfair to comment too much.

I don’t want us to be overly anxious as parents about teenagers. For instance,  the problem with sexting isn’t about new technology or the (incautious) joy of sharing naked photos, it’s really about slut-shaming, which isn’t new, it’s a problem older than the hills. Perhaps a reflection of how young my own children are, of more concern to me is the accessibility of hardcore porn on the Internet, which is also covered in this documentary.

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Ask yourself how it would feel if these messages were to you as a mother

Shaming teenage parents is wrong.

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Three things I like

This poem by writer, Penni Russon over at Eglantine’s Cake. (I love a really good poem about the domestic sphere).

This video of men talking back to men who catcall women on the street.

This blog with really cool little videos of interesting shit for kids to watch.

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“every man became a version of my future son”

Gawker is publishing some really good writing at the moment. Here’s a great piece, “Slanted American Tradition: Broken Children and Unbroken Barriers” from Rosa Cabrera about raising a son and her reflections upon violence in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings (the quote below describes a minor sexual assault):

Two months before giving birth to my son, I walk the four blocks from the train station to see my mother. A boy catches my eye. That looming look in his eyes has something in it that should not belong to a young boy. He begins walking my direction. I hold the heavy door open for him to walk into the apartment building standing on the Concourse of Hip-Hop’s crowded womb.

I hit the elevator button. I notice the baby flesh he still hasn’t lost in the back of his brown hands as they grip a bag of groceries. He asks me questions about the child my body has been carrying for seven months. There’s a quiet fascination, and a strange nervousness in him that I’m embarrassed to fear. I walk into the elevator with him, hating myself for thinking about the knife I forgot at home.  The door slides to a close, and a hand quickly reaches for my shirt to expose my swelling breasts. I knock his hand away.

His face never shifts.

He’s done this before, at least once. The space in the elevator squeezes us closer together. I want to hurt him, but I realize this is a child who could hurt the boy still growing inside me. I ask him what the hell is wrong with him.

And.

I look at the mix of teenage boys and middle-aged men marking the corners with bodies that rock with a tilt. Their faces carry the same stone as the boy in the elevator. The Concourse turf is womanless. I want to not feel so far away. I look down at my swelling womb and wonder what it must feel like to have a son standing among those slanting male bodies.

I relate to that experience she describes there in the second quote, of suddenly looking at men and older boys around me and wondering if this is who my son would become. I remember starting to see these boys and men as boy babies grown up, rather than as male people. It made me see men in a new light – they were now possibilities for who my baby could become, a baby I had grown inside my body. It was a new way of interacting with masculinity with all its good and bad manifestations.

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Boys and masculinity in young adult fiction

This is a fascinating discussion of young adult fiction and its depictions of boys transforming into men by Sarah Mesle in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

WHEN I WAS PREGNANT the first time, I hoped I would have a girl. I know, obviously, that it’s hard to be a girl (the grim realities of Not Having it All, slut shaming, Todd Akin, etc.) but it seemed that parenting a girl, as a task, offered an appealing kind of clarity. You teach a daughter to be a strong, brave woman. But what, I wondered, do you teach a son? “Don’t get too full of yourself,” was about the best I could come up with.

I remember that quandary every time I read an essay about gender in Young Adult literature (which, since I teach it, is often). I see, in the ongoing conversation about Bella and Katniss, our culture pondering whether YA novels support the strong daughters we all want to raise. But as we debate ad nauseam whether, for example, Bella Swan is a dangerous role model for young women, we’ve neglected to ask the corresponding question: what does it tell young men when Edward Cullen and Jacob Black are the role models available to them? Are these barely-contained monsters really the best we can imagine?

The contemporary uncertainty towards young men snaps into focus when we compare recent texts to their literary ancestors — nineteenth-century novels for young readers. Hope Leslie, Jo’s Boys, Northwood, The Lamplighter: these novels heralded the end of boyhood as a happy ending, the beginning of a triumphant journey into a powerful manhood. But today’s YA boys approach their manhood with trepidation. And they should. The adult men who populate YA fictional worlds are often careless, corrupt, incompetent — sometimes even cruel — and only rarely kind.

Thanks to @withabang for the link.

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On judging mothers

I just re-read this guest post I wrote for Feministe earlier this year because I was trying to find it for someone and I have to say, I still agree with me:

If feminism, in approaching the unresolved question of mothers, does not recognise that motherhood is messy and emotional and diverse and political then it has missed the mark. It is important not to try to over-simplify mothers, not to stereotype them and not to ignore that their tasks are real work. Again and again in my writing I try to emphasize that last point, because I suspect much of the hostility towards mothers, including between mothers, would fade if we just understood that mothers are people trying to do a job and it’s consuming and tiring. It is difficult to imagine we would be bothered with The Mummy Wars if we were mobilising around the exploitation of unpaid care in our economy instead.

Because how ludicrous, how shameful, how utterly trivial our judgements of a teenage mother suddenly become with this one acknowledgement – that she is working, that it is hard work and it is for no pay and no recognition. Or our judgements of a mother with a disabled child having an outburst in public; or a mother breastfeeding her toddler; or a mother trying to help her teenage child with their drug addictions; or even, a mother blogging. (Oh, you want to tell me how I should do my unpaid work more to your liking? Fabulous, do tell). It sometimes helps to remember that even the most privileged mother is occasionally woken in the middle of the night by her sick toddler and sits bolt upright in bed, bleary-eyed and shivering in the dark, to catch vomit or shit in her bare hands. It may take some of the sting out of her, apparently, selfish lifestyle.

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What would you do if you found your 13 year old child’s porn viewing history in the browser?

This is an interesting discussion from Tracy Clark-Flory over at Salon. And the expert answers to this one are really quite good.

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How Cormac would like to be a teenager

One night this week I was at a skate bowl with the kids (it’s school holidays). Cormac (age 3) decided he wanted nothing more than to be able to climb the bowl like the skaters were. And he tried and tried and couldn’t.

But then I saw this…

Cormac managed to climb high enough to reach someone’s foot.

And a teenager’s hand came down for him.

And he was up. Finally. With the teenage boys.

Sweetest thing to see.

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THIS is what high school should be like

Intrinsic motivation is a big part of Montessori education but this link is not about my Montessori cult worshipping so feel safe to click on it. This is a pilot program looking at an independent learning high school in the US. One of the best bits starts around the 8 minute mark where the students talk about how they problem-solved making maths interesting for themselves. There are too many terrific quotes in here to pick just one. Just so much going right here.

(Thanks to Buffalo Mama for the link).

 

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Raising daughters to have high self-esteem and the problem with that

So much good analysis in this piece from Jessica Valenti in The Nation – “The Upside of Ugly”:

But this is the problem with teaching young women that the key to happiness and success is self-esteem.

If our end goal for girls is simply to have them feel “confident”—especially about their looks—then we create a trap where anything that makes a girl feel better about her appearance, no matter how harmful, is a reasonable solution. (How many times has plastic surgery been preceded by a “I’m doing it for me!” explanation?)

There may be a bit of head-shaking over young girls going to drastic measures to feel beautiful, but we never seem to question the idea that feeling beautiful is a worthy goal in the first place. We should tell girls the truth: “Beautiful” is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we’re second class citizens.

Girls don’t need more self-esteem or feel-good mantras about loving themselves—what they need is a serious dose of righteous anger. But instead of teaching young women to recognize and utilize their very justifiable rage, we tell them to smile and love themselves.

And:

As my friend writer Jaclyn Friedman once said to me, the problem isn’t that girls don’t know their worth—it’s that they absolutely do know their value in society. Young women know exactly how ugly the culture believes them to be. So when we teach girls to simply “love themselves”, we’re implicitly telling them to accept the world as it is. We’re saying that being beautiful is something worth having when we should be telling them a culture that demands as much is toxic.

Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.

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