Archive for the ‘Feminism’ Category

A wistful longing for times past

July 12, 2011

Whenever we watch old movies, my husband points out the people with a skin color similar to his own and then what role they’re serving. Serving is quite literal here, as they’re usually in some service position or another, waiting to back up the white leads with a toothy grin or a deferential bow. Now that I’m married to someone with darker skin than my own, I notice this more overtly, too, but I still very much enjoy old movies, particularly screwball comedies with their punchy dialog. One of the things I enjoy about old movies, as well, is fashion watching.

Like many modern, youngish knitters, I have a taste for what is commonly referred to as vintage fashion. Vintage referred originally to wines, but now, according to Random House, it can refer to “the high quality of a past time”. Certainly, vintage clothing is not used to refer to old work clothes or the reused fabrics worn by the working poor.

Technically, these people are wearing vintage clothing. (Photo from the National Archives.)

No, vintage clothing refers to clothing worn by the middle and upper classes. It refers to fashion rather than to necessity. And the idea of “high quality of a time past” contains in it a certain nostalgia for the way things were.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because I have a really dual and necessarily compartmentalized view when it comes to vintage clothing and styles. I have no desire to live in the past whatsoever, nor even to time travel to the past for a visit. I can see many inequalities that exist in the time and place in which I live, but I still feel that I live in the best possible time so far for a person like me. At the same time, I have an aesthetic appreciation for some of the looks and styles of the past, even a past that worries me in its more exaggerated inequalities. My current favorite dress looks like it walked out of a fifties or early sixties cocktail party.  It’s full skirted and nip-waisted and it exemplifies the look of a well dressed lady from well before I was born. I wear it with my pierced eyebrow and perhaps there is a certain contrast or visual irony that I enjoy in that, but really, I just like the pretty dress.

I like certain past aesthetics very much, but I’ve noticed that appreciation of an aesthetic can come at a price. It’s easy to slip from appreciating a look into an idealization of the past. I am wary of the show Mad Men for this reason. Although by all accounts the show is meant to expose the underbelly beneath the smooth surface, many of its fans seem mostly to extoll the look of the show and the freedom from political correctness it represents to them. This is a broad generalization, and I haven’t anything to back it up at the moment other than a certain uneasiness I’ve personally experienced when I’ve seen the fliers for Mad Men themed bar nights around town or spoken to someone who went on and on about the fabulousness of the clothes. The two episodes I watched seemed almost nihilistic in the intensity of hopelessness presented, but that’s not the aspect of the show I see represented in its pop culture mythology.

Nostalgia is intense and represents a certain agreed upon amnesia. While I think few people would argue for a loss of civil rights gained by women and minorities in the past 100 years, I do frequently hear people call upon the past as safer. “We didn’t have to worry about this when I was a kid,” is a phrase commonly uttered by many people who seemingly forget that when they were kids, their parents were the ones doing the worrying. It’s a variation on “kids today” that defies any actual statistics about what kids today are doing. It also ignores the very real problems of the past. Drugs, sex, and new and scary music have existed for each generation. Look far enough back and you can find parents scandalized by this new fangled waltz with its opportunities to cop a feel in a dark recess of the dance floor.

The problem with trying to call up the past as better in some aspects is that history is not really divorced from its whole. The picture of nineteen fifties prosperity depends on an ignored unprosperous many as much as on house dresses and good manners and supposedly safe neighborhoods, and that’s ignoring even the nineteen fifties definition of prosperity, which probably would satisfy few alive today, or the fact that rude people have existed in every era, and crime occurred in good neighborhoods and people still behaved like people.

When I’m watching my old murder mysteries or screwball comedies, I enjoy the escapism, the travel to a different time and place, the pretty clothes, the funny dialog, but I try to remember that what I’m seeing is a picture meant for enjoyment. It’s a picture that reveals some of the flaws of the period, as in the case of the dark skinned characters and their service or the women and the way they revolve around the men, and it’s a picture that hides some of the flaws of the period, like when characters in the 30s manage to go an entire movie without ever encountering a single poor or unemployed person. The clothes worn by the movie stars are of course gorgeous, because they were meant to be gorgeous. Your average housewife wasn’t going out in the gowns and coats worn by Myrna Loy or Katharine Hepburn. The past is different from the present, certainly, but people have not changed as much as attitudes have. There is nothing wrong with appreciating the aesthetics of the past, but it’s helpful to remember that aesthetics are deliberately limited in scope.

Posted in Fashion, Feminism | 9 Comments »

A turn for the worse (NOT KNITTING CONTENT)

March 10, 2011

[TRIGGER WARNING: rape, victim blaming]

Usually when I write a feminist rant for this blog, I try to connect it to crafting in some way, because that is the ostensible purpose of this blog, and the intersection of feminism and crafting is a surprisingly rich mine of material. Today, however, I am so angry about an issue that I find so important that I’m going to veer off of the subject of crafts altogether to talk about the broader societal message that our culture is sending to women right now and I’m going to focus on something very specific to talk about it.

Recently, as an American and as a woman, I’ve been feeling like there’s been a misogynistic shift in our rhetoric and I’ve found it disturbing. As a political being, I’ve been seeing ways in which I believe my lawmakers are trying to strip me, as a woman, of my political power and bodily integrity. But what I want to talk to you about today is more insidious and less obvious. I want to talk about what we’re doing to our girls, and I want to do so because knitting and crafting are seen as women’s hobbies, and what has happened here affects all of us.

Two days ago, on March 8th, The New York Times published a story about a horrific rape in a small Texas community. The victim is an eleven year old girl. As of now, 18 men have been arrested in connection with her rape, and the Times ran a short piece on the story dealing primarily with the community and how the rape has affected it. The crime is horrific in its own right, but the coverage in the Times and in The Houston Chronicle has been disturbing on the basis of its choices and not just the details of the crime.

Rather than parsing all of the disturbing language in the articles about this crime, I’m going to focus on a few things that stood out to me. The following quote is from The Houston Chronicle.

If she refused, the statement said, she was warned other girls would beat her up and she would never get a ride back home. Soon she was having sex with multiple young men there, the statement said.

Bolding mine. I want to point out the infuriating use of the pronoun she in this instance. She is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicate says, she does. So in this sentence, we learn that the person “having sex with multiple young men” is the girl, which more than suggests that the person with the agency is the victim and that the sex is consensual, even though the previous sentence makes it clear that it is not, and even though the child is 11 years old, too young to consent to sex with anyone. A more accurate and less victim-blaming sentence would have been, “Soon, multiple young men were raping her.” Having sex is an act between consenting adults. Rape is what happens without consent.

I picked that sentence to start with to point out how subtle some of the victim blaming language is, not just in the two articles cited here, but in general. We like our racism and misogyny nice and blatant, but it often comes in the guise of objectivity and distance. The sentence I cited is presented as a fact, and the author of the article distances himself from the language choices he made by referring to a statement, presumably made by someone other than the author. Note, however, that it is not a quote. The author chose the language and it was not objective, or the only choice. The reporting of facts requires many choices and it also requires a certain amount of responsibility that becomes that much more important when the subject is a child and a victim.

From the Chronicle story we learn that the child victim has now been forced out of her community, that her mother feels threatened and believes that some members of the community want to find and hurt them. However, when discussing how this happened, the only questions of parenting raised in either the Times or the Chronicle article are about the victim’s mother. Where did things go wrong? Not, apparently, with the parents of the up to 28 young men who raped a child. No, the fault must clearly have been with the female parent of the little girl who was raped. I do not believe that trying to fault parents is usually the right response to a crime, but I can’t help but notice that the questions raised in this case are not about the kind of parenting that would lead to raising a victimizer, but rather a victim.

Again, from The Houston Chronicle, referring to the victim’s Facebook page:

Sometimes she comes across like a little girl, such as when she talks of her special talent for making “weird sound effects” and “running in circles” to overcome nervousness.

But she also makes flamboyant statements about drinking, smoking and sex.

You know why sometimes she comes across like a little girl? SHE IS A LITTLE GIRL. I have an eleven year old son. He’s over five feet tall, kind of gawky, into Judo and making up stories with his friends. He’s a big guy who wears men’s shoes and men’s shirts, but he’s still a little boy because eleven year olds are little kids who happen to be at the precipice of puberty.

And finally, we get to the coup de grâce from The New York Times, that venerable Grey Lady.

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”

Ah, yes. Let’s talk about what she wore, because that’s hardly a cliche in rape culture. Let’s focus on the unbelievably offensive insinuation that the way she dressed had something to do with the fact that adult men, including an almost 30 year old, chose to commit a violent assault on her person.

Let’s talk a little about victim blame, which is a problem across society, and which is not unique to this situation. Yeah, it’s wrong when we blame the victim of a robbery from being in the wrong part of town, or the victim of a mugging for not hiding his wallet better. But there’s no cultural message telling people that they have to run down a dark alley waving their wallet and that they’ll be shunned if they don’t. On the other hand, there is almost nothing but a cultural message to young girls that “wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s” is what you need to do if you want to be popular and desirable. And then we see the flip side of that coin in the statement above: that dressing that way encourages men to victimize you, making it your fault when you become a victim. In discussing this yesterday on a friend’s Facebook page, I hit upon a pithy summation of the message we send to young girls (and to young boys) with this mixed cultural message: “You’re not sexy enough, slut.”

I’d like to connect the dots between the horrifying rape story and the victim blaming in The New York Times to this seemingly unrelated story from the Today show about the sexualization of little girls’ toys.

Anyone who thinks that there is no cultural pressure to dress like a (sexy) 20 year old really needs to take a look at what toys marketed to little girls are actually saying.

The thing is, THIS AFFECTS ALL OF US. Today, the victim blaming is falling on a little girl in Texas who was brutalized by men in her community and then brutalized again by her neighbors and the media. This is one example, but it exists in a broader culture that is teaching women and men how to relate to each other. Right now, at this moment, the takeaway message for girls is, “You’re not sexy enough, slut,” but it’s also boys who are taking that message to heart. And it’s adults, who should be protecting children, who are instead looking to place blame on the victim and her specific, personal upbringing, rather than the culture that spawned this unhealthy simmering mess of mixed messages, or the victimizers, or the enablers who prop up the victimizers.

Noticing language and reading critically is a small part of what we need to do in some ways, but it’s also a big way to step away from the societal pressure to accept language at face value and subtext only internally. Breaking away from internalizing the victim blaming takes conscious effort.

Online petitions may be limited in their effectiveness, but a massive groundswell in response to victim blame may make the Times think twice about their language choices and editorial process. No news story makes to print without being raked by more than one set of eyes, and yet this dreck made it to the page anyway. Tell the Times it was wrong. You can also write to The New York Times and The Houston Chronicle and let them know that their coverage contributes to the rape culture.

For more on the media coverage of this story, see this blog post at Shakesville, which further parses out the victim blaming language in the Times article, and this post at Jezebel, which covers media coverage in both papers. The New York Times has, by now, responded to the anger at their coverage but has not taken responsibility for the quotes and views they gave ink to. The Houston Chronicle has published a response defending their coverage, also passing the blame onto residents quoted in the article, and failing to note either the fact that the quotes were selected from many, were not framed in a context to make it clear that the quotes represented an opinion that fails to line up with the law or morality, or the language that had nothing to do with quotation at all. There has been no real apology for this disgusting coverage.

Edit: In case it’s not clear enough when I discuss the pressure to dress in a sexy way, I do not mean that the way in which the girl was dressed or the way in which any girl dresses has anything to do with the fact that a person would choose to assault her. I wanted merely to point out the double bind inherent in pointing to the clothing “more appropriate for someone in her twenties” and the social pressure to dress as a person in her twenties, which extends to women of all ages.

Posted in Feminism, Justice | 19 Comments »

An ongoing discussion

January 17, 2011

Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday seems as good a day as any to talk about the conversation taking place at Flint Knits about privilege and representation. I am going to sum it up briefly, but I highly recommend reading the entirety of what is written there, and many of the comments as well, because there’s a lot to think about. This will be long, so be warned!

It all starts with Heather Ross, she of the unspeakably adorable fabrics. I am a lousy seamstress thus far, but I’ve been coveting her fabrics for years, and hoping to become good enough to make a project worthy of her patterns. I got a Heather R0ss book for Christmas, and I look forward to using it. Despite working in another end of the fiber arts, I’m a pretty big Heather Ross fan, so I was surprised when I basically walked in on a big Heather Ross controversy.

The new line of fabrics from Ms. Ross includes one with little girls in cowboy hats playing with toy horses. The little girls in question are small girls with pale skin and light hair, and this is where the controversy emerges. A number of commenters wrote to ask that Heather Ross fabrics include more portrayals of children with different skin colors and ethnicities. This comment from ‘Andrea in Vermont’ seems representative.

I agree that the spirit of the design is wonderful. And yet… just as horses come in a wide range of colors, so too do little girls (and boys, for that matter) who love them. As a mother of children of color, and a person who simply seeks more representation of *all kinds of people* in the materials I purchase to craft with, I wish… I wish for beautiful Black and Latina and Asian kids to be portrayed by your talented hands. Let us see the world’s rainbow of children represented (in skin tone, not costume) ~ it will make the designs ever so much more beautiful, and ever so much more meaningful to many more children. *Thank you* for considering this appeal.

This request struck a chord with me, because my family is underrepresented as well. White mom, brown dad, tan kids. I’m going to take a moment to say that in the construct of race, my kids can pass as white, and that’s probably how they are perceived by most people, but their self identity is as kids who have a brown dad and a pale mom, and what shocked me when they were tiny was how quickly they noticed that they were not being represented. I noticed, but then I was a new mom, hypersensitive to the fact that the baby magazines I was reading weren’t showing my family, that babies who made the cover had blue eyes, even when they had dark skin, that I hadn’t even known babies could be born with brown eyes because all of the babies I’d ever seen portrayed in magazines or on TV had blue eyes. I’d even been told that all babies are born with blue eyes, which made it very interesting when I later gave birth to two different children who were born with brown eyes.

OK, so, the fact that our family wasn’t really represented started showing up for me again when I’d shop for toys. Families for doll houses are sold in sets, and I would have had to buy three to cover all the skin colors in our family. (The different lighting in the photos above does sort of obscure the fact that I’m pretty much milk colored, and the kids, when their photos aren’t shot in dark woods, are sort of olivey tan.) Dolls tended to come in black or white with no in between. I think this has improved since I had the first child, and I do want to acknowledge that. But at the time, I found myself really frustrated at being unable to find toys that looked like my baby, and toys that looked like my family. I started noticing that families like ours weren’t often portrayed, and when they were, it was not usually as normal people, but with race or ethnicity as the subject. And I dealt with odd comments from people who didn’t really understand they were being offensive. Some examples include being told by other white women that they’d never date someone outside their race because it’s too hard on children not to belong to a culture, hearing from a white friend that she didn’t want her daughter to have to be a minority at school, and being asked, when out with my children, “What are they?”

I somehow didn’t think the kids were noticing all this, even though the kids learned the color brown first, when they each had a tiny epiphany that brown was the color of Daddy. The first time I really understood how they hungered for images of themselves was when someone sent me a link to a website that sold dolls for mixed race families. Both my then-toddler boys were across the room playing when I clicked on the link, and neither seemed to be paying attention to me. However, once I clicked the link, they were right there with me at the computer, exclaiming in excited voices, “He looks like me!

They also commented on how the doll had a brown daddy and a pink mommy, just like they did, and they were literally jumping up and down and squealing. They didn’t even really want the doll. They were just excited that he looked like they did and that he had a family like theirs. (Real Kidz dolls, like the one shown above, are no longer produced.)

My kids are not the only kids who are underrepresented, of course. Most minority children (and I would include children of mixed race couples in that designation, since mixed race couples make up only 8% of married couples in the U.S.) do not get to be the default. When someone refers to a little girl in fiction, it is assumed that she is white unless otherwise specified. When physically describing white people, many of us tend to skip skin color altogether because it is assumed, while people of color are often described by their color or ethnicity first. If I were to explore this idea in any detail, it would take a book.

Looping back to where I started, the post on Flint Knits, guest blogged by Ashley Shannon, is highly critical of Heather Ross’s response to these requests that she be more inclusive. The response is quoted in full in that post, and Heather Ross herself later responds in the comments to this criticism, but I wish to quote only a portion here.

I guess I never think about my drawings of children being representative of every child, if I did I would certainly give the importance of diversity in every aspect of fine art more thought. On the other hand, I’ve developed a certain amount of defensiveness about choosing my own subject matter.

OK. Let me start by saying that in terms of inclusiveness, Heather Ross is by no means the only or the worst offender. The fact that she has little girls in cowboy hats playing with horses is actually a big thing, since so many portrayals of little girls aren’t just of white little girls; they are of white little girls in limited roles, like princesses, or girls playing with dolls or cooking materials, or picking flowers, all of which are great in moderation, but terrifying when they are nearly the only representations of young femininity. And I have a certain understanding as an artist of where Ms. Ross is coming from. When I draw people from my head, I draw myself. I think most artists have a default human who lives in their heads, and that default human is based on our self image. If I draw without referring to a model, all of my pictures look a little like me. Most artists I went to art school with had a similar default human they’d draw, and expanding outside that person who lives in our head takes a little work. I am also sympathetic to the idea that we like to draw what we know and care about. I don’t really have a desire to make a sweater that wouldn’t look good on me. And I understand as well what it is like to make very little money on your work, and I can fully believe that, beautiful and popular as Heather Ross fabrics may be, Heather Ross herself is not paying the bills with them.

However, and this is a big however, while I don’t go as far as Ms. Shannon in my frustration with Heather Ross’s response, I do feel frustrated with the quote above, not because she has an obligation to draw Every Child (it’s all in me!) but because the above response shows a certain amount of naivete about how her work is received. Of course it is representative. All of the positive responses to her work in which people say that they love the new fabric because it reminds them of their own childhood shows that it is always going to be representative. Putting your work into the public sphere means sacrificing a little of that control you had over your own vision, and the moment any iconic image is released into the world, it becomes representative not just of the things you intended, but of all the things that other people read when they bring their own experiences and values to bear on it. And while Heather Ross alone will not save the world or change the fact that many little girls and boys are underrepresented and portrayed, by not including those images, she is still part of the monolithic default representation of idealized childhood as white, whether she meant to be or not. I am willing to bet that Ms. Ross is a lovely person, and that if I met her, she’s someone I’d like to sit down with and enjoy a cup of tea and a chat. Her talky, fun book of patterns makes me think I’d like her a lot, so this isn’t a huge criticism of her as a person. No one likes to be told that they’re excluding others, or that their work reinforces blind spots, and a certain amount of defensiveness is natural. I am also not excluding myself from any of this, either the reinforcement of white privilege (which can end up being quite specific and personal in my life, since my white privilege doesn’t extend to my husband) or defensiveness at criticism. In my ideal world, though, Ms. Ross would have responded to the suggestion to be more inclusive with an acknowledgment that inclusion is badly needed, firstly, and with the explanation she essentially gave, that she is working from her childhood memories and that she drew on herself for those things, and lastly with the idea that in the future, she will consider inclusiveness in her work, whether it directly translates into little Asian and black and Hispanic kids showing up or not.

I saw in the comments at Flint Knits the suggestion that if Ms. Ross’s representations are not inclusive, then neither are the representations exclusively of children of color by artists of color. This may be a controversial position, but I think these remarks misunderstand the nature of white privilege. The white voice is present by default in our history, our art, our literature, and the underrepresented are the people of color. Exclusive representations by artists of color are a drop in the ocean in which published writers and successful artists (jobs that depend often on a steady income from elsewhere) are usually white and middle class. Ms. Ross notes in her response to the Flint Knits blog post that she did not grow up middle class, so her voice is not coming from that type of economic privilege in her background. She further notes that she’s making very little money from fabric design ($9000 a year at best), so calls that suggest she’d make more money by representing more people are probably not going to get too far, since more money is relative when one’s income is small.

I want to go on and on about this, but I feel that at over 2000 words, I’ve likely tried my readers’ patience already.  Instead, let me direct you all to a documentary that was on PBS some years back called Race. It is by far the most comprehensive treatment of the subject I’ve seen on film, and it covers a lot of these smaller, more insidious issues like representation and economic privilege through historical measures that wouldn’t seem to matter today, but do. You can’t rent these videos, sadly, but a number of people have serialized them on Youtube and Google video, and searching “Race: the power of an illusion” finds them pretty easily. It’s such a good series that I wish it was easier to access. I saw it as part of an African American history class.

I’m sorry this is so long and discombobulated, but I hope it adds to the discussion. I firmly believe that this is a discussion that needs to be had as often as possible, as difficult as it is, and I am glad of the opportunity. Returning to something I said earlier, maybe it would be a good idea as a designer to make a sweater that wouldn’t look good on me, if it would look good on someone else who might not have a lot of sweaters designed for him or her.

Posted in Art, Craft, Feminism, Justice, Miscellany, Race | 21 Comments »

Indulge me

August 23, 2010

Or, Why We’re Both Wrong

I’m one of those people who get hung up on grammatical errors and punctuation misuse.  I’ll be reading along quite happily when my brain will suddenly experience a jerking sensation as I hit a place in the writing where a comma has made an inappropriate appearance or a rogue apostrophe has attached itself to a plural form of a word. I’m fully sympathetic to the plights of other curmudgeons, who, like me, grumble to themselves about the stupid living status of the English language.

I am, of course, a hypocrite. I write in a colloquial style and make typos and errors at a fairly normal rate. I adore slang and use it with glee, especially dried up outmoded slang that strikes me as delightfully anachronistic. (It probably strikes others as weird, twee, foolish, or self indulgent, all of which are valid criticisms, since my word choice cannot be said to contribute to clear communication in those instances.)

The self styled Grammar Nazis would tell you that language is terribly, terribly important, that it is about communication, that clear communication depends on rules. The internet as a whole would tell you that language is joyfully alive, that word choice matters little, that communication is about being understood, not what’s being said. They’re both right and they’re both wrong and I’m somehow going to bring this around to feminism and knitting in the next few paragraphs. You begin to see why I asked you to indulge me.

This morning, a number of folks on my Twitter feed were discussing threads on Ravelry in which women mention their husbands allowing them to knit or to buy yarn. Then there was mention of a tee shirt apparently on display at Rhinebeck that reads “Your husband called, he said buy anything you want.” Oy.

These words are often jokey and joking, and I have a number of lovely friends who’d make jokes of this sort and not really mean much by it. The words sort of sat in my head, today, though, and I haven’t been able to get them out. They’re unwelcome house guests who can only be evicted when I write this down and show them out of my head and into the ether.

Feminism has long been about words and word choice. I can argue till the cows come home that in English, the words man and he are both gender specific and gender neutral, but the fact is, specific trumps neutral in anyone’s mind. You is a word with similar issues; it is both specific and collective, but we tend to assume the specific first. If I tell you (specific you) to picture any important man in history, while I could  be intending the word to have its neutral meaning, chances are that you are currently picturing an important historical figure who had a penis.

Even before feminism, canny women saw the use of language in the cause of their sex. Chivalry is today seen as outdated and often sexist, but a look at Eleanor of Acquitaine and her court of love suggests that chivalry once offered women(of a certain class) a new role in society that gave them greater freedom and importance. Eleanor used her money and power to support poets and troubadours who wrote of gentle love and the elevation of women. She did not invent chivalry, but her money helped codify it and to make it fashionable.

Language is symbolic in its very nature, even its most basic and straightforward form. If I tell you that I saw a cat yesterday, even though you did not see the cat, you are still picturing a cat right now. The cat you are picturing is probably either a cat you know or an archetypal cat that you’ve imagined, because your experience allows you to take my abstract word, “cat,” and create for yourself an image of a real animal.

But most language is not as straightforward as, “I saw a cat.” Most of the time there are nuances, even in writing, that provide clues and hints of something more than mere communication. Language is used for obfuscation as well as communication. If I tell you, “I saw a cat, and I shuddered,” taken in the strict light of literal interpretation, these could be separate facts. I saw a cat. I shuddered. Taken in the same sentence, we tend to assume that they are related, and we use our experience and intuition to bridge the gap between those two statements. Most anyone reading that sentence would be able to extrapolate that I have a fear or dislike of cats. (I don’t, for the record. I just like to use a lot of examples when I write.)

So when we, as craftspeople, make joking reference to our significant others and their influence on our craft, there’s more to it than a joke and less to it than a dissection of the words might offer. Partnership is a give and take and it’s considerate to consider how our choices affect our loved ones.  When women begin to talk of asking permission, though, or to promote the stereotype that women love to spend money LOL and men are in charge of the pursestrings LOL, it isn’t just a comment on one marriage or one relationship. There’s a whole history of experience that gets attached to those words. It’s a necessary, but also lazy form of communication that depends on the understanding of others of stereotype, and it exists in a broader context of hard fought feminist ideals. Adults willingly giving up their rights to make choices for themselves is threatening because it was a default (and still is a default for many people) for so long.

I have talked on this blog many a time about why I knit and how it has actually helped my health. Of course I have to balance my knitting with the demands of family and finance, but I think that if I began using the word “allow” or “permission” in regards to my husband’s view of my hobby, business, and creative endeavors, it would signal the wrong ideas about its importance to me and my significance as an adult and an individual. Asking one another for permission is very different than checking to make sure we can afford something, or checking to see if my knitting is encroaching on time we’d normally spend as a couple. It’s not that different in practice, but the sentiment conveyed by the words is the difference between consideration and subjection.

The language purists and the casual users are both right and both wrong. Language has power, importance, nuance, and meaning that go beyond mere words or jokes. But literal meaning and proper usage are not only fluid, they are often not part of true communication, which depends less on the strictness of rules and more on collective stereotypes, in jokes, memories, and experience.

Posted in Craft, Feminism, Knitting, Language | 12 Comments »

Not much of a tempest

May 1, 2010

It’s been a long and busy week, so I no longer remember who linked me to the Jezebel article The New Decornographers (boy is that an unwieldy title) but I’m very grateful, mystery friend!  The article, written by Sadie Stein, discusses the effect of the spate of craft, domestic, and fashion blogs on women.  Actually, more specifically, it discusses their affect on Ms. Stein, but there are larger implications woven into the article.

I’m both a writer and a consumer of craft blogs, so this topic interests me greatly.  You may remember the storms that arose in 2007 when the blogger Jane Brocket released her book The Gentle Art of Domesticity, inspiring backlash and anger from feminists in Britain.  (On a wholly egotistical note, that storm inspired what I consider to be my best blog entry to date.)  There’s no violence in this squall.  Ms. Stein isn’t really condemning the blogs in which the domestic is writ large so much as expressing her own bemused fascination and frustration with the domestic blogs.  (I’m lumping all the various craft, food, fashion, and lifestyle blogs under the header of “domestic”, which may or may not be fair, but it’s at least simpler!)

The point of the article is that so many people are Martha Stewart these days.  While I think it would be inaccurate to say that Martha was the only model of active domestic femininity that the pre-internet generation had to worry about, never has it been so easy for a wannabe domestic goddess to promote her lifestyle to an audience.  All it takes is a hobby, a camera, some photo editing software, and you too can be a queen of the internet.

This sort of blog depends largely on photos.  Cropped, artful photos, color edited for mood.  We get a little story from these pictures.  It is of course an intentionally partial view, usually quite literally (these are most often cropped close-ups) and with artful blurring to heighten the sense of depth.  If I sound critical, I’m not wholly so.  As I discussed in a recent previous post, I try for this sort of artful photograph myself, and while I’m not nearly as skilled in photography as the best of the domestic bloggers, I think sometimes my pictures look pretty swanky.  I like swanky pictures.  But it is important to remember that the camera does indeed lie, and quite ingeniously at that.  Close cropped photos are intentionally not showing you everything that there is to see.

You can't see the dying leaves with spots, because I cropped them!

The article goes on to discuss the ways in which blogs of this sort make the author, and others, feel bad even as they hold a certain allure.  This is where I have mixed feelings.  On the one hand, some blogs do seem to be an intentionally rosy picture of life that has an inherent smugness attached to it.  Others, while not smug, do seem effortless in a way that is unlikely at best, and entirely false at worst.  However, the self flagellating reader is not choosing to read these blogs at random.  There are plenty of blogs out there by every day schmoes with regular lives and crappy cameras and a perfectly decent writing style.  The very reason that the guilt-inducing blogs are sought is their perfection.

The artichokes look pretty because I framed them so that the overgrown weeds don't show. My backyard is seriously messy.

At the time I’m writing this, there are so many blogs on the internet that while the exact number is not known, it IS known to be upwards of 100 million.  In the time it takes me to write this entry, hundreds, possibly thousands more blogs have started.  Your choice in blog reading is almost literally innumerable, and when the numbers get to be so great, it’s a very small number that stand out.  Those that stand out often do so because of photographs.

Let’s face it.  You can look at the mess on your own desk whenever you like.  Domestic blogs are entertainment and escapism.  Sure, they may offer a cupcake recipe, a knitting pattern, or a fashion tip that you’ll use, but generally speaking, we don’t read blogs looking to adopt a new lifestyle.  While the self consciously perfect person is yet more insufferable when she insists, “I’m just like you, really!” I don’t think bloggers are under any obligation to show sides they don’t wish to display.  If you keep a fashion blog, I don’t need to see a flash lit picture of you in your ratty pajamas at noon for every keen photo in which you display dashing sartorial sense.

We took about a hundred photos. Only a handful looked good.

One of the things that this article did was cause me to go back through my archives and look at my blog.  Honestly, I can’t see it well.  I don’t think any of us can see ourselves well.  I have no idea how people see me.  I can’t get rid of the context I have that tells me that I spend a lot of the week in a big ugly mess, that I lose my temper with my kids more often than I’d like, that there are whole days in which I get very little done.  I’m not taking pictures of my messy desk or my ratty pajamas or the times when, instead of doing a cool craft project, I snap at the kids and they behave like little monsters.  But I know all that’s there, whether it shows or not, and it makes it impossible for me to gauge whether I am, myself, presenting an intimidating front.  I don’t think I am.  But I’m also here with my posed and edited photos, leaving out huge chunks of my life and presenting the parts that look good.

I believe strongly that the personal is political.  I believe that women hurt each other when we pretend to be OK all of the time, when we pretend that having it all is something we can all do.  I believe that making choices and sharing those choices helps keep us whole.  But I don’t share every choice, every flaw, and truth be told, I have no intention to do so.  This isn’t the place where I do that.  This is primarily the space where I write about my knitting, and where I occasionally write something like this, but it’s mostly just the place where I write about knitting.   I don’t even share all of that.  Sometimes, when a project is so discouraging or has failed so hard, I am too depressed to turn it into a funny story or a useful lesson or a tale of woe.

Women and men both have it tough these days.  Women and men have always had it tough, and the toughness changes over the years.  Right now, we’re in a transition and no one knows quite what’s expected of them. Rigid gender roles aren’t gone, but they’re softening, and that’s freeing, but it’s also scary.  Some of us retreat to more hardened gender roles to feel safe, and some of us push against any expectations we perceive and most of us try to make a path that feels sort of comfortable.  Sometimes, the very things we seek out for comfort or ideas or for entertainment are the things that make us feel most lacking.  But the truth is, none of the perfect cupcake ladies is really perfect.  Some of these bloggers are writing from a place of privilege.  They can afford to stay home and bake lovely cakes for fun.  Some of these bloggers are writing their blogs after a long day slogging at a job that they hate and baking perfect cupcakes is how they relax.  Some bloggers are baking perfect cupcakes in between changing dirty diapers and running around the house desperately trying to keep ahead of the mess, and those perfect cupcakes are the one thing that is under control.

The point is, how we react to these blogs is far more about us than about the blogs.  Some of these blogs aren’t very good, really.  Some aren’t really good for us, anymore than indulging in perfect cupcakes would be good if it was an every day occurrence.  But we can click on that little X in the corner, close the browser window, and step back into our imperfect lives, lives we sometimes make a little more perfect with a camera lens and a story.

Posted in Craft, Feminism, Miscellany | 14 Comments »

Girl Detective

June 17, 2009

Hey, you know what we haven’t had around here in a while?  One of my semi annual long rambly feminist rants. About time, I think.

A little while back, Emily posted this in response to my musings on enjoying the things we don’t have to do.

I think something else that’s going on, at least in Anne and the other L.M. Montgomery books, is that they really valorize a particular kind of intellectually dreamy yet physically adventurous, almost tomboy-ish girl, and that type of girl (as portrayed) is unlikely to enjoy a quiet, non-narrative activity like sewing. I find that in many novels about girls there is this idea that the main character is interesting because she’s different from other girls – and sewing/knitting is often the shorthand indicator for boring feminine normalcy. So often the “dull” girls are content sitting still and sewing, whereas you can tell the “interesting” girls because they like to read and to be outside, roaming over the prairie/dale/moor (Callie Woodlawn, Scout Finch, and Jane Eyre also leap to mind). Which is interesting and problematic, in terms of discounting the traditionally feminine & claiming that girls are only interesting if they’re more like traditional boys.

Good points, all, and they stayed in my brain and affected my interpretation of my recent reading choices.

Some years back I wrote the very, very messy first draft of a novel, and I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to edit it ever since.  Recently, it occurred to me that what my novel most needed was a good dose of noir and mystery.  There is a mystery central to the plot, but the writing about it was so unfocused that it never became cohesive.  Reading the works of masters of detective fiction has become a major project for me of late.

So after reviewing Hammett for a while and moving on to Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, it hit me that I had never read a Nancy Drew book.  Nancy Drew was the commercial creation of Edward Stratemeyer, the successful publisher of the popular Hardy Boys mystery books.  Stratemeyer was a decided anti-feminist, but he was an even more decided capitalist, and when he realized that girls were purchasing the Hardy Boys books, he saw an opportunity to make money in the person of a girl detective.  Thus was Nancy Drew born.

Since Nancy Drew was entirely a commercial enterprise, her incarnations have changed somewhat over the years to suit the vagaries of different times and attitudes.  The byline Carolyn Keene is as much a fiction as Nancy herself; all books were ghostwritten.  In 1959, the earliest Nancy Drew books were reworked to suit changing cultural attitudes toward race.  It has been written that much of Nancy’s personality was stripped out at this time as well, but since my library only had the rewritten novels, I can’t personally confirm or deny this.  I can tell you that the solution to the racial insensitivies seems to have been to strip all references to non white characters from the books entirely.

Nancy presents an interesting counter and confirmation to the issue brought up by Emily.  Nancy has all the feminine accomplishments suitable to a young lady of her times, and what’s more, she enjoys them.  In one of the books I read, Nancy arranged a bouquet of flowers that she had grown herself and then, much to her surprise of course, won first prize at a local garden show with her arrangement.  She sews, she has fabulous fashion sense, she probably knits, though she didn’t in either of the books I read. Nancy is independent, confident, capable, and wholesome.

And she’s an absolute bore.  The character is more static than any I’ve read in a long, long time.  Already practically perfect, there’s no real need for Nancy to grow.  She exhibits none of the endearingly human foibles that the rest of us experience.  Anne Shirley, though also practically perfect in her own way, shows temper and makes mistakes repeatedly.  Nancy has no time for mistakes.  She must solve the mystery, at her own expense, without reward, and on her own initiative, because she is just that amazingly perfect and wonderful all the freaking time.

It was easy to see what about Nancy appealed to young women, though.  Nancy manages to straddle the uncomfortable line between left and right in the United States, and she does so with aplomb.  Nancy is independent, confident, trusted by the men in her life, and while she shows consideration for others, she is also very much whole in herself, so much so that her faithful boyfriend, Ned, seems rather limp and dependent in comparison.  At the same time, she has the traditionally feminine qualities already mentioned, and the respect she shows others, as well as the individual charity, tends to appeal to the politically conservative.  Nancy’s role is traditional and feminist at the same time, making her a fairly unique figure in children’s literature.

I’d rather read Hammett, but there’s something to be said about this wooden archetype who inspired Supreme Court justices and First Ladies. In an odd way, Nancy is closer to my particular brand of feminism than the heroines I’ve enjoyed and admired more.  I’m an ardent feminist who lives a fairly conservative life.  I’ve been a stay at home mother to three kids for a good long time now.  While I currently attend school and work, most of my adult life has been wrapped up in traditionally feminine pursuits.  It has been occasionally asked of me how I, a stay at home mom who loves to cook and knit, who has spent many occasions literally barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, can call myself a feminist.

I suppose we all must decide for ourselves.  If someone wishes to think me a bad feminist for living my life this way, that is his or her prerogative.  To me, though, feminism is not about disparaging the traditionally feminine.  It is about upholding the rights of women to make choices for themselves.  It is not just about those choices.  We can make choices that are decidedly unfeminist and antifeminist, but the right to make those choices for ourselves is a feminist cause.  I believe in the rights of women to determine their own courses, to have as level a playing field as is possible in a world where we all differ in talent, ability, and inheritance.  I don’t believe in allowing other women to decide for me based on what they believe is best for women, whether that view is one of women in traditionally feminine roles or women in traditionally masculine roles.  Ideally, we carve out our own place based on our own needs, and yes, our own desires.

Nancy Drew, girl detective, practically perfect in every way, is not a perfect symbol of feminism, but in some ways, she comes close, and for that, she has my interest.

Posted in Feminism, Miscellany | 4 Comments »

Totally hot

July 10, 2008

It is, actually. The East Bay is usually pretty temperate, and I know very few people who have air conditioning, but it’s been hot as Hades lately. So, so totally hot. In a round about way, connected only by the vagaries of language, this brings me to some thoughts on beauty brought on by Julie Frick‘s freaking amazing post about self image and hawtness, which I’ve been meaning to talk about since I read that post.

Where do we learn to think we’re somehow not OK? I used to think it was inherent in teenage angst and insecurity, but that was before I met my husband. Once, I said something to him about, “You know that age when you think you look just godawful and you feel terrible about your looks?” and he said, “No.” Further exploration revealed that he’d never actually experienced this. As he put it, he didn’t expect anyone else to find him attractive, but he was always very happy with his looks.

Now, I’ve been married to the guy long enough to know that he does have insecurities and issues, but his approach on looks struck me as remarkably healthy, and one that I’d like to emulate in raising my own kids. The idea of being happy in yourself without expecting praise or outside confirmation is amazing to me – something of a Holy Grail of self image. I would have considered it mythical had I not met my husband. Perhaps it is cultural. As one of my favorite Salon articles indicates, my husband is not the only Venezuelan with great self image. Perhaps it has to do with upbringing. Perhaps it has to do with gender. I’ve known more men than women who are happy with how they look.

Whatever the reason, I’d like to find it and solidify it into a talisman to protect my kids. And I’m starting by looking at myself. (Navel gazing for the benefit of others! Yowza!) How often do I think, say, or indicate that I’m not good enough? Pretty darn often, actually.

I’m an occasional reader of Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose. I have read about, and I believe I understand, thin privilege. But something that comes up again and again, for women of any weight, is this feeling of inadequacy. For some, thin is never thin enough. For some, it’s not about weight at all. I’ve talked about my personal issues with weight on here before, and with my recent weight gain, I think I’m the healthiest and happiest with my body that I’ve been in ages. Which is why it’s weird that the way getting on clothes has gotten harder feels a little upsetting to me some of the time. And it’s probably also why, instead of sitting around being down on my body, I’ve started in on my face.

Silly stuff. My face hasn’t changed, but without my body to focus on as the problem, it seems like I have some sort of sick need to pick at myself, to deconstruct my looks and find what’s wrong. It’s a form of vanity, I think, because it seems like, rather than accepting myself and just moving on, it’s a way to focus on my own looks and spend more time on them than is really necessary.

Reading about the beauty of other women, I realized that it’s one of the things I absolutely love about reading knitting blogs. I love looking at pictures of other people’s beautiful knits and I love it even more when I can see pictures of the knitters as well.  There are so many beautiful people whose blogs I read on a regular basis, and it’s real beauty, more than skin deep, that’s on display.  I see beauty from models in magazines and catalogs, but it’s not the same as these personal pictures in which you can see the pride of a creator, beauty without design or ostentation, and the little flaws that are so much more lovely than all the perfect features in the world.  It seems like all the beautiful women in magazines and movies begin to blend together after a while.  There’s only so much Photoshop airbrushing one can take before all skin looks too smooth, all eyes too sparkly, all breasts too perky.  Freckles disappear, and one never sees an interestingly crooked smile or a gentle curve of a belly anymore.  It’s all the same, it’s all bland, and while there’s some beauty there, it’s less real than the beauty of interest.

I can see all this in other people.  I’m grateful for it.  Maybe you’re like me in this: it’s easy to appreciate the beauty of others without extending much of that courtesy to ourselves.  We’re trained up to think it vain to even appreciate our own physical assets silently.  We begin searching out all our flaws far too young, and not in an appreciative, interested way, but as a means of telling ourselves how little we are, how disgusting, how ugly.  I’ve met very few young women who felt comfortable in their own bodies.

Age is a gift here.  I, and many of my friends, have found that we like our bodies and selves better as we get older.  At nearly thirty, I’m a lot happier with how I look than I was at twenty.  But there’s still a long way to go before I’m comfortable with what I’m showing my daughter about beauty.  I think, some days, we need to look in the mirror and actually say, “I look good today.”

Totally hot.

Posted in Feminism, Miscellany | 7 Comments »

Shallow artifice

May 2, 2008

A brilliant post on Needled about historian Catharine Macaulay got me thinking, and I’m going to try to run down the train tracks of that thought now. How much relation this bears to knitting may be debatable, but I hope to get to the needle arts in time.

My daughter is named for many strong women.  We liked the name Eleanor, but we also liked the fact that all the Eleanors we could think of were capable, interesting people.  It’s a name that’s not been very popular since the 1930′s, so the first association for a lot of folks is Eleanor Roosevelt.  This is something we liked about the name.

Which makes it interesting to note that a number of people, hearing my daughter’s name, have commented on that association, not in regards to (Anna) Eleanor Roosevelt’s achievements or personality, but her looks.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that looks don’t matter, because I think I’d be lying if I did go that far.  Looks do matter.  They matter in all sorts of ways, from the perceptions people form of us, to the way we present ourselves.  But it does mean something that a smart and qualified and capable woman can be dismissed by both men and women on the basis of her face and figure, while men with faces like feet can be revered and even thought sexy for their smarts.

The thing is, while I think looks do matter, they matter in context only.  It makes little sense to comment on the looks of a man or woman when the topic at hand is their work.  When Nancy Pelosi took over from Dennis Hastert as Speaker of the House, I saw and heard multiple commentaries on what Pelosi wore.  On the news.  I remember none of this during Hastert’s reign, and it stood out as a stark difference.

I’m not an innocent here.  This is where we start coming back to the realm of needle arts.  I’ve been making some of my own clothing for a number of years now.  I can’t help noticing what people wear and how it makes them look.  I think about clothing more now than I ever did, and that leads in turn to thoughts about how attractive clothing can make a person, and also how unattractive.  I’ve read plenty of little aphorisms about how you shouldn’t worry about what you wear because no one will notice, but I know they are not true, because I notice what other people wear.  I suspect I’m not alone.  I suspect, darkly, that these aphorisms exist merely as comfort, to bolster the true and lovely, but somewhat uneasy position, that we should wear what we want and not worry about what others think.  It’s easier to do that if we believe that others are not thinking of us at all.

While it’s clear that certain sorts of commentary on looks and dress are wrong, there’s a danger of slipping too far the other way as well – a danger of condemning people as frivolous for daring to care about matters of dress or facade.  Early feminists often fell into this trap.  Mary Wollstonecraft repeatedly railed against the frivolities of the women whose rights she defended in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, suggesting that showing any care for one’s looks was akin to moral weakness.  (I used Google Books to search the words “beauty” and “frivolous” in A Vindication, and found numerous passages damning the fair sex for the idiocy brought on by an obsession with loveliness – Wollstonecraft seemed to believe, not without reason at the time, that beauty came at the expense of education.)

We walk a fine line in fashion and feminism.  Caring too much makes us shallow, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of artifice and dressing to please others.  But it’s also easy to fall into the trap of dressing to displease others, without considering our own taste and feelings at all.

Women are still judged unfairly on their sexuality and sex appeal.  If the article by Brian Sewell that is referred to at Needled isn’t enough for you, reading about nearly any female public figure should open some eyes.  But how we are judged shouldn’t be the arbiter for how we present ourselves.  I think the beauty of creating our own clothes, the potential beauty of that edgy obsession with fashion, is that we can choose our own path.  If you want to show off your body, if you want to cover it, if you want to dress for comfort, you can create clothes that do just that.  The point is that you make it your own.

I’m torn here.  I think we will always devote more time and energy to what is easier.  That people are interested in fashion, gossip, and celebrity is less proof of foolishness or frivolity than it is the ease of forming an opinion on such matters.  It’s certainly easier to say what you think of Kate Hudson being named one of People’s 100 Most Beautiful People than it is to suggest a solution to problems in Uganda.

But this predilection for the easy, the safe, leads to sad legacies for women such as Catharine Macaulay.  I confess that I did not remember hearing her name until the post at Needled shoved a few bubbling streams of thought up from my memory.  We remember beauty long after it has faded and died.  We forget that which we do not understand, but particularly when it comes to women.  I can name you any number of men whose work I will never really understand, but when I trip blithely through my memory to name you some impressive historical women, the list compresses sadly and severely.

Napoleon dismissed my sex with a flippant suggestion that women should stick to knitting.  Well, I, for one, will stick to knitting.  But I can do so much more.

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Posted in Fashion, Feminism | 5 Comments »

Tempest in a teapot

October 26, 2007

All of this uproar is convincing me that I need to go out and read a copy of Jane Brocket’s new book, The Gentle Art of Domesticity.

I’d never read Jane Brocket’s blog, Yarnstorm, until the storm surrounding it caught me up, so I’m approaching this as an entire outsider. The first I heard of the book was in the bitter, intense Daily Telegraph review, and then, through this interesting post on Feather and Fan, I found the Woman’s Hour furor over the same book. Basically, from those sources, I could glean only that a woman named Jane Brocket had written a book in praise of domesticity and that a certain brand of feminist had found it terribly threatening. Then there’s the dismissive, intentional language on both Woman’s Hour and in the Telegraph article, suggesting that we refer to all such attempts at passing off the uber domestic as normal as porn, and that’s what sparked Ravelry’s most controversial thread to date. And finally, when I stopped by Needled to see what was new, I found that there’s another fabulous book review up, this time of the controversial Gentle Art. I’ve got a great overview now without a glimpse of the source. It’s like peering through a fogged up window.

However, even without reading the book, it’s set my brain atwitter, and you, dear reader*, must bear the brunt, I’m afraid.

In the end, the stakes on this particular book are not terribly high. Whether Ms. Brocket makes money selling it or not, it will not single handedly turn the tide toward a world of women in aprons preparing perfect meals served on hand glazed plates and hand knit placemats. It is not the gentle art of domesticity that is truly on trial here, but two distinct visions of womanhood. And to be honest, whether Ms. Brocket’s book truly endorses a particular vision of womanhood from her own perspective, it will still be representative of one.

I was born in 1979, so I’ve grown up as a beneficiary of the women’s movement. The 1980′s, when I was forming my own views of womanhood, were a fertile time for the myth of the Superwoman, she who could bring home the bacon as well as frying it up in the pan. The Superwoman wasn’t just a working mother – she Had It All. She was a high powered executive who could slip into something more comfortable after work and make a fabulous home cooked meal before seducing the husband and going to sleep in the bed she’d made so perfectly that morning. Having It All, though, proved to be very tiring, and many women found they couldn’t live up to the myth. Traces of Having It All remain, but mostly, that’s a myth that’s been put to rest. It’s perfectly possible to be a working mother who also has innate domestic skills, but the harm of the myth was that the woman was required to be the one doing it all and it was something she did without effort, because she was superwoman.

Back in the day, the now completely inane shopping and shoes comic Cathy was actually an incisive critique of the Superwoman myth. (Truly! It used to deal with issues like sexual harassment and single parenthood and the feelings of being left behind when everyone else seems to Have It All.) But Superwoman did not die with the idea that a woman could (and should) be everything at once.

Today we seem to have a dichotomy between the Superwoman who works outside the home and the Superwoman who stays at home. These twin deities, so often portrayed as enemies in the major media outlets, are no more the norm for most women than the Superwoman of the eighties. But if they are to be Superwomen, if the myth is to persist, they must be Very Different as well as being Super. The working woman, therefore, is career driven and successful, a perfectly coiffed Madonna in a power suit, while the stay at home mother of myth not only raises fabulous, interested, stimulated children – she does so while keeping a perfect home, and she does so in a post feminist world, a world where she can knowingly wink at the camera while polishing the silverware.

It’s this world into which the recent spate of domestic soliloquys has burst upon the stage, alarming those who fall on one side of the divide or the other. Most of us, I believe, reside somewhere in the middle – women who might work and raise children, sometimes make the bed, sometimes leave the cereal bowls on the table till dinner time, sometimes make a perfect home cooked meal, sometimes decide that a block of cheese will tide everyone over. That they are soliloquys is evidenced by the fact that these are largely personality driven views of domesticity. We do not watch a show on the Food Network or HGTV to see our own domesticity writ large, but to see the domesticity of Martha Stewart, Nigella Lawson, or Rachael Ray.

This means that criticism of the domesticity on display cannot avoid the personal. We reject the brand of Martha Stewart, and in so doing, we look a little closer at Stewart herself. I cannot tell you who Calvin Klein is or what he looks like, but Martha Stewart’s invitation to take her sheets as a model for my own makes it so that just by knowing the name Martha Stewart, I also feel like I know a little about her. And, this, I believe, is why the response to Jane Brocket’s book has been so venomous. The reviewers who dislike Jane’s own domesticity see her as a representative of the form of womanhood that is not just about enjoying a craft, but is about being a domestic creature in the entirety.

I personally feel stifled by both views. I’m a stay at home mother and I consider myself to be a feminist. I love to knit and cook. I have a frilly apron with teapots on it. I feel unspeakably adorable when I wear that apron. I find it practical, as well, in that it has actually protected my clothes from spills and splashes in the kitchen. I’m also a terrible housekeeper. I do not like to clean. It is as much as I can do to force myself to pick up some of the most obvious messes many days. Today I have not cleared the breakfast table. It is 10:25 AM. The boys are at school, and their cereal bowls sit discarded on the table and I do not think I will clear them until I feel like it.

The important part of all of this is that I do not feel like any of this is a reflection of me as a woman. It is a reflection of me as a person – what I do, what my interests are, what choices I’ve made, how I relax, where I succeed and fail. But my husband is just as likely as me to be the one serving the meal, leaving out the bowls, picking them up, washing them, as I am. My husband is going to come home and he will not expect me to have cleaned the house. He will be happier with me if I can show him a drawing I did today than if I can show him the laundry I did.

This is where I think the tempest starts and ends. We are still seeing the art domesticity as part and parcel of the art of being womanly. Perhaps if we looked upon it as one hobby in a sea of hobbies, one that is not truly about what is domestic, but the hobby of being domestic, we could watch the tempest settle down into a well mannered pot of tea, to be served, of course, to oneself, lounging about in a teapot bedecked apron while the breakfast dishes lie fallow on the table.

Posted in Craft, Feminism, Miscellany | 5 Comments »

Real women, real old patterns, and really moved

August 17, 2007

Well. We have a place to live, and that’s good, but I am so ready to never, never move again. Of course, spending the rest of our days in a two bedroom apartment with three children is probably not an option, but I hadn’t remembered how much I hate moving. I thought I remembered hating moving, but that was before my loathing grew to epic proportions in the course of actually moving.

Yarn, by the way, makes excellent packing filler. It’s light and squishy, and it works very well in keeping boxes filled but not too heavy. Just a tip for all you knitters, should you have cause to move.

We hadn’t moved in four years. It’s the longest we’ve been settled anywhere, and it meant we were both out of practice and more entrenched than usual.

In the course of moving, as is usual, I rediscovered many things I’d lost, including the pattern magazines of the sixties and early seventies that my grandmother left me. Good heavens! I must scan some of the pictures in – there are really remarkable things to be seen. I’m not going to give too much away, so I’ll just say this: pornstash, bow tie, knit zig zags. All in one place. Oh, the humanity! Many of the sweaters are quite lovely, actually, but the knit items for men are…well, who in 1972 decided that what men really need is to accentuate their waists? There are all these perfectly decent sweater spoiled by an ill placed belt or a long laced slit at the throat. It’s terribly exciting, but not good fashion sense. Worse yet is when the belt is slung at the hips. I don’t know how, but this looks even more accidentally feminine.

In other news, I finally got into Ravelry! It’s rare that something is as good as the hype, but Ravelry is every bit as good as I’d heard it would be. I’m having so much fun. I can’t wait take pictures of my stash and get them up there.

One of the most interesting discussions I saw on Ravelry was about Real Women. I capitalized the term because it seems like in recent years Real Women has taken on a cultural meaning having to do solely with weight. When a magazine refers to Real Women, they’re not talking about real women. They’re talking about people who are not skinny. Real Women doesn’t have to mean overweight, but it means Not Skinny almost exclusively.

The Ravelry discussion was about banishing the term as a pejorative since we’re all real women, regardless of size. It’s not a new idea, but it’s not one that I think can be brought up too often. One of the most unpleasant aspects of being female is the constant competition in which we all seem to be engaged. If I’m OK, it must mean that everyone different from me is not OK. Since there’s been a trend toward skinniness since the 1960′s, skinny has come to be the forbidden and unhealthy ideal that is difficult, even impossible for most women to attain. That there should be a backlash is entirely understandable, but what perhaps is not as well understood is what the backlash does to women.

Obviously, if you’ve seen my pictures here, you know that I’m skinny, so there’s some self interest in this discussion. What I may not have mentioned overtly is that I tend toward the unhealthy underweight end of the spectrum. It’s not something I have a lot of control over. My natural body size is small and I have a hyperactive metabolism. I don’t really mind being skinny in most respects, but I do mind the unhealthy part of things, because when I drop below a certain weight I get dizzy and spinny and tired and it becomes harder to get through the day. Anyway, because of this I don’t view my size as a positive, but merely a fact. I’m skinny. Not just thin, not just willowy, not just slender or graceful or elegant or any of those lovely words, but skinny. I look better with 10 to 15 pounds more than I usually carry, but it’s very hard for me to get up to that weight and then keep it on.

Maybe I’m extra sensitive, but it makes it hard for me to read reviews of knitting books or patterns sometimes, because a lot of times the smaller sizes are referred to as being for “anorexics” and the models disparaged as pathetic, sickly, unattractive, not like real women, or otherwise disturbing. I had a bad evening some weeks back in which I read one of these reviews on Amazon and then cried. It’s no more appropriate for people to disparage the in body type than to make fun of people for being overweight. Moreover, if the models are simultaneously being held up as an ideal and ripped down as hideous, then we’ve created a space in which no woman is ever attractive or acceptable as she is, rather than making it more acceptable to be real. Real is many, many sizes, and many, many shapes. Real is a big nose or a dainty upturned nose, a svelte figure or a curvy one.

Women look their best in so many different ways. Some women look better with a little more meat on their bones and some look best thin and sleek. It all depends on build and health, and in the end, health is 99% of attractive. I’d like to see a space where all of us can feel our best about how we look and stop worrying about weight.

I’d also like to see a wider range of sizes in knitwear, too, though, and with that in mind, I’m going to try to write up the pattern for Arthemis soon in many sizes. I think the shape should be flattering to most figures with the loose fit but curved outline. Arthemis will be a free download like Maude Louise (which I’m also hoping to edit soon). I recently stumbled upon Ysolda Teague’s wonderful size chart, and I’m going to refer to that for future sizing.

If you made it through the rambling, good for you! Thanks for letting me pour out a little bit of mind.

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Posted in Feminism, Knitting, Miscellany | 7 Comments »

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