Last year, my first Christmas with three daughters drove me to blogging. I couldn’t believe how different the toys marketed to my kids versus toys marketed to boys were. I was amazed at the billion dollar effort spent on gender programming.
Thank you to all the ReelGirl fans. Happy Holidays!
Here’s a version of one of my first posts up on SF Gate today.
Santa, the Easter Bunny, unicorns, and heaven
What do you tell your media saturated kids when they ask you if Santa is real?
I tell them how Santa can fold his body up, like a magical yogi, to wiggle down our chimney. I tell them which reindeer are the fastest, smartest, or strongest; what they all like to eat (cold, baby carrots and chocolate coins.)
In my stories, there are also girl reindeer, and Mrs. Claus is Sara, an artist who is famous throughout the North Pole for her animal portraiture.
My kids look adorable sucking it all up, mouths open, eyes wide, round cheeks; their faces are all circles. But while they are looking at me, mesmerized, asking a million more questions, sometimes I wonder about telling them such elaborate lies. What’s going to happen when they figure me out? How old they will be? Will they feel sad? Disillusioned? Will they ever take me seriously again?
I didn’t grow up believing any of this stuff so I don’t know. Probably, making it all up isn’t a big deal. Or maybe it is. Now I think, possibly, all these childhood myths serve a brilliant purpose: a gentle way for kids to learn well-intended parents are not always reliable sources of truth.
This movie is so campy, like a horror film or a melodrama parody. I don’t think that’s the director’s intention. That said, I had a great time going out to see it. I would recommend this movie if you, like me, rarely get that chance and you are craving some well-produced, Hollywood escapism.
Here are some things I liked about it:
(1) Natalie Portman is a great actress. As always, she gives an excellent performance. But her role is kind of a one-note. She’s got Oscar buzz, but, in the same way her character is challenged in the movie, Portman doesn’t get much of a chance to show her “dark” side. (Though unlike her character, we all know Portman can pull off dark; it’s this script/ role that limit her here.)
(2) Some breaking of stereotypes. I thought this movie was going to have two female rivals who hate each other and wickedly compete for the star role. We’ve all seen this set up a million times. But Portman wins her role at the beginning of the movie. The movie is about how winning that prize affects her. Kunis and Portman are supposed to look alike in the psycho-girl-twin way Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh do in “Single White Female.” Kunis, I think, is wearing brown contacts to make that point, and they’ve got the “white swan” versus “black swan” thing going on which the movie beats to death in repetitive dialogue and symbolism. But Kunis’ character, Lily, is only out to get Nina in Nina’s head. Lily is actually supportive and funny. That Lily is evil only in fantasy is a cool, different take– the idea that women aren’t really all out to get each other! (Of course, Nina does have the quintessential psycho-mom who keeps her daughter locked away, as just seen in “Tangled”.)
(3) Many female parts: Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder are also in the movie. There is really only one male role. Other males have walk-ons as sex objects or as supporting dancers.
When I decided to have kids, I knew sacrafices would be made, but I did not plan for the end of matching socks.
There are way, way too many socks, many of them super-tiny. I don’t have the time to spend hours seeking out and matching up these socks. Who in the world has this time? Or this drive? Or this kind of organized, efficient mind?
No one in my family, not my kids or my husband, wears matching socks anymore. We do wear socks with the same thickness. You can’t wear a thin sock with a bulky sock.
There is one exception: a new pair of socks. My niece just gave me a pair of black socks, soft and thin, decorated with circus elephants. Today, I’m sporting a match.
Instead of counting sheep last night, I made a mental list of my favorite book stores in San Francisco. How weird to wake up this morning and see someone else made a list on the same thing in today’s New York Times.
www.nytimes.com Dog Eared Books in the Mission
I was very happy to see a celebration of local bookstores, though The Times list is a little highbrow and genre focused for me. For example, City Lights in North Beach is undeniably a great book store with an excellent feminist/ women studies section, but it can be kind of oppressively intellectual to lose yourself in. If we’re talking about pleasure-seeking in bookstores, that is escapism into text, which is my goal when I enter a place, I’m more of a generalist; I like a bookstore with a good mix of highbrow/ lowbrow and a massive magazine rack. This can be a challenge because I don’t like superstores i.e. Barnes and Noble and Borders. So here are 4 local favorites:
Dog Eared Books on Valencia (which is listed in The Times.) This store has a good mix of new and used, and I also love the mix of books they choose to display prominently.
Books Inc, one in Laurel Village and the other on Chestnut Street, are perfect for me.
Christopher’s Books in Potrero Hill is my local store. I love it. At night, its all lit up with yellow light; one of my friends said of it, “18th street with Christopher’s Books is so cute; it looks just like Sesame Street!” It’s true, the street and the store have a comforting, homey appeal, though Christopher’s is very small, if you’re looking for classic, they may not have it (and it doesn’t have a magazine rack.)
I’m a bookslut, I read several at once. Here’s my current list of books I love that I’m reading now or just finished:
Just finished Big Girls Don’t Cry by Rebecca Traister. This is a great, optimistic analysis of the 2008 election. Traister writes a lot about the divide between young women and second wavers, and how a major problem with Hillary Clinton’s campaign was her failure to reach out to the younger generation. Even though their agendas were similar, the potential first woman president was framed as establishment while Obama got a monopoly on being the candidate of “change” (and of course hope!)
Traister, oddly, left my demographic out of her book: Gen Xers, women in their 30s and 40s with young kids who could have been Clinton supporters. I went to Hillary’s campaign with media advice, offering to train women in talk radio, op-eds, TV debate, and new media. They were not interested. One woman in charge of San Francisco volunteers asked me to do one workshop for them. In contrast, as Traister notes, Obama was brilliant about reaching to voters using all kinds of media including social. Traister told similar stories to mine about Clinton’s campaign and women bloggers in their 20s who had tried to help her out but were not used well.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I’m kind of bogged down by the plot but the characters are great.
How To Become a Scandal by Laura Kipnis. This is a brilliant book. I especially loved the Linda Tripp analysis. Anyone interested in the intersection of politics and culture should read it.
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis. Never read Amis before, and he’s a great writer, though the sexism is challenging for me.
A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias. I’m always looking for good fiction about marriage. This novel is romantic and beautiful, though very sad, the protagonist’s wife is dying.
My Hollywood by Mona Simpson. I just bought this. I loved Anywhere But Here. Simpson’s other work seemed like the same story recycled, though I’m excited to try this new one.
I Found This Funny edited by Judd Apatow. This is a really great fiction anthology that includes Alice Munro, F. Scott Fitzgerald, David Sedaris, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, John Stewart, and many more.
The latest issue of New York Magazine has a seven page story on the longterm fallout from the Pill’s legalization in the 1960s and it’s subsequent infiltration into mainstream American sexual culture. The magazine’s cover photo pictures a woman sticking out her tongue, a white pill stuck to it, evoking similar imagery from the Sixties of young people eagerly ingesting tabs of acid. The message is, of course, that the Pill is just as insidious as all the other drugs that came out of the era; it’s ‘free love’ revolution no better than the concomitant drug craze that left my generation moaning about their parents’ addictions and irresponsibility, feeling as if were left to clean up after somebody else’s party.
The article makes the point again and again, that yes, contraception may have advanced female independence and sexual freedom, but it, too, has an irresponsible twin movement; it’s created a modern, multi-million dollar fertility industry fueled by women who delayed childbirth too long and now, in their thirties and forties, are miserable because they’ve failed to reproduce.
The article succeeds in perpetuating beloved myths about womanhood, all which spring from one essential notion: women desperately want to have children and women who don’t are unhappy.
Once you accept this basic tenet, a series of other beliefs follow as logically as a proof from highschool geometry. Women are naturally Madonna-like and possess the qualities we prize in good mothers; they’re dedicated, nurturing, and kind; their life’s mission is to find good fathers for their offspring; that’s why they seek out men who are powerful and rich and that’s why men are attracted to women who are young and fertile; and that’s why women aren’t motivated to be in positions of power and that’s basically why the world is the way that it is. Childless women are creepy, but they’re okay if they’re sad about their state.
The way the New York Magazine article falls all over itself to highlight female pain reminds me of how the media paternalistically covers sexual assault survivors with gray dots so they don’t have to be ‘shamed’ again. Wouldn’t it be better if we had a society that actually recognized and valued those brave women for the heroes they are? Wouldn’t it be better if our culture actually valued childless women?
Bad things happen to women, but very often, they recover. Contrary to popular belief, they recover from assualt, from abortions, and from childlessness. They’d recover much faster and in far greater numbers if the world supported and valued them for their multiple roles and potentials instead of falling all over itself to celebrate motherhood as the primary female achievement. If for example, magazine covers didn’t show a woman crazily licking up a birth control pill like a tab of acid or feature multiple images of the latest starlets’ “baby bumps.”
There are also many women, perfectly happy, well-adjusted women, who don’t want kids. Elizabeth Gilbert, best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love is one of them. She writes about her blissful childlessness in her book, Committed. Gilbert, successful and talented, is widely criticized for her self-absorption.
But here’s a crazy idea: having kids is actually just about the most selfish act (read un-idealized-feminine) a human can engage in. Rapidly growing world population issues aside, we have children because we think it will make our own lives more fulfilling; we want to create another human being with someone we love; or we are seeking immortality by continuing our gene pools. That selfishness isn’t bad by the way. All ‘good’ deeds are self-centered. God was smart that way. We give money away because it feels good or work for causes or support political candidates because they further our personal beliefs. But as Erica Jong notes in her recent Wall Street Journal article, when women have kids, their worlds can become very small and limited, mothers turning away from the world’s unsolvable, overwhelming issues into the self absorption of their own families.
The species needs to reproduce, we all know that. Having kids can be incredibly fulfilling, and it’s great that so many of us do it. But the under-reported story is not only the well-adjusted, happy women who live fulling lives that don’t involve children at all, but a culture, still desperately lacking in celebrating women’s other creative acts.
(4) Make kids pick out & lay out clothing the night before (one brilliant mom I know dresses her daughter in her “tomorrow clothes” before she goes to bed)
(5) Only one chance to make requests for hairstyles
(6) Cereal for breakfast, put out boxes on the table; cook only one hot thing. If they want something else, they can go to their food shelves.
(7) Parents, don’t start activities if kids will annoy you if they interrupt you including checking news or email (and if your husband happens to be a musician, no playing the piano or ukulele)
(8) If you have a sitter and multiple kids, it’s great if s/he has a driver’s license and can help with drop off
“As a Black woman, I know all to well how complicated the issue of hair can be. Looking at the above image [of Tangled’s Rapunzel], I found that I could not see beyond her long blond hair and blue eyes. I believe that this will also become the focal point of many girls of colour. The standard of long flowing blond hair as the epitome of femininity necessarily excludes and challenges the idea that WOC are feminine, desired, and some cases loved and therefore, while Disney is creating an image of Rapunzel that we are accustomed to, her rebirth in a modern day context is problematic, because her body represents the celebration of White femininity.
…
The fact that Tangled is coming on the heels of the first African American princess is indeed problematic. It makes Princess Tiana seem like an impotent token, with Rapunzel appearing to reset the standard of what princess means and even more precisely what womanhood means.”
I watched “Tangled” with my sister, both of us brunettes, and when we heard the line about how Rapunzel’s hair, if cut, loses its magic and turns brown, we looked at each other and started cracking up.
There is some other reference in the movie to “browness.” Does anyone remember what it is? Flynn takes Rapunzel into a bar full of drunken men, and he says something, or someone says something like: “It seems very brown in here” or it “smells brown.” Please tell me if you know what I’m talking about.
It is notable to, as Girl W/ Pen! refers to, that the princess death sentence is coming right after the first African-American young royal finally made her way to the animated screen. There’s lots of talk about ending the only cartoon vehicle that repeatedly allowed girls be stars, but not so much discussion about the racism involved in the timing of this decision. Also, I keep hearing that adjusted for inflation dollars, “The Princess and the Frog” did just as well as “The Little Mermaid.” If this is true, I don’t get why Disney execs claim the film was such a failure.
Again, I don’t want to be defending princesses here. I don’t like them. But I don’t like the way they’re being used to get rid of starring girls roles all together.
Natalie Wilson writes the cast of “Tangled” isn’t quite all white. On Rapunzel’s wicked mother:
Notably, Mother Gothel, Rapunzel’s evil abductress, has dark hair and eyes and non-Caucasian features.
According to Christian Blaulvelt of Entertainment Weekly, “Mother Gothel is a dark, dark character. I mean, she’s a baby snatcher.” Ah yes, and she is dark in more ways than one – her dark skin, hair, and clothing contrasting with the golden whiteness of Rapunzel.
Alan Menken, the musical composer for the film, similarly notes that “Mother Gothel is a scary piece of work. Nothing she is doing is for the good of Rapunzel at all. It’s all for herself” Emphasizing her manipulative relationship with Rapunzel, Menken admits, “I was concerned when writing it. Like, will there be a rash of children trying to kill their parents after they’ve seen the movie?” Wow – how about worrying if there will be a rash of children who will see DARK-SKINNED mothers (and non-wedded ones) as evil and sinister?
In addition to carrying on Disney’s tradition of problematic representations of race, the film also keeps with the tradition of framing females beauty obsession as evil and “creepy” (Flyn’s words) rather than as understandable in a world of Disneyfied feminine norms. A mirror worshipper to rival the evil queen in Snow White, Gothel is presented as a passive-aggressive nightmare — she is the tyrannical single mother that is so overbearing Rapunzel must beg for the opportunity to leave the tower.
I always ask my daughter when we’re watching these movies: where are the moms? Belle in “Beauty in the Beast,” no mom. “Ariel” in The Little Mermaid, no mom. “Jasmine” in Aladdin, no mom.
So right after I blog about what a great sleeper I am and what great sleepers my kids are blah blah blah, a stomach bug invades my house. All three kids are puking. Always at night. The kids are on the bottom floor of our house, all three in one room; my husband and I are on the top floor, so we hear the whole sequence of events on the baby monitor: a cough, then a series of coughs, then a splash.
One crying kid ends up coming to my room to sleep with me. My husband goes down to sleep in her bunk. She is so psyched to get in my bed that even though she’s just been throwing up, she’s smiling ear to ear, her hands clasped in front of her. She burrows in next to me and then she throws up all over my bed, something brown and thick, possibly refried beans. I want to cry. But she’s already crying. So I change her clothing, my husband changes the bedsheets, we get a bowl for her in case she has to puke again. She keeps talking and talking, for at least an hour. She wants to know all about Santa. How can he stay awake all night? Does he really stay awake or does he nap in the sled? When she’s finally quiet and back to sleep, I ‘m awake for another hour.
Maybe I’ll delete my earlier posts and open that Preseco tonight.
I have not read The Three Martini Playdate, but the title cracks me up. Even though it makes me laugh, drinking and parenting don’t work for me.
In Nora Ephron’s last book, I Feel Bad About My Neck there’s a piece called “What I Wish I’d Known.” I just reread her hilarious list, reprinted in an anthology called I Found This Funny edited by Judd Apatow. One of Ephron’s maxims: “The reason you’re waking up in the middle of the night is the second glass of wine.”
My last blog post was about sleeping. I love sleeping. Love it. I think it’s the best thing ever. I love my bed, I love being in my bed. I think a lot of parents fetishize sleep. Ephron is right, alcohol messes with my sleep, even just a little bit of it. When I don’t sleep, I get cranky. Then I yell at my kids and feel guilty and horrible.
Not only am I meaner when I’m sleepless, I’m less productive. I’m self-employed, and I need to be highly motivated to get anything done. I started a non-profit, and I can’t just show up for work and slog through. I’m also a writer, and I have little desire to write when I’m sleepless or hungover. I know lots of writers, incredibly famous and successful ones, have managed it: Hemingway (though he shot himself in the head) Faulkner, Mary Karr (though she got sober) But not me. Not with three little kids. Of course, lots of factors contribute to exhaustion. Some are just very easy to eliminate.
I’m sure lots of people can handle drinking a glass of wine or two–jeez– and many parents probably find kids less tiring than I do. I can’t imagine being a preschool teacher or kindergarten teacher, for example. I think I’d last about one hour. I adore my children, but they’re energy suckers. Or maybe something more symbiotic, less parasite sounding. My kids make me incredibly happy, but I need to choose very carefully what else I allow in my life or I wouldn’t be able to do much else but amble through the day.
Not drinking makes me happier, nicer, more patient, and more motivated. It’s very possible I won’t always feel this way, but right now it’s working for me.
Since I had kids, I can’t stay awake for a entire movie. Also, I’m not that into going out. I’ve tried to force ‘date night’ but the cost is insane– with the sitter, parking, and a movie or dinner. I’m also exhausted by the time we go out and starving, I’m used to eating at 5pm.
So here’s the solution: watching series. I love it! It’s perfect for our attention span, My kids go to bed at 7pm so Dan and I light a fire and watch. Its relaxing, cheap, and fun.
We started out with “The Wire” which, like many people, I think is the best thing on TV ever. Though it took me a long time to ‘get it.’ I saw the first episode in the hospital, after I had Rose, and had to watch it, literally, over 10 times before I could follow the plot.
Now we’re watching “24.” We started watching this on vacation, when the house we were renting had it in their DVD library. Its entertaining but total propaganda. Everyone in the show is always watching FOX News. The hero in the episodes we just watched is the Secretary of Defense. His daughter spotted the villain at a Heritage Foundation dinner. And the idiot of the show is a lawyer for Amnesty International. The series is basically a dramatized justification for torture. That said, it’s well acted and keeps your attention.
Any suggestions for us when we’re done? I tried “Mad Men” which I understand is about sexism, not sexist. I liked it very much. But it depressed me. I can’t watch it when I have three little kids.
www.nytimes.com Dog Eared Books in the Mission
