16 and wearing “too much” nail polish and also pregnant.

 

 Fat and the Ivy’s awesome nails.

 

A few weeks ago at the CLPP conference, I went to a panel discussion called “Teen Families Take the Lead.” What attracted me to the panel was two fold-first, my well documented obsession with 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom, and also the part of my brain that says that teen parenting will ruin your life, and the desire to be disproven. I tweeted the panel (#clpp2012), which featured Chelsea Kline, Ena Suseth Valladares, J’vaughnii Karakashian, Noalanii Karakashian, and Gretchen Sisson.

I came back to New York and watched numerous episodes of 16 and Pregnant and struggled to apply what I was now thinking to the show. Since not watching the show is apparently not an option, I’m going to write the following points on a Post-it and keep them within spitting distance:

* Why does being a young parent have to mean you ruined your life?
* There are advantages and disadvantages to having children at any all.
* People are one track minded about what parenthood should look like.
* If you believe in reproductive justice, you have to believe it’s for everyone.

And then I read some of the comments below the episodes, emailed Fat and the Ivy, and the following happened:

me: For the two hundredth time, while watching 16 and Pregnant, I noticed that in the comments, people had remarked on the fact that the girls have their nails done. They should be saving that money for the baby, etc, etc. It’s the same statement I’ve heard made in the Global South when I take participants there-people don’t have running water, but they have hair gel. For me, it’s about allowing people to be complicated and fully human and to do what they feel gives them dignity. We don’t get to decide how people spend their money, it’s another way in which we police bodies.

Fat and the Ivy: It’s also that nail polish can cost $1. We’re getting in such a huff over $1.  Yes, you can spend a lot more, but I have some fabulous colors with glitter and pizazz for under $5. It’s the downside of social welfare in capitalism.  Because we “earned” our money that gets redistributed through social welfare, we all feel entitled to police how “our” money is spent. There is a sense of entitlement and control that extends far beyond “paying ones dues” in society.  In this particular case is, we’re also dealing with misogyny. (What fun is capitalism without misogyny?!)  The comments speak to the ways in which the feminine is not valued.  Nail polish–a girly thing– is trivial and stupid.  It’s not worth time, energy, or money. And yet we still value women for their appearance. It’s such a completed fucked up system.

me: I was thinking that too. I don’t think these girls are getting manicures, but if they are? It’s STILL NONE OF OUR BUSINESS.  If you get pregnant at 16, you have to be punished to the fullest extent. Your life is over, and you deserve it. It’s the same conversation that gets had about weight and “health” and having to pay for other people’s health care. It makes me want to eat a sandwich and lay down. And then eat another sandwich, because you know, that’s what you do.

Fat and the Ivy: I see two things happening. The first is economic.  Our public welfare programs are in shambles and not able to support our basic dignities, and part of that is because we (as tax payers, as the landed classes) get to decide how other people spend “our money.” Of course, this is not an apolitical economic argument. If we really cared about “fiscal responsibility” birth control and abortions would be 100% covered and easily available. Plan B costs $40; a hospital birth costs thousands. 18 years of feeding, clothing, educating, and supporting a human being makes the abortion look like a better bargain than Groupon!

The second is the systematic devaluation of the feminine. We have this idea that what is feminine is unnatural– makeup, clothes, external things that you have to buy.  While we see the masculine as natural and innate– strength, facial hair, deep voices.  So when women engage in feminine things– like painting nails– we see it as something external, unnatural, and costly. And that means it’s and silly and wasteful.  It’s not artistic, enjoyable, relaxing, calming, or meaningful. And that means we, as a public, get to police it.

me: What’s also frustrating about reading the comments is that they are always from other young women, directed towards the young women on the show. I am aware of the alternative to not read the comments, but aside from morbid curiosity, I also feel like it’s important to read them because this is the stuff we have to fight against, and we should know about them.

I remember turning 20 and my friends and I saying to each other, WE ARE TOO OLD TO BE TEEN MOMS!!!!!! WAHOO!!!  It was more than the fact that we had dodged a (sperm?) bullet, it was that we thought we were actually better and smarter than these girls. We didn’t think about birth control being difficult to get and use, or about what makes it easier or harder to assert yourself or anything, other than that we were not stupid enough to get pregnant.

Fat and the Ivy: Fun fact: when I turned 20, I was a little bit disappointed that I wasn’t even going to be a teen mom, or even teen pregnant.  There goes my shot at being on MTV. But seriously, I think of this as a form of slut shaming. In high school, whenever someone got pregnant, the big deal wasn’t that she’s going to be a parent, but rather that she’s so slutty that she got knocked up. She’s having sex(!!) and she’s not even doing that right because she got preggers.

me: She doesn’t even feel badly about having sex!!!

Fat and the Ivy: THE HORROR!!!

me: Pregnancy is the punishment, it’s not just that she’s too dumb to use birth control, but it’s the punishment for being sexual and thinking that she’s entitled to pleasure. I always think during these episodes, I hope everyone involved had really good sex, and that they don’t regret it.

write about all the things.

(photo by me. Central Park, 2011)

Last Saturday, I drank sangria with Fat and the Ivy on the Lower East Side before we went to hear Dean Spade speak at Bluestockings. The whole night was pretty remarkable, which made up for the fact that I’d gotten out of my bed at 4 pm that day.

I’ve been feeling kind of haunted lately, at the same time as my political brain is surging forward and everything is becoming unraveled and simultaneously raveling into something else. I’m thinking mostly about the little voice that nags, that says things that I don’t actually believe. It’s important to remember that  it’s not that that voice is right, so much as well fed, rewarded, validated and consistent. At Dean Spade’s talk, he remarked on the fact that people seem to really believe that change on a certain scale, or towards a certain end, is impossible (i.e. the legal system, the corporate media, gender “norms,” capitalism.) To paraphrase Spade badly, of course the system is telling us it’s impossible, because within the system we’re operating in, it IS impossible. The point is to keep things the way they are so certain classes, races, etc., keep benefitting. The answer is to create new systems, which we can do and are doing. (See Wall Street, Occupy, etc.)

What I’m trying to do, perpetually, is to decolonize my brain. Last weekend, S and I went to a fancy brunch fundraiser for an abortion rights organization. (The tickets were free, as were the drinks, so I had two mimosas. WHO AM I?) One of the speakers who addressed the almost exclusively white, well coiffed crowd was a woman who told the story of  her abortion, which she had at 32 weeks upon learning that her very much wanted baby had a horrible, irreversible brain anomaly. She and her husband traveled to Colorado to have the abortion, and as she told us her story, she cried.

I just kept thinking that this is the story we have to tell to make abortion palatable to others-the government, each other.  If a woman is white and married and straight and has financial means and has other children, her abortion is acceptable. A woman who very much wants a child and has an abortion because of circumstances like the ones described, she will be asked to tell her story to move others. If that woman is of color, poor, young, not married, doesn’t want a child, etc., her abortion is unacceptable.

When I talk about  decolonizing my brain, I mean confronting thoughts like, well, just don’t have sex. See how that works? That trope, of who gets access to birth control, who should be able to have control over their reproductive capacity, who “deserves” sex, who deserves to have sex without getting pregnant, is alive in my head, it’s alive in all of our heads. The racism and classism and sexism. etc. has snuggled itself deeply into our brains after years of living in a world that rewards that shit. The task is to dig and unearth where it came from, and then it’s the shaking off of it. It’s sticky, though. It doesn’t come off easily. It’s scary to lose it, because then you have to figure out a whole new way to live and think. Keeping my brain in line with all those racist, sexist beliefs has not only kept me safe, it’s kept me buoyant.

It’s also kept me fucked up. Example: I am surrounded by folks who are really radical and smart and powerful. If we all combined our power and our energy and our brains, we could put a nice, big, quivering hole in the patriarchy. Instead, I find myself hesitant about sharing space, jealous at the accomplishments of other women, feeling badly about myself because I am not where they are. It was during a workshop at the CLPP conference that I had this revelation-the reason I feel this way has a lot to with capitalism. In capitalism, you don’t share. You get as much stuff as you can, because you deserve it, and you don’t give it away, and that includes credit for things you’ve done, made, etc. If you share, or redistribute, you lose what is YOURS. People who try to take away your stuff are doing so because they can’t get their own, and because they don’t deserve it. They didn’t work for it. They aren’t good enough, because clearly, the system hasn’t worked for them. (Remember that the premise is that the system is supposed to work for everyone, because it’s Fair.)

And in the meantime, the student loan debt in the United States has hit one trillion dollars, some of which is mine, and the existence of which is supposed to make us feel shitty and irresponsible and not good enough. That is another blog post all together. In the meantime, you’re probably tired. Take a day off.

holding pattern

Folks,  I’ve literally been going from my house to the nearest cup of coffee to work to more coffee to somewhere else to my bed every day, and I’m looking forward to that experience changing this weekend when I lock myself up and write fiction until my heart can’t take it anymore. There have, however, been some excellent feminist adventures to tell of. In the meantime, here are some photos I took at the Brooklyn Flea last summer.

 

occupations

(you can download more occupy posters here.)

thursday afternoon songs: mexico, the staves; the golden age and the silver girl, tyler lyle; you and me and the moon, the magnetic fields; tiny vessels, death cab for cutie; me and you, she and him; foregone, the decemberists; fake tales of san francisco, artic monkeys; walking in los angeles, kate micucci; why you’d want to live here, death cab for cutie.

I’m feeling extremely grateful for my ankle being healed today, especially since I’m mean to it by walking really far and wearing shoes I’m probably not supposed to be wandering in. It feels good to walk somewhere and then decide I’m not done and be able to keep on walking. I am so greedy for New York.

This weekend, I’m heading to Western Mass for From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom, which is put on by Hampshire College’s Civil Liberties and Public Policy program. (I’m going to tweet as much as I can, if you’re following on Twitter, it’s  #clpp2012.)  I’m already so glad for this space, for the folks I know will be there who are unapologetic about being pro choice. I read this great quote in a piece by Josey Ross on Gender Focus last week, that has stuck with me and kept me centered in the midst of the crazy bullshit:  “Pro-choice is pro-choice. We don’t get to decide which abortions are right and which are wrong. Every abortion a woman chooses in her own best interest is the right abortion.”

That is the beautiful and righteous (is there any other kind?) ruckus I’ll be part of soon, and in the meantime, I’ve been hanging out at Occupy in Union Square, mainly reading pamphlets about anarchist feminism and Tidal and  trying not to freak out when I overhear people say things to occupiers like, “Get a job.” (Yes, because jobs are so easy to get, and keep. And building, sustaining and growing a social change movement is not a job. And also, shut up.)

Because of the media, because Union Square is so full of tourists, and because the NYPD is camped out around Occupy as if it were a gun factory full of kindergartners, there are a lot of pictures being taken all the time. There are some people with serious cameras, and others with cell phones and it makes me nervous. I’m reminded of  being in Israel, during the summer of 2005, walking in Jerusalem and ending up in the middle of a rally against the disengagement from Gaza. I don’t think I took pictures of it, or at least, I can’t find them if I did, but I remember sitting in the sea of orange ribbons and watching (gaping?) at people praying and crying and being awed by the spectacle of their grief and  indignation.

I wish I could tell  the difference between the people who  mock and exoticize and those with genuine curiosity and the desire to make more art out of the art of revolution. I wish you could see intention on people the way you can see what shoes they’re wearing.

tv on a friday night

 

I had a day off yesterday, so obviously I spent it catching up on the new season of 16 and Pregnant. The latest episode is about Briana, who’s 17, and lives with her mom and sister in Florida ( This is the third episode that’s taken place in Florida. What goes on there?)

Briana has already graduated high school by the time we meet her, which means there’s at least one giant hurdle she won’t have to overcome. She chooses to parent her daughter, in spite of the fact that her ex-boyfriend/father of the baby is only theoretically interested in being involved. Briana’s sister, Britney, found out she was pregnant at the same time, and chose to have an abortion.

I’m always worried whenever abortion gets portrayed on television, even if it’s  a “real” situation. It’s a physical feeling, I actually am more tense in my body when I know it’s going to be edited by media who’s notoriously irresponsible. Back in 2010, when MTV aired “No Easy Decision,” I hovered, with many other feminists, over the TV and the keyboard, curious and freaked out. In the end, it could have been better, of course, and it also could have been worse.

Briana’s episode is really powerful, and not just in the ‘holy shit, I’m so glad this is not my life’ way that I often feel watching this show. It was powerful because people were honest about their feelings, and MTV didn’t edit it out, even though much of it is hard to hear. Brittany feels like she can’t talk to anyone about the abortion, which she’s struggling around still, Briana feels like she can’t talk to her sister about being a teen mom. At the end of the show, Briana tells  Brittany that in having an abortion, she made a smart, hard decision, and that if she (Briana) had it to do over again, she might have made the same choice.

And then I did the thing that Fat and the Ivy warns me about, which is that I read the comments below the video. Not surprisingly, Briana was attacked for saying she might have made a different decision: “How can she say that with her daughter in her lap, breathing and making sounds…etc”

A lot of my friends have had babies, and some of them have even been brave enough to talk about how hard it is in places so public as Facebook. These friends of mine are not teen mothers, they are married women, college educated, financially privileged, and in most cases, planned their pregnancies. They love their babies, but they also love sleeping and showering and being able to  leave the house without worrying about someone who is totally dependent on them. probably they miss being able to do those things regularly, as parenting is hard under even the best of circumstances, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is because being human means having all sorts of complicated feelings.  And last time I checked, women qualified as human and thus have a full range of human-type  emotions, including regret, ambivalence, fear and longing. Asking how someone in Briana’s situation (or Brittany’s, who also would have been a teen mother)could experience complicated emotions around being a parent not only negates the fact that parenting is hard, but plays on the trope that women have simple and discrete feelings about motherhood-namely that we pursue it blindly and without thinking about its consequences and complexities.

I’d recommend watching the separate interviews Briana and Brittany later give,  in which they each say honest and important things that makes me grateful that this story was on tv. Briana: “We both made sacrifices, we both made different choices, and with every choice we make, there’s hardships that come with it.”

 

The Marriage Project, Reflection 49: “In the world of heterosexual wedding planning, the groom just shows up.”

 

R is a graduate student in her mid-twenties living in New York City. 

Why are you choosing to get married?

D and I have been together for more than seven years, and we both went into the relationship expecting that marriage would be the endgame if everything worked out.  I think that expectation comes from our families; that’s “just what you do” when you commit to someone for life.  Why for life?  We both want the same things: to make each other happy and to make a family together.  I wouldn’t want to have kids with someone who wasn’t committed to me and to our family for life.

Is there anything so far about being engaged/wedding planning that you find remarkable or surprising?

I definitely shouldn’t have been so shocked by the blatant, no-apologies sexism in wedding planning, but I was and continue to be.  99% of the ads I’ve seen are directed to the bride.  When I was looking for a book about wedding planning, I was frustrated to find nothing that was truly egalitarian or progressive in any way (except a few books about same-sex marriages).  Even the “modern bride” books were just that – for brides and only brides.  In the world of heterosexual wedding planning, the groom just shows up.

I ended up getting the Real Simple wedding issue, which appealed to me because it departs somewhat from the traditional commercialized wedding model.  But that wasn’t any better.  Real Simple taught me that I should sew our invitations by hand and make our centerpieces from found materials.  Is that something I really need to be spending my time on?  (As a non-crafty person, no.  If crafts are your thing, then this is the perfect magazine for you.)  It made me feel like I was copping out if I didn’t make every single detail perfect.

I’ve also been surprised by things I now want that I didn’t want before being engaged.  For example, I kept saying that I didn’t want a train on my dress, but I ended up getting a dress with a train that I absolutely love.  I wonder often if I am succumbing to the advertising.  In the case of the dress, it was more likely that I’ve never worn a train and couldn’t imagine myself in it before.  I am trying to remain mindful while still relaxing and letting the process flow, without denying myself anything I decide I want.

How do you feel about the word “wife”?

I won’t mind when D calls me his wife because our relationship doesn’t have any of the negative connotations that sometimes come with the word “wife.”

What do you expect marriage to be like? Are you expecting your relationship with your partner to change?

Our day-to-day lives won’t change because we’ve already lived together for about two years.  I expect that our relationship will continue to evolve as it has for the past seven years, as we both learn more about how to communicate effectively and how to deal with inevitable conflict.  I expect our relationship to change a great deal more when we have kids (although that won’t be for a while).

What decision are you making about your name? Why? 

I’m not changing my name.  Growing up, I never thought I would change my name if I got married.  This idea likely came from the fact that my parents are divorced and my mom has changed her name since then, so having a different last name from my immediate family doesn’t bother me.  It also seemed like the most blatant form of sexism to my 12-year-old mind.  Now that I’m older, I can see the complications that come with not having the same last name as your spouse, but it’s more important to me to keep my name than to forgo some minor hassles.  (He didn’t want to change his name, either.)

What do you see the role of a wedding to be? 

A religious, spiritual commitment to each other in front of the people who are most important to us.  Not the first day of our “new life” together, but the first day of the rest of our lives together.

A Marriage Project Announcement

 

If you identify as queer/bi/lesbian and female, and are married/engaged to another person who identifies in the same way, or if you identify queer, female, etc, and don’t want to get married AND want to do a Marriage Project interview, contact me  on Facebook, Twitter, or at chaneldubofsky@gmail.com.