Punk Rock Uncle: Yeah, poor Lauca, these moods are pretty bad for her.

Me: Hmm and you know, Bill and I aren’t highly strung, we’re not particularly moody people so it’s been difficult for us for a long time to understand her melt-downs.

Punk Rock Uncle: Weeeeell, you were always pretty flighty.

A morning sitting on my friend’s bed with her looking through her headscarf collection.

More of Lauca’s giftwrapping wonders, this time for her father’s birthday.

Lauca’s newest doll (thrifted) meets her older dolls for a swim.

The cat on my bed.

Our nut tree.

Cormac’s painting.

Flowers for our bees.

One of the punk rock uncle‘s tattoos.

A school of fish.

Image credit.

Apparently a lot has happened for me in the last (almost) seven years of being a mother. When I read Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin back all that time ago, the book causing a big stir and me, with my first baby in my arms, I was though broadly sympathetic towards her, also genuinely troubled at times by the mother character narrating the story. Last week I finally saw the film adaptation and I have to admit to finding the character Eva entirely sympathetic. Not so controversial anymore. What’s changed? This could be partly about the way Tilda Swinton played her. She’s completely fantastic in it. There’s little dialogue in the film and certainly no internal monologue, but Swinton’s expressions are so good that you can pretty much pick out the exact text from the book  that she is playing in any particular shot.

The novel is written in the first person through a series of letters written by Eva, who is coming to term with her ambivalence around motherhood and the incredible difficulties she experienced in mothering her son, Kevin, he who eventually goes on to carry out a schoolyard massacre. In the book you know exactly what Eva’s thinking, if not exactly whether her perspective is all together reliable; in the film you have to fill that in for yourself but Lynne Ramsey’s directing is incredibly skillful. (I loved the feel and look of this film but then I also loved Ramsey’s Morvern Callar).

There are so many good ‘motherhood’ scenes in this film – Eva beaten down and exhausted, driven to soothing herself by standing next to a jack hammer on a crowded street in order to drown our her colicky baby’s incessant cries; Eva, equal parts bored and defeated, desperately trying to conjure better mothering from herself for a defiant pre-schooler; and then also, Eva, increasingly isolated from her husband for failing to exhibit the maternal proficiencies he expects.

I just wanted to bundle Eva up and take her along to my feminist mothers’ group.

Only one element of the film is problematic for me and that is the casting choice for the teenage son, Kevin. All the Kevins are gloriously sullen through the various ages but Ezra Miller is a seriously handsome young man and he plays the teenage part very well but his casting tends to sexualise the older ‘Kevin’ character.Perhaps, given how charismatic Swinton is you really need to have someone equally as striking to watch on the screen with her? If I’d been in charge of casting I would also have reconsidered John C. Reilly for the husband/father, too. Reilly is a marvellous character actor but is he a believable pairing for someone as chic as Swinton? Granted he’s supposed to be a very different person to her, the all-American ‘everyman’ but I still didn’t find it worked for me. Anyway, whose asking me?

Did you see the film, did you like it? (Rachel Hills can be excused seeing as we’ve already discussed her dislike of the film).

Apart from the fact that doing anything without consent is both illegal and immoral and this man surely doesn’t want to be doing either – and how can you argue against a tiny bit of clarification when it has the potential to stop a world of pain – consent is actually the sexy part. Without consent it isn’t even sex; it is a flat-out violation. This man assures me that he isn’t trying to rape anyone, what he is saying is that he just wants to be having hot sex and he wants to be a hot partner so he doesn’t want to kill the excitement by stopping and asking her to sign a consent form.

I don’t know why the idea has persisted that asking for consent is necessarily a clinical business – what is stilted about – more? do you want to? do you like? Because “mood-killer”? Are you kidding me? That moment when they close the space between you both and ask you to put your cards on the table – is this on or not, can I do this with you – is one of the most heart-flippingly exciting moments in all of existence. Eat those moments up because they are the episodes of your life that you will daydream about when you’re ninety years old. That anticipation – that moment when your asking is simultaneously both aggressive and submissive – it is what fuels a billion films and books. Granted it is not pleasant when you’re turned down, and for the record, it isn’t easy turning someone down either. Something is usually lost; the end of a good conversation at the very least, and sometimes even a friendship. But it is a gamble you take because you can’t bear another moment of not knowing; it is the gamble you take because when someone says ‘yes’ to you it is about the hottest feeling you’ll ever know.

Yeah, and now Gina Rinehart is set to be the richest woman in the world.

It wasn’t called a super-fucking-profits tax for nothing.

One of those couples doing the gender-free parenting thing has a kid who is now five years old and off to school and they’re all ready to announce that… it’s a boy!

Laxton, a UK-based web editor, and her partner, Cooper, decided to keep Sasha’s sex a secret when he was still in the womb. The birth announcement stated the gender-neutral name of their child, but skipped the big reveal. Up until recently, the couple only told a few close friends and family members that Sasha was a boy and managed to keep the rest of the world in the dark. But now that he’s starting school the secret’s out.

For years, Becks has been referring to her child, the youngest of three, as “the infant” on her personal blog. But guarding the public from her son’s gender was only part of her quest to let her kid just be a kid.

Oh god, sweet relief, the great gender binary can go on safely now.

I was hardly one of those tragically vulnerable teenagers. I suppose I was the kind of wanton female the lawmakers and wrath-of-God types look down on. There’s no doubt that I was stupid and irresponsible, and I certainly knew better than what you might have surmised from my actions. By some standards, I suppose you could say I was a slut. Those sleazy doctors left no doubt that that’s how they saw me. Some would say I got what I deserved, or that I deserved to die.

The arguments would be endless, but they would be irrelevant to the facts: From the moment I started looking for an abortion, not once did I even consider going through with the pregnancy. Not for one second. It simply was not going to happen. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was going to stop me, and it could have cost me my life. And this is what I had in common with millions and millions of women throughout time and history. When a woman does not want to be pregnant, the drive to become unpregnant can turn into a force equal to the nature that wants her to stay pregnant. And then she will look for an abortion, whether it’s legal or illegal, clean or filthy, safe or riddled with danger. This is simply a fact, whatever our opinion of it. And whether we like it or not, humans, married and unmarried, will continue to have sex—wisely, foolishly, violently, nicely, hostilely, pleasantly, dangerously, responsibly, carelessly, sordidly, exaltedly—and there will be pregnancies: wanted, unwanted, partly wanted, partly unwanted.

A society that does not accept the facts is a childish society, and a society that makes abortion illegal—and I believe that the PBAB is a calculated step in exactly that direction—is a cruel and backward society that makes being female a crime.

Can you ethically ignore power bestowed upon or generated by you when it would give you the opportunity as a feminist intellectual to change things on a significant scale for others? Also, what right do people have to expect this of individuals – Jill Filopovic is tired and apparently unwell, she is also beaten down with disgust at ‘mob mentality’ Internet behaviour? (But then La Lubu‘s questioning of what one defines as inappropriate Internet behaviour and what that says about you and your privilege has given me pause for thought. I am highly sympathetic to Filopovic with regards to her reaction to ‘mob mentality’, I find myself easily horrified by pile-ons and gotchas, too, but has this allowed us to ignore more important injustices – I don’t know?).

From La Lubu:

I want to speak to you on some of the overall dynamics I’m witnessing on these recent posts and comment threads. From my perspective, there is an almost corporate-style mode of abdication of responsibility. The fact that Feministe has multiple staff bloggers will necessarily result in this default in the absence of a formal structure of consensus among the bloggers and in the absence of a mission statement. It seems to me that Feministe vacillates between being a pop-culture entertainment blog; an informative source for international news relating to women and feminism; a galvanizing instrument for political action; and a “LiveJournal”-style space for venting. Although there is a comments policy, there isn’t a declared mission statement of….goals, dreams, boundaries of any sort on what Feministe is or wants to be; nor is there a transparent description or process of how conflict within the community will be resolved. For that matter, there isn’t a definition of the community—does it refer solely to the staff bloggers, or to the commentariat as well?

This is very alienating to me as a labor unionist, as I come from a tradition that has very clear statements on who and what we are, and clear boundaries on process, policy, and conflict resolution. The stock answer in the blogosphere at large is a mercantile one—”if you don’t like what we’re selling, take your business elsewhere.” I don’t necessarily perceive this to be the attitude of Feministe, but strongly feel that the absence of a mission statement and attendant processes contributes to the hostile dynamics in the comment section.

But back to the “corporate style” as I call it, which I see very frequently in the comment section and is clearly evident in the recent threads: an ahistoricity, a blurring of boundaries during controversy or conflict, an assertion of “objectivity”, “rationality” and dismissal of emotion (particularly anger)….these are all concepts essential to the construction of whiteness as a political identity (which is to say, a means of teaching the people who are taught they are white, how to be “white”. I say this because I’ve been getting a whole lot of folks dropping by this blog lately since I was linked on Maya’s post at Alas, and I want to be crystal-clear to people unfamiliar with the term “white” as referring to anything other than light skin. I’m talking about the “whitewashing” of people of European descent; the assimilation into a “whiteness” that exists solely in opposition to people of color and other colonized persons). Even if the overt hostility of the comment section were abated, the affirmation of the ways and means of middle-class white communication are very uninviting (to say the least).

Because, this below from La Lubu also, is pretty spot on…

“The feminist blogosphere is: young, but not too young (25-35); mostly white (and of northern european extraction); middle to upper-middle class; highly educated (always degreed, usually grad school or law degree); able-bodied and healthy; non-religious (but typically with a Protestant or Jewish background); childfree by choice (also not a caretaker of an elderly or disabled adult); body size from thin to very thin; cisgender; heterosexual; conventionally feminine/pretty; fashionable; not employed in a nontraditional (>25% female participation) workforce; native English speaking (family of origin usually native English speaking also); non-indigenous and several generations removed from immigrant ancestors; raised in a nuclear family (either intact or divorced—but not “unwed” or extended family); lives in a large metropolis; favors capitalism; unmarried/unpartnered (meaning: no formal or legal ties of responsibility to a partner); never incarcerated (no family incarcerated either); and has plenty of personal contact with people in positions of actual power (gets invited to policymaking meetings/summits).”

Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.

(There is something else about this debate that appeals to me and that is the way in which it is calling ‘choice feminism’ into proper question for a wider audience. I know this puts me at odds with some feminists, some whom I greatly respect, but I remain highly dubious of ‘choice feminism’, that is, the notion that simply making a choice makes any act feminist for a woman and that all choices are equally feminist. Yes, this makes feminism personally confronting at times – it should be. We live in a patriarchy, feminism challenges that, and removing all the splinters of patriarchy from our brain should be a difficult exercise, it should be one where we have to stop and think and re-examine ourselves and wonder and struggle. Being raised in a system of thinking that oppresses you and then trying to identify all the reaches of that oppression? That’s hard work. And because it isn’t a system that oppresses us all equally, some are disadvantaged many times over (eg. racism, poverty, ableism, homophobia etc.), and because many of us are also advantaged by others’ disadvantage the work of identifying oppression is actually incredibly difficult).

Now, back to the topic of this post, here are two fantastic pieces about why pro-life is anti-feminist, you should really read them in their entirety but here’s excerpts anyway.

From Anne Summers in The Age:

So what is a feminist? Can you be a political conservative and a feminist? I would say, Yes. Can you be (that heavily loaded oxymoron) ”pro-life” and a feminist. I say an emphatic, No.

Let me elaborate. Feminism might be blandly defined as the support for women’s political, economic and social equality, and a feminist as someone who advocates such equality, but these general principles need practical elaboration and application. What does economic equality actually mean? How can women in practice achieve social equality? As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women’s ability to be independent.

There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one’s fertility. To achieve the first, women need the education and training to be able to undertake work that pays well. To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.

Feminism has taken on all sorts of issues over the decades, from the need for childcare to criminalising domestic violence to the rights of sex workers. Feminism has undertaken campaigns for everything from equal pay to paid maternity leave to the need for more women in parliament. There have been debates with, for example, some supporting women in the military, others claiming women are inherently pacifist.

But whatever the differences and however the issues have evolved over the years, with new ones (like sexual harassment) emerging as we develop greater understanding of women’s experiences as new barriers are broken, the fundamentals have not and will not change.

From Tedra Osell in Crooked Timber:

The bottom line about abortion is this. Do you trust women to make their own moral judgments? If you are anti-abortion, then no. You do not. You have an absolute moral position that you don’t trust anyone to question, and therefore you think that abortion should be illegal. But the second you start making exceptions for rape or incest, you are indicating that your moral position is not absolute. That moral judgment is involved. And that right there is where I start to get angry and frustrated, because unless you have an absolute position that all human life (arguably, all life period, but that isn’t the argument I’m engaging with right now) are equally valuable (in which case, no exceptions for the death penalty, and I expect you to agonize over women who die trying to abort, and I also expect you to work your ass off making this a more just world in which women don’t have to choose abortions, but this is also not the argument I’m engaging right now), then there is no ground whatsoever for saying that there should be laws or limitations on abortion other than that you do not trust women. I am completely serious about this.

Finally, for good measure and because it is also relevant you could read Margaret Atwood’s current piece for The Guardian reflecting upon her brilliant novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which was first printed way back in 1985:

I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the “Christian” tradition, itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the church’s behaviour and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organisation would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)

The Handmaid’s Tale has often been called a “feminist dystopia”, but that term is not strictly accurate. In a feminist dystopia pure and simple, all of the men would have greater rights than all of the women. It would be two-layered in structure: top layer men, bottom layer women. But Gilead is the usual kind of dictatorship: shaped like a pyramid, with the powerful of both sexes at the apex, the men generally outranking the women at the same level; then descending levels of power and status with men and women in each, all the way down to the bottom, where the unmarried men must serve in the ranks before being awarded an Econowife.

Photographs of Cormac by my sister.