Reader Benoni writes:
I’d imagine if people were so concerned with making you stay within the boundaries of your gender role, they’d be praising your decision to have a child and also encourage you to give up your career, or something.
I believe, however, that the desire to undermine women works on a subconscious level. With the kind of life I lead, I don’t encounter freaks who believe in “traditional roles.” People are simply bothered on a deep, existential level by women having lives, and can’t verbalize what bothers them. So they erupt in anger.
A few years ago, I was kicked off a blog after leaving a single comment there. The blog’s author claimed that female scholars can’t do research because “research is effectively gendered male.” I commented, in the most polite manner I’m capable of, that everybody at my department was extremely encouraging of my research, kept telling me to concentrate on it, and praising me for every achievement. Where was this huge, hostile apparatus that was supposed to prevent me from doing research? I asked. Why wasn’t I seeing it? The author got very angry, accused me of being a man, and I had to leave. This is how I discovered that the apparatus in question was not located in the Dean’s office. It was located among scholars themselves.
The blog’s author was a female scholar who claimed to be a feminist. Obviously, she has no conscious wish to make women give up their careers. Still, she works extremely hard to persuade female scholars that we will all fail, the world is against us, and scholarship is just not our thing. By the way, I have never heard the ideas she expresses with the persistence of a crazed parakeet voiced by any male chauvinist. Ever.
I never looked at her blog since then because her efforts to scare women into abandoning all hope of having thriving academic careers are too disturbing.
People who consciously and directly promote “traditional gender roles” (the inverted commas are here to remind everybody that said “tradition” is completely spurious) are not very dangerous. They are not that smart and have zero hope of achieving anything. The real danger comes from those who pay lip service to feminism and equality but who work hard to subvert the goals they claim to be supporting.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m glad that you’re against gender roles in some kind.
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I just read the post you linked to, and wow, what a disgusting little echo-chamber that was! Loved how some idiot later claimed you couldn’t be russian because she had *visited* russia a few times so she’d know what was going on. Jesus Christ, and that blog is one of the biggest academic-oriented feminist blogs out there, right?
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I stopped reading immediately after I was asked to leave, so I missed the rest of the discussion. It sounds hilarious!
Yes, this is a highly esteemed and hugely popular feminist blog. And it bans a female scholar for asking one very respectful question. Weird, weird, weird.
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I think that asking questions is considered an affront in much of English-speaking culture, especially in the less sophisticated quarters. One simply doesn’t ask questions as these imply some kind of insinuation or sub-text. Rather, everybody knows everything and simply clubs the others over the heads with what they “know”. The person who is the least clubbed to death then becomes the winner by default.
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I think I’m coming kind of late to the discussion but I definitely think that part of what is going on here (in terms of the gloom and doom predictions you are receiving) is absolutely part of a “feminist backlash.” (I am a big fan of Susan Faludi.) I think that your rejection of attachment parenting, your embrace of your career, your refusal to read “pregnancy books” are all disconcerting to various “types.”
To explain, I think attachment parenting and the rise of the “pregnancy handbook” all come out of the same cultural logic. Both rapidly gained in popularity after women started becoming seriously competitive in the workforce. And both the pregnancy handbook and attachment parenting are, I would argue, explicitly targeting educated, career women. Who else is going to take the time to read attachment parenting literature or pregnancy handbooks other than literate women who have been trained to respect research?
I’m glad that you have managed to avoid the “trap” of pregnancy books. But I have known many smart and wonderful women who have turned their lives absolutely upside down when pregnant because they, like all reasonably healthy women, want to give their children the best possible “chance” at life. It takes a lot of courage to ignore the various manuals warning women that eating a piece of feta cheese will irreparably damage their unborn child. Something similar is going on with attachment parenting. Many women really and truly think that they are doing the best possible thing for their children when they adopt the practice–that it’s only their own selfish that makes attachment parenting unpleasant. And if a mother adopts attachment parenting, what suffers (other than the children)? The thing that suffers most is the mother’s career. How can someone be a successful working mother if she has been convinced that every time she steps away from her child, she is somehow damaging this little person that she loves?
So I think that you are rejecting these tools of the feminist backlash—which obviously enrages patriarchal types. But, perhaps less obviously, it also scares liberal, otherwise feminist women, who have been convinced that the only way they could fulfill their children was by foregoing their own independence. It’s a little different for me but I feel that I have experienced something similar in a way. I have decided not to have children. And there some very unhappy attachment parenting (though generally feminist) types that will tell me that the “only reason” my partner and I go out on dates and don’t fight, or the “only reason” that I’m good with my time is because I don’t have children—followed by a strange offhand remark that my life is somehow “empty.” Again, my situation is different but I think it’s similar in that women who manage to avoid the patriarchal trappings of “modern parenthood” tend to scare and disconcert others.
Anyway, sorry for the long response. But I have been following these discussions with interest—and these are my convoluted thoughts. 🙂
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This is a brilliant brilliant comment. I haven’t thought about pregnancy books and parenting theories from the point of view of social class, which is a big fail on my part. I think your analysis is spot-on, now that I think of it. This is actually a huge relief because I suffer when I see irrational behavior. Now that I realize that this is not irrational but simply part of people’s discomfort at seeing a non-self-sacrificing woman, it is a lot less scary.
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Also, I now think I’m performing an important public service by providing a public spectacle of being very non-sacrificial.
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“Also, I now think I’m performing an important public service by providing a public spectacle of being very non-sacrificial.”
I agree. And I think that this will become even more convincing when people see how happy and well adusted your child is. 🙂
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Many people seem to think that they can purchase a happy, well-adjusted child by completing a series of mechanical and ultimately very simple actions. Eat a tomato / don’t eat a tomato, breast-feed / bottle-feed, jump up whenever the child makes a sound / don’t jump up. The only problem is that all these mechanical actions are of zero importance. Something very different and a lot more complex is needed.
I heard today, for instance, that I shouldn’t be eating radishes. If only I could convince myself that a completely ridiculous sacrifice of radishes would change anything for the child in the long term! I can just imagine her, 30 years from now, telling her analyst, “What I still can’t come to term with are all those radishes my mother kept eating. I will never get over it!” But I can imagine her saying, “My mother is this perennialy embittered person who kept making stupid, useless sacrifices supposedly for my sake. Like I needed her to give up radishes and then blame me for that!”
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I’ve never heard about “not eating radishes” , so I googled it.
It does not seem to be a bad idea to give it up , or at the very least to handle it with care :
“The danger associated with eating radishes is that raw vegetables can be contaminated with bacteria that can lead to serious illness. Colorado State University notes that your immune system is suppressed during pregnancy, which increases your chance of developing a bacterial or parasitic infection. Toxoplasmosis is passed through contaminated soil or by foods grown in contaminated soil. You can also get salmonella or E.coli from eating contaminated vegetables, such as radishes, that have not been properly washed. The radish leaves also pose similar dangers.”
Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/503658-can-pregnant-women-eat-radishes/#ixzz2O8KLWKjT
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OK, what did I say about agression against pregnant women?
I said very specifically that I have no interest in these health warnings and lists of what I should or shouldn’t eat or do, right? I will do, eat, wear etc, exactly what I feel like.
Seriously, though, why is it so hard for everybody to understand that I’m not a masochist?
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And then somebody has the temerity to down vote Clarissa’s justified complaint. People just don’t like it when they can’t feel justified crossing someone else’s boundaries.
I’m well aware that it is considered a social faux pas these days to make note of someone’s “race” (a dubious concept), but not their gender. One can engage in subtle dominance ploys only in the latter case. But nonetheless, I had cause to respond to somebody recently who persistently overstepped the boundaries after I warned him off. Here is how it went :
ApeNOXIOUS: Thanks, Jennifer! btw, you are looking very feminine!Congrats!
Jennifer Frances Armstrong: Congratulating me for looking pleasing to a male is mindnumbingly stupid. Far better to try to demonstrate an understanding of the complex ideas I have spent time putting across.
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LeeAnne Fourcrows Hensley: Looking “feminine” is a circumstance of one’s birth. Not a personal accomplishment. Therefore it is an insult to congratulate someone on their feminine appearance, especially when they are a brilliant and accomplished individual.
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Jennifer Frances Armstrong: Thanks, LeeAnne. It’s people emulating the regressive Christian culture that comes from the US. They think a woman’s greatest achievement can only be to please various random men.
[……]
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Jennifer Frances Armstrong Those with insight express it, those with none fall back on traditional gender roles. Thus it was, thus it always will be. Gender roles are the ultimate security blanket for the one who must travel blindly through life.
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LeeAnne Fourcrows Hensley I am grateful to my insight. Because the world would be a shallow, meaningless place without it.
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Jennifer Frances Armstrong Yup. But those without insight are keen to perpetuate their own experiences of the world.
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LeeAnne Fourcrows Hensley Lack of personal development. Reduces the intellectual and emotional capacity to a fraction of what it was built to be.
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Jennifer Frances Armstrong: But it’s also partly a matter of opportunity and culture….
ApeNOXIOUS: i have only said that you look feminine ,excuse me please.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong: Ok, well congratulations! You have black skin. Well done my man. I’m happy to notice it for you. It’s rather shiny and flattering.
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ApeNOXIOUSI didn’t tell you that you are beautiful.
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Jennifer Frances Armstrong I have no idea what you are getting at, but getting the brain in gear might be good
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Jennifer Frances Armstrong and keep working on your blackness. It is pleasing to me…but not beautiful.
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ApeNOXIOUS: You can be ‘ugly’ and feminine.
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Jennifer Frances Armstrong: Ok, I am blockiing this idiot.
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