Complicated love

This, “I want my mother back” by Lisa Solod in The Broad Side is a wonderful essay on loving a very complicated mother.

I want my mean, bitchy, drunk mother back. The mother who was depressed and melancholy, who said cruel things about my work and criticized my parenting, who undermined instructions to my kids by saying, “You really don’t have to pay attention to her.” I want the mother back who invited herself to my first apartment and then pitched screaming fits in the streets of Boston. The woman who threatened to pull off my arm and beat me with its bloody stump. The mother who said that if I told her she wasn’t a good mother she would kill herself. I want the mother back who came to my college graduation and could barely stand for all the scotch she’d had. The mother who took to her bed for weeks. The woman who stood eating supper in the kitchen because she couldn’t bear the meaninglessness of the family dinner table conversations.

I want her back.

On being an opinion writer

From Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

..Much like a boxer who wants to fight the best in the world, you want to take on the best of your opposition, and their most credible arguments. (My neighbor James Fallows excels at this.)

This is not only for the benefit of people who read you, but for your own. To paraphrase Douglass, a writer is worked on by what she works on. If you spend your time raging at the weakest arguments, or your most hysterical opponents, expect your own intellect to suffer. The intellect is a muscle; it must be exercised. There are cases in which people of great influence say stupid things and thus must be taken on. (See Chait on George Will’s disgraceful lying about climate change.) But you should keep your feuds with Michelle Malkin to a minimum…

..And then after you fight with them, have the decency to admit when they’ve kicked your ass. Do not use your platform to act like they didn’t. Getting your ass kicked is an essential part of growing your intellectual muscle.

To do all of that, you have to actually be curious. You have to not just want to be heard, but want to listen.

And then this also from Coates in The Atlantic:

I think our own Yoni Applebaum gave the best advice some years back:

Choose the things about which you genuinely care, and come to know them deeply and well. Form your own judgments, and constantly question them. In other matters, attempt instead to ascertain the consensus of expert judgment. It will be right far more often than not. The only alternative is to form your own judgment upon every question, and I can assure you that you will be correct far less frequently. 

If you encounter an attack upon a conventional piety that troubles you, first assess its source. Has its author taken the time or trouble to know his subject deeply or well? Then, assess its content. Does it seem sophisticated and convincing? If it meets those two tests, ask yourself how much you care to know about the matter. You can always add it to the list of things you wish to know deeply. But if you feel that you simply don’t have the time, because of the realities of your life, then bracket your concerns and set them aside. The regnant consensus will do.

Wise words. You simply can’t know everything, and you can’t always be right. But you can be honest and you can be brave.

Best t-shirt

Willow Smith in a t-shirt celebrating feminist icons. Image via For Harriet: celebrating the fullness of black womanhood.

UPDATE: Rats, it’s photoshopped, but there’s a link for where you can buy the t-shirt.

You must read

“Feminism and the terrifying dependency of children” by Cristy Clark over at Larvatus Prodeo. Cristy and I have long been expressing our increasing frustration to one another with the dominance of liberal feminism over motherhood and I’m so pleased she wrote this post about it. This post of Cristy’s should be essential reading for any feminist writer before she dips her toe into motherhood topics.

Liberal feminism has failed to adequately respond to the realities of motherhood, because it has primarily focused on helping women to overcome their historic status as second-class citizens by becoming independent. This vision of equality has led to the struggle for a range of positive measures for women, including:

• the rights to education, to work and to receive equal pay;
• the right own property;
• the right to participate in public life by voting and running for political office; and
• the right to bodily autonomy, including the right to refuse to consent to sex and to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

All of these rights are important prerequisites to equality and all of them have historically been denied to women, particularly after marriage. The struggle for these rights is also an ongoing one, as they continue to be denied to the majority of women across the globe and remain under threat even where they have been achieved. Nonetheless, this vision of equality falls down when the reality of dependency enters the picture. For women who are, or become, dependent on partners, families or the State, liberal feminism’s vision of equality through independence becomes unattainable.

The right to education, to work, or to participate in public life is of limited value, for example, when participation requires that you disencumber yourself from dependents of your own.

Wild things

Photos taken while drinking tea and watching Cormac, the 4 year old playing in the garden.

 

Criticising individualism creep in the Australian Left

This is a thought-provoking discussion.

Starting with this from Helen Razer in Crikey (behind a paywall, sorry if you don’t have a subscription):

Because the “Left”, such as it is, is not able to think about systems; about social and economic class. It has not only borrowed the cheesy stupidity of Andrew Bolt; it has borrowed the idea of his “individual” as well.

The “Left” now hungers for symbols of cultural identity and spurns the idea of class. Or, indeed, of material conditions.

Nowhere, for mine, is this more starkly drawn than in plaintive chalk on sidewalks as queer activism gives up its campaign for mental health reform and supplants it with the symbolic fight for an equality that already exists in law.

This from Elizabeth O’Shea in Overland:

But to me it seems disingenuous to berate the obsession with symbolism and individualism on the part of the Left as a commentator with apparently little interest in doing anything material about the social problems you identify. I would be happily proven wrong on this point. Razer is perfectly positioned to write about those problems she is concerned about and pose interesting and compelling alternatives. But she seems to prefer confecting her own outrage about the confected outrage of others. That is, her criticism is basically an individual, symbolic act.

And this from Sacha Blumen in Larvatus Prodeo:

Her piece struck a chord with me, particularly in relation to inner-Sydney politics over the last 13 years. (I moved from Brisbane in 2000 to inner-Sydney.) While Helen’s piece was about national cultural politics, I see it also played out in inner-Sydney cultural and electoral politics.

And finally, this from Helen (not Razer) in Hoyden About Town:

Razer has a schtick, and it’s being the Cool Girl of Australian feminism, scolding other feminists for sweating all that small stuff which is small, and neglecting to focus 100% on the Terrible Things (about which she doesn’t write much herself). #DestroyThePoint and other snarky tweets were greeted with You Go Girls! and Woohoos! (a description, not a verbatim quote) from numerous male media figures with recognisable names. Cool girls, of course, don’t call people on their day-to-day shit, they keep their powder dry for the Terrible Things, so they make men feel so much more relaxed and comfortable. People who think #EverydaySexism might feed directly into the big issues are so irritating and boring and serious. No, wait – they’re not serious enough, because they’re not off writing articles about masculinised violence and feminised poverty? Are you completely confused now?

When your child finds Internet porn

This is a good piece of writing from Lizi Patch over at Daily Life, “My son saw violent porn”.

I was looking at this through the eyes of my 11-year-old. He could see that there were gradations of porn. Some of it, though an unrealistic view of sex between two consenting adults, was bearable and allowed you to retain a basic positive belief in the world. But then there was the degrading, shockingly violent porn that showed him a dark underbelly of an online world that until that moment was largely populated by Minecraft and Harry Potter. Faced with this hideous new information, he simply didn’t know where to file it.

Also on this topic, previous posts on blue milk:

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

And,

Guest post: Being a feminist and raising a lad.