Pro-Choice: variations on a theme

I am female. This means that for as long as I can remember, people have inquired about my intention to procreate. I recall being asked at the age of about four how many children I intended to have, and being encouraged to seriously contemplate the question. And I did, too, as did my sister.

My brother did not. It didn’t matter. I mean, obviously if a male child discussed the issue, it was seriously discussed with him (my cousin Alex used to say he wanted 12 kids), but the matter never seemed to be pressed on them if they didn’t bring it up.

As I got older, the messages started to change, for a while. The topic of procreation became more about how it worked and how to prevent it, and for a while it seemed that we females were on somewhat equal footing with the males; our bodies were different, but it was impressed upon us that we had equal responsibility for preventing unplanned pregnancy (a stance that older feminists inform me is a recent one).

… But a few years later, as the conversation turns towards the question of having kids rather than preventing them, all the weight is shifted back onto the women. Women are encouraged, at every stage of their fertile years, to think about their potential to have children, and the consequences thereof. In particular, we are asked to consider how to “balance” this with our desire for a “career”. Countless articles are written about it, ranging from go-getter encouraging to pessimistic and downright demeaning. And, of course, we talk about it with each other.

A (nominally feminist) message board I frequent, which is about 98% female, and mostly teens and 20-somethings, discusses the issue with some regularity. It’s not like we talk about nothing else (like, to another woman, about something other than a man), but childbearing comes up a lot. A recent thread included the serious suggestion — discussed at some length! — that women should start thinking seriously about this around age 16 or 18, when they are deciding on what life-paths to take, career-wise, because some professions are much more compatible with child-rearing. Within the safe space of our discussions, this is a valid and potentially helpful point to make. But a part of me still wants to shout “COME ON, MY SISTREN! Do whatever you want with your uterus! Have your kids then let’s fight like hell to make sure you have the opportunity to continue your career if you want to! To make sure that your partner is equally able (and feels equally obliged) to bear half the burden of caring for them! To achieve a gender-equal society!”

Because, honestly, while a small part of it all makes sense, biologically speaking — women are the only ones who are physically obliged to take at least some time off work to accommodate the actual birth of the child — there’s no reason why all of the intellectual labour of pondering these questions should be done by the ones who incubate the foetuses. When was the last time you heard a group of young men discussing the relative merits of different career choices based on their potential to accommodate any hypothetical future children? Where are all the op-eds telling young men how to plan their lives around their reproductive capacities? A google search for ‘men career children’ first asks if I meant ‘women career children’ (and gives the top two results for that), then shows a whole bunch of pages about how the career-vs.-children issue is an issue for women and not for men. Big news there. I mean, I know writing this isn’t going to tell anyone anything new, either; but I’m not informing, I’m just ranting.

By way of further research, I asked a male housemate if anyone had ever asked him to consider the potential effect of children on his career. It was a small sample size, I know, but the research was purely rhetorical; of course no one had. To be fair, he said, ‘career’ itself was not much of a consideration for him, either — which is about the answer you’d expect from an anarchist. However, it gets to what I think is the real root of the problem: that we, not as women but as people, at least in the time and place these words inhabit, are encouraged to think of “careers” as the be-all end-all of identity. Not just what we do but who we are. If “careers” were not hierarchical, and if “advancement” didn’t matter so much, then it wouldn’t matter so much if someone — male or female — decided to take one or three or fifteen years off to raise their families, and return to them later. Obviously in something like research there’d be some catch-up work to do, but in most cases it would simply mean that you ended your ‘working life’ with a few years’ less experience than your peers. Is that such a bad thing?

Unfortunately, I think that kind of paradigm shift is going to be a lot harder to achieve than simple in-system (but still necessary!) steps like paid paternity leave.

The left hand giveth, and the right hand driveth millions more into poverty

There’s this old parable I heard once. I don’t know how old, actually (and it might have come from one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul books my mother used to be so fond of), but it goes like this:

A storm out at sea has washed thousands of starfish onto a beach, and a man is walking along the beach, picking them up one by one, and flinging them back into the sea.”What are you doing?” asks an incredulous passer-by, “You’ll never save them all! There are thousands of starfish on the beach, and you’re only one man; you’ll save maybe a hundred, tops. You can’t possibly make a difference!”

The man doesn’t stop, doesn’t even look up. He just picks up another starfish and tosses it into the sea. “I sure made a difference to that one,” he says. Boo-yah!

But … what if storms like that are totally uncharacteristic for the area, but are becoming more frequent (and thus likely to kill many, many more starfish) due to global warming, which is contributed to, in part, by, say, offshore oil wells near these folk’s seaside town? And all of this is allowed (and even encouraged) by their government? Wouldn’t it be more productive for citizens to spend their time lobbying their government and campaigning against the oil drilling, rather than throwing starfish into the sea? Or at least for that man to say “Hey, I’m gonna handle these starfish right here, why don’t you go fight the oil companies?”

Words to live with

Spam knows what we really want. I mean, not me personally, but we as a society. Mine’s finally given up on bank scams, and now mostly tries to sell me a degree or an “elevated bed experience”. It seems to come in waves, and changes like the tides — and is apparently now responding to the news. A day after the swine flu paranoia started, I started to get the subject line “Absolutely effective respiratory pathogens treatment”.

Advertising of all sorts does this, really. It appeals to the desires we don’t want to admit we have: the shameful, base, lazy and cowardly and shy. There’s an instant food company here called ‘Batchelors’. I thought it was a little blatant, but never gave it much thought until a box of powdered “soup” packets appeared in our cupboard. How they got there is a mystery in itself, since my housemates are vegan and they are not. In any case, they were named ‘Slim a Soup’, to indicate their capacity to effect self-improvement. The powder they contained promised to materialise into “chicken noodle & vegetable”, a stereotypical comfort food. The more interesting promise was in what appeared to be their slogan: “a great big hug in a mug” — thus replacing not just the cookery of the prototypical wife, but the wife herself.

Violent gang of masked thugs incite riot at otherwise peaceful demonstration

About 48 hours before writing this, I was being dragged away from a line of peaceful protesters, having been torn from their ranks by riot[ing] police.  Totally anonymous under their helmets, about half of them in balaclavas, all with their numbers covered up.  And yet they dare to question why so many anarchists would want to hide their faces!  You’ll probably have already seen several news reports about all of this already, and maybe even read a few personal accounts.  This is mine.

Occupying Against Occupation

On Wednesday, 18 February, at high noon, some 60-odd St Andrews students poured into Lower College Hall, the big important reception room on the main quad. We’re occupying in response to the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s (most recent) invasion of Gaza, and in solidarity with the Palestinian people and with students in the other universities who’ve undertaken similar occupations; we are demanding that the university take certain steps to redress its involvement in the Israeli war machine, and to provide medical and educational aid to Palestinians.

I’ve been here, on and off, since the beginning — though I didn’t find out about it until the morning it happened, having missed the previous meeting leading up to it. I found out because I went downstairs for breakfast and found that my housemate had piled most of our dry-goods up on the stove with a note saying ‘for the occupation’. But I didn’t know where and I didn’t know when, so I went off to my lecture. An hour after that finished, I found myself in the quad, gathered with a cluster of friends, tense and expectant in the bright sunlight. Wondering how many of the dozens of students were there for our cause, and not just incidentally. And then we were all pouring inside.

AIRLINES GO GREEN

By actively discouraging people from flying!

Yes, you read that right. Apparently acknowledging that the only truly ‘green’ solution for the airline industry is dissolution, several major airlines have been heaping on the fees and surcharges for their passengers — a move which, on top of all the increased and ever-increasing hassle of security checks over the last 7 years can only be interpreted as deliberate attempts to scare away their own business. A selfless, climate-saving gesture.

Secret Ancient Horror Knowledge

This year, all of H.P. Lovecraft’s work came into the public domain, eliciting a flurry of geekery among, well, the geeks. Harry took the opportunity to stage the first-ever play of ‘Call of Cthulhu‘, and filled the house with Lovecraft paraphernelia, including various radio plays which he aired for our general enjoyment. I hadn’t read much Lovecraft before, but it wasn’t long before the themes common to most of his stories became glaringly apparant. In almost all of the ones I read or listened to, some curious person delves just a little too deeply into some secret knowledge of the ancient horrors of the world, and concludes that it were better they were never known.

*Insert obligatory Life of Brian reference here*

Now that the election is good and over — now that the Almighty Barack Obama has been officially accepted as Saviour Elect, and the faithful across the world lift their voices to the sky to sing His praises — and, more importantly for my purposes, now that North Carolina has finally called its very close race in favour of Obama, I can share this bit of news that brought me great pleasure, even a little pride, a few days ago.

Phantasms

Recently I’ve been feeling inexplicably agitated. It’s almost physical, like an itch or irritation deep in my chest, behind the solar plexis, churning and twitching with no hope for relief. It could just be too much coffee, I suppose, but I am so tired all the time. And anyway, it feels more like I just ought to be doing something, anything, all the time, but I’ve no idea what I should do — and I am so tired, all the time. And so I itch, and burn, and snap at people.

Scar Tissue

Eddy, the other chef where I work, is always trying to get me to cut properly.  You can go much faster, he says, and you’re much less likely to cut yourself. I cut pretty quickly using my own methods, but the other day I decided to give his way another try — and cut myself for the first time ever. The cut isn’t deep, but as it’s on the joint of my thumb, it keeps reopening. I’ve been wondering if it will scar, since Harry obtained a similar cut putting up the marquee at the Summer Gathering and was certain it would scar him forever, since it disrupted the natural folds of the knuckle.

I don’t think it’s so easy to tell what will or won’t scar us forever.