On Reel Girl, I’ve been blogging for years about raising my kids as intuitive eaters so now we have archive of something I think is pretty rare: a record of what it was like to bring up daughters with no eating disorders. Now my kids are 22, 19, and 17. Check out this video as the latest exploration about often misguided (but not always) attempts to be “safe” and “successful” and “healthy” as a female living in a patriarchy.
In my email last week, I received brilliant words from Discovering the Inner Mother author Bethany Webster.
Bethany wrote:
“Patriarchy encourages women to become mothers, then abandons them.
Through isolation, overwork, lack of childcare, lack of parental leave, lack of healthcare, and through lack of real community support.”
I would add to this: lack of reproductive rights, the wage gap, and access to quality education. I could go on…
Bethany writes:
“Patriarchy sets mothers up to fail and then blames them for the suffering it created. All of this limits a mother’s capacity to show up in the ways she may have wanted to.”
So when I speak about the Mother Wound, many women get reactive and tell me:
“You’re just blaming mothers.”
“You’re putting even more on women.”
And I understand why it can feel that way.
But here is where I see it differently.
When we only position mothers as passive victims of the system, we unintentionally strip them of their power.
Mothers are not ONLY victims of patriarchy.
Mothers are ALSO participants within the system—and therefore have the capacity to interrupt it.
Mothers are extraordinarily powerful, precisely because they are formative.
And recognizing their formative role is not equivalent to blaming them.
It’s about responsibility in the truest sense: the ability to respond differently.
This critical nuance is the core of my work and is often misunderstood.
Not every woman is a mother. But every woman is a daughter.
And the work of healing begins there.
When a woman becomes more conscious of:
She begins to break the cycle with her own children.
This is not about being hard on yourself or trying to be the perfect mother.
It’s about awareness, honesty, and a willingness to do what your own caregivers could not.
I’m not saying this is easy work.
The truth is, not everyone is ready for it.
But this is where change happens.”
I’ve had coaching from Bethany, and she’s been instrumental in helping me find my inner mother. I’ve also trained in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to learn the skills to emotionally regulate and show up with presence, curiosity, and compassion for myself, my partner and my kids. Basically, figuring out how can I be resourced enough to be as healthy a mom and person as possible while living in the patriarchy that degrades my values and doesn’t support my well-being.
Nonviolent Communication, created by clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, teaches that all human behavior is motivated by an attempt to meet universal human needs. Feelings are clues pointing to those needs. NVC teaches how to to express these needs honestly while staying connected to the humanity of others, which basically means not creating “enemy images,” remembering that everyone has needs and everyone’s needs matter.
So, for example, say I go into my daughter’s room and it’s a mess. Maybe I’ve asked her to clean it, and instead I see her lying in her bed, looking at her phone.
How do I feel when I walk into this scene? Probably frustrated and irritated. My underlying needs could be: order, beauty, and maybe respect or consideration.
Before learning NVC, I might have yelled at my kid, something like: “What are you doing? Get up! Clean your room!” Maybe I would’ve added a threat: “If you don’t, you’re not going out.”
I might have gotten compliance from her. She may have rolled her eyes, gotten defensive, she may have yelled back. Most likely any motivation would come from fear about a consequence or from wanting to please me, a fear of disconnection, maybe a feeling of shame and a need for acceptance. It’s doubtful she would have met or recognized any intrinsic motivation, any desire to care for her space, what she wants and how to make that happen as far as the state of her room. And without being motivated in this deep way, the whole cycle is likely to repeat: my daughter dependent on me, yelling and threatening.
Now, if I find myself in this scenario, the first thing I do is offer myself compassion for the pain of my unmet needs. My needs matter, totally separate from hers.
When I see her messy room and my daughter in her bed, I might quietly say something like “Ouch,” and put my hand on my heart.
I do whatever I need to do to regulate—maybe I leave the room and come back minutes or hours later. Timing is everything. I love the phrase: “Strike when the iron is cold.” I rarely talk to my kids now if I’m activated. After I’ve soothed myself, I turn with curiosity in my imagination, to my daughter. Rather than thinking about what she’s saying no to, I wonder: What is she saying yes to? How might she be feeling—tired, overwhelmed? What needs might be alive in her—ease, comfort, rest?
When I’m in that “NVC consciousness,” if I still want to talk to her, I go ask her if she’s in a place to talk to me. I might go back in her room, sit next to her on her bed, and gently rub her head.
“Hey honey, how are you?”
“Tired.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. You’ve been busy.”
“Yes.”
“You just feel like resting.”
“I could sleep forever.”
“I get it. Is this an OK time to talk about your room?”
She sighs. “I guess.”
“When I see the clothes on the floor, I feel kind of annoyed and anxious. I got you those clothes, and I feel sad when I don’t see them not taken care of the way I wish they were. I’m also thinking about the washing machine—when the laundry piles up like this, it makes it hard for everyone else to get a turn to use it. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, I see that.”
“I’m wondering if you have any ideas about how to take care of your clothes in a way that works for everyone in the family?”
“Yeah, I could do a load later today.”
“That would be helpful, thank you. Any other ideas?”
“While I’m doing a load, I can clean my room.”
“That would be great. Thank you for thinking about this.”
“Sure, I like it when my room is clean. I get it.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
My priority is connection with my kids—and my long-term goal is helping them feel safe and supported so they can learn how to emotionally regulate. Whether or not my daughter cleans her room is secondary.
Before I learned NVC, I was a “power-over” parent. I thought my job was to teach my three kids to be “good” and “successful” by obeying my wise and smart rules.
When my oldest daughter struggled with behavioral health challenges, everything changed. I realized I didn’t actually know what was best for her all the time. I realized she was a different person that me with her own feelings and needs. I know this may seem obvious, but somehow, I really thought, just like my reflex reaction to my youngest kid’s room, that I know best how and when everything in their life should be done.
When I learned NVC, I realized I’m not the ultimate authority on all things, the teller of truth, God, as patriarchy would have me believe in that there is always a power over another person or thing. With NVC, I learned how to actually listen to my kids, to meet them where they were instead of where I thought they should be.
So many of the rules and expectations I had internalized—compliance, obedience, rewards, external validation—were rooted in patriarchal values, not in fulfillment, joy, or creativity.
And just to avoid turning this into a binary: all three of my kids are actually more “successful” (I think all human are) when they are intrinsically motivated—when they are living authentically, recognizing their deeper needs, and making choices from that place.
That’s the kind of success I care about now.
To learn more about my daughter’s mental health challenges and NVC, read this post and go to Listen2ConnectCoach.com To download free NVC Feelings and Needs lists, go to https://listen2connectcoach.com/resources
When my teenage daughter was in residential treatment for behavioral health challenges, she would tell her therapists about the time my husband kicked her out of his truck on the freeway.
That never happened.
The first time my husband and I heard her story, we were shocked and defensive. “How could she say something like that?” We asked the therapist. “Is she trying to hurt us?”
“Lying is a consistent problem for her,” the therapist told us. “We’ll confront her together in a family session. If she can’t be truthful, she won’t get better.”
Finally, all in one room, my husband and I demanded our daughter tell us why she made up negative stories about us. We restated what really happened: “When you yell at us, get physical in the car and threaten us, when you grab the steering wheel, or shove the car into park and your sisters are in the back seat, we cannot continue to drive. We’ll pull over and ask you to get out to calm down. We do that to keep everyone safe. We would never force you out on a freeway.”
Our daughter’s eyes glazed over, and she wouldn’t say anything or respond to us at all. My husband and I got more agitated, frustrated, and defensive. That session ended, like so many others, in radical disconnection.
Several therapists later, when we heard the same story yet again, I rolled my eyes. “I can’t go through this in another session, it’s a waste of time and money.”
“What about just listening to her?” said the therapist.
“What?” I said. “She’s lying.”
“But what was she feeling?” asked this therapist.
“What was she feeling when the thing that never happened happened?” I said, my body stiffening.
“We’re not going to enable her,” said my husband, reciting the counsel of so many experts. “She’s manipulating us.”
“Can you listen for the emotions underneath her story?” said the therapist. “Could that be the truth for her?”
I’m a writer, skilled in translating emotion into metaphor, and still hearing the therapist emphasize feelings beneath the narrative, my brain short-circuited. “You mean how would she feel if we had left her on the freeway?”
“Yes, can you picture that?”
I closed my eyes. I felt like I had to harness every brain cell in my head to even imagine my daughter abandoned on 101 North. “She would be terrified,” I said. “Totally alone.” When I spoke those words, I felt them. I finally experienced the empathy for my daughter that always eluded me when I pictured her on a tree-lined street.
In our next family session, when the freeway story came up, I blinked and saw her standing on the shoulder, cars whizzing by. “That must’ve been really scary,” I said.
“Yes, it was scary,” she said. She went on to talk about how lonely and sad she was, and how much shame she felt for acting out— this from a kid who would never tell me what she was feeling. And tragically, I spent so many years begging and ordering her to open up. Not long before that session, I’d written in a letter to her:
“Time and time again, we’ve asked you to be honest with us, to be specific about what is happening for you, what problems you face and how you work through them, but what we get is lies or half truths and you taking a victim role. We are not asking you to be perfect. What we need is for you to approach our talks with honesty, openness and authenticity, to feel the words that you’re saying.”
I was asking my daughter to choose to feel, as if that were a conscious decision she could make—and then I expected her to somehow summon the courage to share those painful, vulnerable feelings with me, her angry and frustrated mother.
In her new book, Fawning, Dr. Ingrid Clayton writes: “My brother once told his teachers in elementary school that our parents made him sleep outside at night, in the freezing cold. He said he curled up in an empty hot tub with nothing but the cover for a blanket. This is NOT what was happening in our house, but even as a kid, I remember thinking, that is genius. Because that loneliness, that fear, that neglect…was.”
When my daughter found her own ingenious way to share her internal world with me, I didn’t meet her with curiosity. I yelled at her for lying.
All these years later, I sound like I’m judging myself, and that isn’t my intention. I want to share how desperately I wanted to connect with my daughter, how much she wanted to connect with me, and how we repelled each other like magnets. Too many mental health experts and treatment centers push parents to create and hold firm boundaries in order to achieve behavior change, instead of showing us how to connect with our kids. Professionals handing down wisdom from mountaintops can’t guide us when they don’t know how to listen to us or our children.
Reading about the Reiner family tragedy, I was struck by a similar moment of clarity when the parents spoke about their son Nick’s history in treatment. In 2015, Rob Reiner told a reporter: “The program works for some people but it can’t work for everybody. When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen. We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”
Michele Reiner added, “We were so influenced by these people. They would tell us he’s a liar and he’s trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.”
My husband and I didn’t have a magical, instantaneous metamorphosis the first time we heard my daughter’s feelings underneath her words. We were still scared, defensive, and confused as we all muddled our way through recovery. But what shifted dramatically that day was our orientation, our goal, our North Star. We no longer prioritized fact-checking, scanning words for accuracy, evaluating for objective truth, and deciding how much we agreed with everything said. Instead, slowly but committed, we turned towards the principles of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and began practicing empathic listening with each other. Developed by clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, NVC centers on identifying feelings and the universal human needs beneath them. Rosenberg taught that conflict arises not from those needs, but from the strategies we use to try to meet them—and that when needs are heard, compassion becomes possible.
I have no doubt my family will spend a lifetime continuing to learn how to listen to each other, but all these years later, my daughter is happy, healthy, and though forever poetic, no longer depends on metaphor to risk expressing her truth.
If you’d like to learn more about NVC and my parent coaching visit my website. You can also find me on Instagram: @Listen2ConnectCoach and TikTok: @reelgirlreviews
Living in San Francisco and witnessing gay people fight for a right I’d always taken for granted made me rethink everything I’d ever assumed about marriage. For the first time in my life, I started to believe that maybe marriage didn’t have to be a sexist, antiquated institution.
In 2000, Prop 22 was on the ballot in San Francisco, and I watched my first reality TV show ‘Who Wants to Marry a Mutlimillionaire.’ I wrote about America’s hypocrisy regarding marriage for the San Francisco Chronicle. Not long after my op-ed, I met the man who would become my husband. I fall more in love with him every day.
Thank you to the gay community for vivifying marriage for us all, and thank you to Barack Obama for being the first U.S. president to have the courage to support marriage equality, it’s his quote in the title of this post.
Here’s the post I wrote in 2000:
I DIDN’T think TV could shock me anymore. But then, during sweeps week last week, I watched Fox’s new hit, “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” and realized modern television had sunk to a new low.
The show began with the introduction of 50 women, all competing for the grand prize of marriage to a multimillionaire, their union to be sealed with a $34,000 engagement ring.
The women stepped into the klieg lights wearing everything from bathing suits to wedding gowns, exposing their bodies to be rated and judged. Meanwhile, Mr. Multimillionaire was safely shrouded in a darkened booth. The whole scene brought to mind the voyeuristic ambiance of a peep show.
During one of the show’s worst sequences, each finalist had 30 seconds to convince Mr. Multimillionaire that she was the one he should choose. While guitar porn rock played in the background, the women said things like, “I know just how to please a man.”
At the end of the show, Mr. Multimillionaire finally appeared in a tux and chose his bride, the blondest and thinnest of them all.
I was stunned by this degradation and mockery of the marriage ceremony. How can there be any presumption of honesty or integrity in marriage vows when the groom takes them – as Mr. Multimillionaire did – just moments after meeting his wife to be, promising to love her until death?
Are those elements that I thought were key to marriage – vows and love and commitment – without real meaning?
A wedding ceremony should be a sacred celebration, inspired by devotion so powerful that those in love want to make a lifelong commitment to each other publicly.
Yet on the Fox Network, marriage became a modern-day flesh auction with women transformed into a commodity to be purchased by a wealthy man.
I’m not completely naive. I know that marriage was initially created as a financial contract. I know that in Biblical times the purpose of marriage was to control the means of reproduction – that is, women.
I know that when women had no social, political or financial power, when they were not allowed to own property and were only valued for how many children they could bear, marriage existed just to ritualize the transfer of ownership of women from fathers to husbands.
I know that remnants of these ancient roles of womanhood are still prevalent in marriage ceremonies, but I had thought they no longer had significance.
Though brides still traditionally wear white, the color has lost its relevance as a symbol of virginal innocence, once so prized in a woman. Few recall now, when the priest asks if anyone has just cause why the marriage should not take place, that the question was originally meant to determine if anyone had evidence that the bride was, in fact, not a virgin.
Fast forward a few thousand years to the debut of Fox’s top-rated show. After watching these women on TV, whose worth was measured by how well they conformed to limited ideals of beauty, while male worth was measured by wallet size, I was feeling pretty cynical about gender roles and matrimony.
Then something happened to restore my faith. The debate on Proposition 22, the ballot initiative on gay marriage, caught my attention.
As supporters of the initiative condemned gay marriage for defiling a holy institution, I thought of the irony. An elegantly packaged prostitution ring on prime time television is perfectly legal, yet two people in love who want to make a public and legal, lifetime commitment to each other, with sincere vows, are forbidden legal recognition of their marriage because they are of the same sex.
While “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” illustrates the worst of marriage, defeating Prop. 22 would bring out the best of it. Allowing gay people to marry shatters all of the antiquated sex stereotypes that still threaten to be resurrected in popular culture.
If marriage is to survive and thrive in this millennium, it needs to evolve. The marriage contract is a living document. We need to keep the best of it – the love, the romance, the vows – and leave behind those elements that reduce human beings to property.
If Californians really are concerned with family values, they should be fighting for the right of people who truly love each other to legalize their commitment.
Dear Pope Francis,
Today, you told the world that “the choice not to have children is selfish” referring to a “greedy generation” who is not reproducing enough. Since you don’t have any kids yourself, and I’m the mother of three, I thought it might be helpful to hear about my experience. Becoming a parent is probably the most selfish thing I ever did, and I’m far from unique.
Before I had children, like lots of people, I was busy contributing to society. I created a non-profit organization to foster and train ethical women leaders, produced top-rated talk radio programs, and wrote about politics and culture for newspapers, magazines, and the internet. I also spoke on radio and TV programs about these issues. At that time, I dated, but had no interest in having children or getting married ever. But when I was 32, I fell in love. I was so into this guy that I started to wonder what it would be like to create another human with him. The idea that you could make a baby with someone you love seemed crazy magical to me, so beautiful, like a miracle. I decided I wanted to have that experience. He felt the same way.
He wanted to get married, and I didn’t. For most of my life, I thought marriage was oppressive to women, taking his name, wearing virginal white, being given away by your father to another man etc. If you’re committed, you don’t need a piece of paper. But something happened to change my mind. I I live in San Francisco, and gay people were organizing and fighting hard for the right to get married. Witnessing people advocate for something I’d always taken for granted forced me to rethink the institution. I realized that since Biblical times (and even earlier) when women were property traded by men, marriage has been evolving and will continue to. Being a part of that movement felt inspiring, so we got married.
Over the next six years, we had two more kids, mostly because making babies and raising humans is as selfishly magical as I expected. It’s really fun creating little people and watching them grow. I love my children and my husband deeply, but in no way were the choices I made generous to society. I mean, you’re reproducing yourself. And after having kids, in some ways, I struggle to keep my world from getting smaller and myopic. I long for more time to write, create, and contribute to the world at the rate that I used to.
Women are the world’s biggest untapped resource. The status and education of women is directly linked to how many babies they have. The more children they have, the poorer women are. We all lose out. Deciding to have kids or not is a personal choice, but I have a lot of admiration for people who don’t. People like you, Pope Francis, who dedicate their lives to pursuing what they believe in to make the world a better place. Don’t you think women deserve to make that choice too?
Sincerely,
Margot Magowan
Margot Magowan is a writer and commentator. Her articles on politics and culture have been in Salon, Glamour, the San Jose Mercury News, and numerous other newspapers and online sites. She has appeared on “Good Morning America,” CNN, Fox News, and other TV and radio programs. For many years, Margot worked as talk radio producer creating top-rated programs. In 1998, Margot co-founded the Woodhull Institute an organization that trains young women to be leaders and change agents. Margot’s short story “Light Me Up” is featured in the anthology Sugar In My Bowl (Ecco 2011) and she is currently writing a Middle Grade novel about the fairy world. Margot lives with her husband and their three daughters in San Francisco.
Guest blog for Reel Girl by Susan Prasher
Growing up, I never had a doll, a Barbie or a princess dress. As a mother and a former teacher, I have seen children verbalizing, practicing and sharing experiences of social interactions with the use of dolls, which is really wonderful and joyful. One can definitely learn a lot by observing and listening to children at play with these types of toys. One thing that throws me off guard are the sheer number of princesses. With each princess, there is a new dress, a story line, and possibly a tiara. I get confused with which princess represents which movie. I’ve had the good fortune of having a best friend’s daughter explain why she felt sad that I didn’t know about the princesses and proceeded to break it all down for me. Perhaps all the role playing actually encouraged her to be an empathic person that understood and heard me.
One of my boys is obsessed with Star Wars. When searching for a new sitter, I lucked out by meeting a computer science engineering student who loves Star Wars just as much as my son does. Together, they have the most engaging conversations. The sitter is a young woman. While she did have some dolls growing up, her room is filled with Lego and items from Star Wars.
Back in August my son asked for me to please consider being one of three characters for Halloween: Princess Leia, Queen Amidala and Ashoka. I had trouble being a princess or a queen. To encourage me to consider one of these three roles, he began calling me Queen Momidala. I would banter back various lines including “Shaan, I am your mother” using a Darth Vader voice. He’d have this funny expression on his face, laugh and at some point tell me all the parts I was doing wrong. Since this was rather fun, I ordered a female version of the Darth Vader costume. And when it arrived, my son was thrilled and proud. Of course, the costume is a skin tight costume, but it’s a power suit nonetheless. The red light saber was placed on me like the finishing touch of a tiara. And that’s when it all clicked.
In the United States and in Canada, light saber sales are up. They sell like hot cakes. With the new movie coming out, you know it’s going to remain a hot toy. They are fun to play with, my kids mimic the exact movement patterns in battles and beg to attend Light Saber School. From what I’ve seen, light sabers are a source of tremendous power. There are even adult versions of these things that can do some serious damage. But is it really a toy? The science behind making one is pretty interesting. And Star Wars has inspired all kinds of advances in science as well as inspire people all around the world. In the case of our incredibly bright female sitter, she grew up loving Star Wars and is now creating a program designed to teach the art of coding.
As a teacher, I used to swap the names of characters as we read from a picture book for names of children in the class. Their eyes would light up with joy and excitement because suddenly, they were IN the story. There are females in Star Wars but what if we encouraged children to take on a role that appealed to them personally, regardless of gender? What if we reversed the gender roles in Star Wars by having all the males fill the females roles and visa versa? What if Leia became the great Jedi master and not Luke? When I suggested this reversal to my son all kinds of drama unfolded. He was upset with the mere thought of such a thing and thought that it was being disrespectful to the story. When I told him that George Lucas is an incredible writer and that it would be great to have a different version of the story, my son laughed and blew me off. He pointed out that there are some females in key roles and insists this is the story, like it or not. What I was really aiming for is a demonstration in a growth mindset and that as a female, my version of the story would be different.
We all have power, whether we hold a light saber or not. There are different kinds of power and each medium channels its own type. If I walked around with a tiara on my head, I’d be channeling a certain mindset. But the outcome is vastly different. With the use of Star Wars, little girls can be exposed to Science, which is huge, but they need to know the storyline. And yes, it involves a queen and a princess but they are welcome to take on any role of their choosing and rewrite the story.
Our friends’ daughters are like my own. It’s time to swap a bit of princess dresses, tiaras and dolls for at least one or two light sabers, even if they choose pink or purple ones, because it helps them channel a different type of power.
May the force be with you!
In 12 step programs, people talk about the pink elephant in the living room.That phrase, you probably know, refers to the experience of seeing something totally fucking obvious, right there in front of you, in your living room, but no one else acknowledges it.
What you experience isn’t real. What you see isn’t happening. At best, later in life, those people who were in the living room might say: OK, maybe that happened, but really, it’s too trivial to make a fuss over, more like a pink mosquito.
Today, meaning right now– April 8 at 11:01AM– feminism is feeling like that to me: pointing out the billboards all over town, the motion picture sexism taking place on giant screens across America, and people telling me it’s not real, it’s not happening, it doesn’t matter.
If my now 45 year old self could say something, not even to my child self, but to the 30 year old me, it would be this: you’re not crazy. What you see is real. What you see is happening, and it matters.
In honor of that message, I’m re-posting something I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle when I was 31, right after I saw my first “reality” (get it?) TV show. I was scared to write the op-ed, not only because I worked at a talk radio station where many people didn’t agree with me (or maybe just hadn’t thought deeply about the issue “too trivial”) but because, as I put down those words, I realized how I felt about marriage was changing radically. Marriage was never in my life plan. Fourteen years later, I have a husband and three kids. Of course, I can’t credit the gay marriage movement with all of that, but I can’t deny it planted a seed. I see the words right there. (Did you hear that, radical right, isn’t that what you want for the ladies? Maybe rethink your strategy?)
I DIDN’T think TV could shock me anymore. But then, during sweeps week last week, I watched Fox’s new hit, “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” and realized modern television had sunk to a new low.
The show began with the introduction of 50 women, all competing for the grand prize of marriage to a multimillionaire, their union to be sealed with a $34,000 engagement ring.
The women stepped into the klieg lights wearing everything from bathing suits to wedding gowns, exposing their bodies to be rated and judged. Meanwhile, Mr. Multimillionaire was safely shrouded in a darkened booth. The whole scene brought to mind the voyeuristic ambiance of a peep show.
During one of the show’s worst sequences, each finalist had 30 seconds to convince Mr. Multimillionaire that she was the one he should choose. While guitar porn rock played in the background, the women said things like, “I know just how to please a man.”
At the end of the show, Mr. Multimillionaire finally appeared in a tux and chose his bride, the blondest and thinnest of them all.
I was stunned by this degradation and mockery of the marriage ceremony. How can there be any presumption of honesty or integrity in marriage vows when the groom takes them – as Mr. Multimillionaire did – just moments after meeting his wife to be, promising to love her until death?
Are those elements that I thought were key to marriage – vows and love and commitment – without real meaning?
A wedding ceremony should be a sacred celebration, inspired by devotion so powerful that those in love want to make a lifelong commitment to each other publicly.
Yet on the Fox Network, marriage became a modern-day flesh auction with women transformed into a commodity to be purchased by a wealthy man.
I’m not completely naive. I know that marriage was initially created as a financial contract. I know that in Biblical times the purpose of marriage was to control the means of reproduction – that is, women.
I know that when women had no social, political or financial power, when they were not allowed to own property and were only valued for how many children they could bear, marriage existed just to ritualize the transfer of ownership of women from fathers to husbands.
I know that remnants of these ancient roles of womanhood are still prevalent in marriage ceremonies, but I had thought they no longer had significance.
Though brides still traditionally wear white, the color has lost its relevance as a symbol of virginal innocence, once so prized in a woman. Few recall now, when the priest asks if anyone has just cause why the marriage should not take place, that the question was originally meant to determine if anyone had evidence that the bride was, in fact, not a virgin.
Fast forward a few thousand years to the debut of Fox’s top-rated show. After watching these women on TV, whose worth was measured by how well they conformed to limited ideals of beauty, while male worth was measured by wallet size, I was feeling pretty cynical about gender roles and matrimony.
Then something happened to restore my faith. The debate on Proposition 22, the ballot initiative on gay marriage, caught my attention.
As supporters of the initiative condemned gay marriage for defiling a holy institution, I thought of the irony. An elegantly packaged prostitution ring on prime time television is perfectly legal, yet two people in love who want to make a public and legal, lifetime commitment to each other, with sincere vows, are forbidden legal recognition of their marriage because they are of the same sex.
While “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” illustrates the worst of marriage, defeating Prop. 22 would bring out the best of it. Allowing gay people to marry shatters all of the antiquated sex stereotypes that still threaten to be resurrected in popular culture.
If marriage is to survive and thrive in this millennium, it needs to evolve. The marriage contract is a living document. We need to keep the best of it – the love, the romance, the vows – and leave behind those elements that reduce human beings to property.
If Californians really are concerned with family values, they should be fighting for the right of people who truly love each other to legalize their commitment.
One month after I published this, in March of 2000, Proposition 22 passed in California. In May of 2008, it was struck down by the California Supreme Court as contrary to the state constitution. Today, 17 states have legalized same sex marriage.
My house looks like a tornado blew through. I feel completely overwhelmed when I look at what’s happened.
I just saw this on my Facebook feed from Gallant Girls.
Good morning, Gallant Girls and Guys! Now that the holiday festivities are over (until New Years), hopefully we are ALL working together to clean up and put away the aftermath of the holiday. Right?!
My husband is cleaning up this morning so I can take a few hours to write. I have to get my next chapter to my editor by tomorrow. Without his help, that would be impossible.
Sheryl Sandberg has said that who you marry is a career decision, and I couldn’t agree more. If I didn’t have a partner who supported my work and my dreams, there is no way, with three kids, I would be able to act towards making them come true.
Erica Jong has said lots of people have talent but what is rare is the courage to follow it. I read a post on Salon that I can’t take the time to find right now (because I’m supposed to be writing my chapter) about sexism, literature, and “chicklit,” where the author writes something like: How many women are going to close the office door and tell their family they need to write?
Now, consider how many men are going to close that office door? How many men have wives who will organize and put away everything without expecting their husbands to do equal work or will be so grateful for any “help?”
There is another reason I get to write today. My three kids are in camp. I can afford to send them there. How many women also have the income to put towards childcare so they can write? And this principle, of course, goes back to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” her essay about Shakespeare’s mythical sister. Without the space and the income, women can’t write. If women can’t write, they can’t create narratives with female protagonists. If stories with female protagonists don’t exist, women and men both learn that females belong on the sidelines and in supporting roles.
Once my three hours of writing are up, it’ll be my turn to clean, food shop, and pick the kids up at camp. Because I will have gotten my work done, I’ll be excited to go on with this part of my day and be a better mom.
If dads did half of the childraising and the housekeeping, moms would be that much closer to changing the world.
I wrote this piece for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000. Living in San Francisco and witnessing the fight for marriage equality inspired me, a heterosexual woman, to think of marriage in a new way. While I always thought the institution was irrelevant and kind of stupid, I came to see it as exciting and alive. I still do. Thank you to the gay movement for vivifying marriage for all of us.
I DIDN’T think TV could shock me anymore. But then, during sweeps week last week, I watched Fox’s new hit, “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” and realized modern television had sunk to a new low.
The show began with the introduction of 50 women, all competing for the grand prize of marriage to a multimillionaire, their union to be sealed with a $34,000 engagement ring.
The women stepped into the klieg lights wearing everything from bathing suits to wedding gowns, exposing their bodies to be rated and judged. Meanwhile, Mr. Multimillionaire was safely shrouded in a darkened booth. The whole scene brought to mind the voyeuristic ambiance of a peep show.
During one of the show’s worst sequences, each finalist had 30 seconds to convince Mr. Multimillionaire that she was the one he should choose. While guitar porn rock played in the background, the women said things like, “I know just how to please a man.”
At the end of the show, Mr. Multimillionaire finally appeared in a tux and chose his bride, the blondest and thinnest of them all.
I was stunned by this degradation and mockery of the marriage ceremony. How can there be any presumption of honesty or integrity in marriage vows when the groom takes them – as Mr. Multimillionaire did – just moments after meeting his wife to be, promising to love her until death?
Are those elements that I thought were key to marriage – vows and love and commitment – without real meaning?
A wedding ceremony should be a sacred celebration, inspired by devotion so powerful that those in love want to make a lifelong commitment to each other publicly.
Yet on the Fox Network, marriage became a modern-day flesh auction with women transformed into a commodity to be purchased by a wealthy man.
I’m not completely naive. I know that marriage was initially created as a financial contract. I know that in Biblical times the purpose of marriage was to control the means of reproduction – that is, women.
I know that when women had no social, political or financial power, when they were not allowed to own property and were only valued for how many children they could bear, marriage existed just to ritualize the transfer of ownership of women from fathers to husbands.
I know that remnants of these ancient roles of womanhood are still prevalent in marriage ceremonies, but I had thought they no longer had significance.
Though brides still traditionally wear white, the color has lost its relevance as a symbol of virginal innocence, once so prized in a woman. Few recall now, when the priest asks if anyone has just cause why the marriage should not take place, that the question was originally meant to determine if anyone had evidence that the bride was, in fact, not a virgin.
Fast forward a few thousand years to the debut of Fox’s top-rated show. After watching these women on TV, whose worth was measured by how well they conformed to limited ideals of beauty, while male worth was measured by wallet size, I was feeling pretty cynical about gender roles and matrimony.
Then something happened to restore my faith. The debate on Proposition 22, the ballot initiative on gay marriage, caught my attention.
As supporters of the initiative condemned gay marriage for defiling a holy institution, I thought of the irony. An elegantly packaged prostitution ring on prime time television is perfectly legal, yet two people in love who want to make a public and legal, lifetime commitment to each other, with sincere vows, are forbidden legal recognition of their marriage because they are of the same sex.
While “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” illustrates the worst of marriage, defeating Prop. 22 would bring out the best of it. Allowing gay people to marry shatters all of the antiquated sex stereotypes that still threaten to be resurrected in popular culture.
If marriage is to survive and thrive in this millennium, it needs to evolve. The marriage contract is a living document. We need to keep the best of it – the love, the romance, the vows – and leave behind those elements that reduce human beings to property.
If Californians really are concerned with family values, they should be fighting for the right of people who truly love each other to legalize their commitment.
blue milk posted this intro:
Oh my god, Ta-Nehisi Coates knows how to write an Opinion piece. Here he is in The New York Times talking about the relationship between intuitive eating and historical affluence and how this all relates to culture and politics. It is an exceptionally clever way of framing the discussion.
I left the first of these dinners in bemused dudgeon. “Crazy rich white people,” I would scoff. “Who goes to a nice dinner and leaves hungry?” In fact, they were not hungry at all. I discovered this a few dinners later, when I found myself embroiled in this ritual of half-dining. It was as though some invisible force was slowing my fork, forcing me into pauses, until I found myself nibbling and sampling my way through the meal. And when I rose both caffeinated and buzzed, I was, to my shock, completely satiated.
Like many Americans, I was from a world where “finish your plate” was gospel. The older people there held hunger in their recent memory. For generations they had worked with their arms, backs and hands. With scarcity a constant, and manual labor the norm, “finish your plate” fit the screws of their lives. I did not worry for food. I sat at my desk staring at a computer screen for much of the day. But still I ate like a stevedore. In the old world, this culture of eating kept my forebears alive. In this new one it was slowly killing me…
..Using the wrong tool for the job is a problem that extends beyond the dining room. The set of practices required for a young man to secure his safety on the streets of his troubled neighborhood are not the same as those required to place him on an honor roll, and these are not the same as the set of practices required to write the great American novel. The way to guide him through this transition is not to insult his native language. It is to teach him a new one.
Thank you Ta-Nehisi Coates for writing this! And to the feminist motherhood blog blue milk for picking it up.
Every time I blog about the way I eat or how I feed my family– intuitive eating, letting my kids eat whatever and whenever they want, and that they never get in trouble for “wasting” food— I get comments about how wasteful and unhealthy I am, along with what a terrible mother I am.
Intuitive eating is about so much more than eating. It’s about learning how to listen to your body and listen to yourself. It’s about self respect and independence and health and not giving a shit what other people think or say about you.
If you don’t know how to listen to your body, learn. Buy the books When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies or Preventing Childhood Eating Problems. Raise your kids to be intuitive eaters. That is, honestly, the best way to stop “wasting food.” And it sure makes meal times more pleasant.