Random Sunday Update

In no particular chronological order at all whatsoever…

I went outside today to assist M2 with an apology for her new best friend that lives next door & as I was talking with the little girl’s mommy, up pipes the little girl — “So, who *are* you?” I said, “I’m M2’s mommy.” Her mommy says, “That’s M2’s mommy — she was at G’s b-day party picking up & dropping off M2, remember?” Little girl (who is adorable, biggest sweetest brown eyes) says, totally matter of factly, “Oh. I thought you were her Gramma. Mom? Can I go get my bicycle?” Woo! That’s a new one! I laughed…

For dinner I made a turkey chowder. I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. I was going to make a chicken soup, but when I went to find ingredients, it kind of morphed… Ridiculously tasty…

A asked me my opinion on the Gloria Steinem article on the primaries & Obama “vs” Clinton & I went on at some length in her comments about my reaction to the article. Without rehashing it all over (well, ok, maybe a little, in retrospect), I’m sad that it’s going to be held up as “this is what feminists think.” Leaving aside my issues with editorial stuff in the mainstream press, I just think it could have been written so much better. I’m also somewhat embarrassed on Gloria’s behalf for her own -isms & apparent lack of awareness of what’s been going on from the time that people started guessing who might/might not be running that came shining through in the article (or were at least edited to appear as such)… I don’t know. The whole article just made me kind of sad. Have the second-wavers always been so polarized? It’s as if she couldn’t grasp anything more complex than “either/or” arguments. She started out most paragraphs with, “I’m worried that…” and then she’d set up these uncomfortable apple/orange things (racism vs. sexism, young women vs. older women, etc), strawmen, and… gah! I’ll let her worry about that stuff, but now *I’m worried* that people are going to read that & think that feminists aren’t capable of dealing with complex multicultural, multi-gendered issues with any hint of grasping the complexities, but instead must reduce everything to polarized (and charged) sound bites from hell. Lifting my own line from my response, the thing that bothered me most (well, thinking back, maybe not most, but it was the closing line & sticks out) was this: It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.” With regards to a job being done I thought the point of feminism was to be able ultimately to say, “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president FULL STOP/PERIOD.” I admit, I haven’t been following super-closely because I’ve had other things on my mind lately, & it’s been a while since I brushed up on second wave feminism philosophy, but… goddamn. That was a painful, embarrassing, sad, & unpleasant read. False dichotomy much? I’m not saying that racism & sexism aren’t happening in this primary, but this is classic divide/conquer stuff here. These issues, racism & sexism, go hand-in-hand in the context of institutionalized -isms — both originate in the same mentality, and in a political environment that is overwhelmingly older, richer, white, male, it seems crass to me to set up the two token “others” against each other in this way, when there’s plenty of policy stuff that should be getting discussed . To have a respected feminist act as a mouthpiece to set this stage is… appalling beyond just crass. That said, I do really wonder what the editorial process was & how much control she got over the end result of the piece.
Edit to add:
points out that the primary critique of the second-wave was that it was mostly mid & upper class white women & their perspective on things… This is true. What’s really sad is that the third-wave has been around & discussing the racism, sexism, and other -isms and how they inter-relate for a solid 15-20 years & the least second-wavers leadership could do is try to keep up with the discussion… or at least know when to defer the discussion to someone with more insight on the issues at hand. < /petulant third-waver >

Ahhh, so in other news… fairies are the name of the game at our house. I have a pile of fairy pictures sitting at my side from M2. M1 has been working for about an hour on the same, elaborate fairy & is now reading one of the fairy chronicles to M2. They’re bundled up under a star blanket & TimTheCat is looking placidly at their combined lap space waiting for his chance to sneak on to it & claim their laps as his own personal warm cushion. Oh crap — now P is making fairy puns. “Go brush your teeth! It’s FAIRY important! You know you WAND to!” Ooohhh oh oh oh oh dear…