Piece of Advice #103: Don't expect others to make everything all nice for you.

I know that months have passed since the incident with Adria Richards at PyCon happened.  But it's kind of stuck with me, and it's a good excuse to give my fingers some exercise on the keyboard again.  When someone on Twitter mentioned the other day that the guy who lost his job due to Richards's public and photographic outing of him as an egregious harasser [cough, cough] had found another one, I went and looked to see whether Adria Richards had also found another position - and came up empty. 

Now since she's been lying low for the past several months and has shunned all attention, it's possible she has and it's not public knowledge.  And, for her sake, I hope she's found a way to keep the Devil from the door.  But somehow it's not surprising to me that someone who can do something tangible and valuable found a job and someone who revealed herself to be difficult and controlling seemingly has not. 

I mean, would you hire Richards?  She had a good job and lots of opportunities, but apparently things were not enough to her liking because she had to eavesdrop on people talking privately among themselves and tweet a photograph of them to the world so that she could drive home the point that women are slaves to - what? - the male libido in the form of a dongle joke? 

I looked up what a dongle was.  Let's just say it didn't give me the vapours.  I didn't break my pearls clutching them.  Compared to the cascade of obscenity I spend significant energy trying to keep out of my life by cordoning off TV, radio, most of the internet and the news, a "dongle" just hasn't got what it takes to shock me into outrage.

Now, the backlash against Richards wasn't pretty: the DDOS attack, the online harassment, the photo of a decapitated woman sent to Richards - that's ugly.  She unfortunately got the backlogged rage of men who are sick and tired of being controlled by legislation, by speech codes, by training seminars and Human Resources, by every petty control freak who doesn't mind chipping a nail to make someone else subject to her whims.  The sluices filled and Richards was washed away.  And this is where we have our teachable moment.

Life just isn't about making things all pleasant for everybody.  Mostly it's hard and unfair.  We used to know that.  We used to say things like, "If you can't stand the heat..." without it ending in "...have the remodelers rework the kitchen to your exact specifications."   Maybe tech isn't a friendly place for women.  Maybe it is full of sexists and jerk guys who leer lone females all day long.  If that is so, it's too bad.  I'm sorry to hear it.  But why is the solution to reprogram every guy in tech against his wishes or inclinations?  And how can anyone believe that's even possible?  Why don't women in tech create their own companies and their own amazing tech contributions and use the profits and power to mentor other women in tech?  Did Bill Gates expect his employers to roll out the red carpet for him when he was still wet behind the ears?  Did Steve Jobs?  It's probably easier for a woman now to get a small business loan or grant for a tech start-up these days.  Or they could do it the old fashioned way and code like the wind in the comfort of their parents' basements, harassment free.

Maybe, just maybe, if you aren't the head honcho, if you aren't the goose that's laying the golden eggs, if you are not the pivotal player upon with the success of your employer's business balances, you should learn your place and stay in it.  Be nice to people, blow off the slights and offenses, give people the benefit of the doubt, and don't assume that you have the authority to correct everyone around you.  Does no one think they have to put in their time anymore and make a little coffee? 

Honestly, if you can't handle a little blue language, maybe a nearly all male workplace isn't for you.  Or, heck, any workplace now.  The world has become a crass place.  But this incident wasn't about fighting crassness or inappropriateness; it was about control and demonstrating who has it and who doesn't and who is supposed to bend his neck.  There's a risk in playing that game, though, if you haven't quite got those numbers crunched correctly.  Adria Richards learned that the hard way. 


*This post was made possible with support from AEC and readers like you.

Happy New Year

I've had some requests from readers who have missed this blog, so I'm making it available for the now.  I can't promise I will keep it up forever.  I haven't deleted anything, and there wasn't a "preferred reader" list while it was blocked.  Google has certain options for limiting readership, and I just took the easiest one that didn't jettison everything I'd written.

2012 wasn't a great year for me, and I'm glad to see it gone.  But we are still alive, in good health, and together, and we have enough to eat and a warm, safe place to sleep.  I have a new part-time job too, one I can do at home that should allow me to keep up with the responsibilities of my family.  I took down the blog partly because I was concerned I would not be able to find a job in my field because of the opinions I expressed within, and since that is no longer really an issue, I'm reinstating it (for now).

I hope all of you who have read the blog and stayed with me are doing well.  I have missed your voices.

God bless.

Anyone want to join me in a (probably) pointless exercise of dissent?

I commented on Katha Pollitt's blog piece, "The 'New York Times' Misses the Mark on Inequality, Marriage," itself a comment on - yes - The New York Times's piece "Two Classes, Divided by 'I do'" which compared the lifestyles of two women who come from the same Midwestern, middle class background but whose lives diverged when they chose to have children in marriage and out of marriage.

Pollitt's position is that Jessica Schairer, mother of three, is a victim of a society that will not provide better solutions for her as a single mother.  I left a comment there.  It was almost immediately scrubbed.  SOBL1 also posted (before me, I believe).  Also scrubbed.  Fortunately, I had copied my response, and so I reposted.  I think they've left it up because several posters there have "educated me" as to the error of my ways and cold hearted villainy with their lengthy comments.  However, they took down SOBL1's second response, backing up a comment I made.

So, would anyone like to join me in this fun little effort to, at the very least, annoy some comments moderator  who may or may not be Katha Pollitt herself?  Comment here.

Checking in and thoughts on mammograms and preventative health

I've been lurking mostly around the web, although I'm still on twitter.  For the last month I've been keeping busy with my son, who is on summer vacation, and dealing with the anxiety that comes from having an "iffy" mammogram, then a "suspicious" mammogram, and finally a biopsy.  I owe at least one person an email; I've been more scattered, I'll admit it - I'm sorry.

I would like to make my experience of the last month a Piece of Advice, but I'm still trying to sort it all out.  For my women readers, I'll say this: there is clearly a boatload of money in mammography and breast health. Women are told to take preventative measures with their health, including regular breast checks and pap smears.  I've always been one for preventative measures - they are all about self-preservation, after all.  But a system that tells patients they have to have routine tests and then from the results of the tests that cancer is a small possibility, knowable only if a large amount of money is spent on further tests - that would seem to be a system with built-in opportunity for fraud and advantage taking.

It turns out I don't have cancer, and I am very, very relieved and grateful.  But if I hadn't had that first mammogram, I wouldn't have gone through the emotional roller coaster of the last month, and I'm not sure it's worth the couple grand this is probably going to cost me out of pocket for deductible to know that I have tiny benign calcifications in my left breast.  I won't even know the true cost until they bill me because I couldn't get anyone to tell me how much it would be.

I received good care during my procedures, but I also got a couple of sales pitches for further cancer treatment services that made me realize that medicine truly is a business, and not simple ministration, now.  Additionally, plenty of tests are run to limit the potential for a medical lawsuit - on your dime, if you are willing.  In my case I think an equally valid choice would have been to wait another six month and monitor with further mammograms.  However, both my mother and my mother-in-law lost their mothers to early cancer, so that approach was strongly discouraged on all fronts - family and medical.

All I have to say is watch yourself, research your options, and make your choices carefully.

Left a comment at Philly Mag

I'm posting it here in case it accidentally "gets lost" over there.  It's in response to Sandy Hingston's piece "Parents, Society to Blame for Guys Falling Behind" which is itself in response to her previous piece diplomatically titled "The Sorry Lives and Confusing Times of Today's Young Men" for which she got a significant negative response from...wait for it...young men.  Here's my comment:

It's all about incentives and disincentives.  Yes, the job market is brutal right now for young people, but it's not the economy that is halting marriage.  Young men still got married in the Depression.  Young men married during every war we've ever had.  Technology throws a monkey wrench into things, but young men aren't eschewing marriage because of porn or video games.  Having a kind, supportive, caring, nurturing, loyal, attractive living partner is going to be preferable to porn any day for the vast majority of men.  But the system isn't producing kind, caring, nurturing, loyal, attractive women who want to be wives and mothers.  It's set up to create crass, overweight, "empowered," mannish women who don't particularly like children or domesticity and who think sex is a contact sport and want to play until their fertility window is slamming shut.  

This is not the kind of woman men get excited about committing to.  

Furthermore, the system currently allows for a sort of children&home dream fulfillment without men via welfare/section8/WIC/food stamps/school lunches/medicaid.  This version is decidedly inferior to traditional home and hearth, but it does allow women to have and raise children without men.   

Many women opt for this version without even making a go of the other which makes a significant portion of the young female population single mothers.  Here's another thing about men: they don't particularly want to raise other men's children either.  

Additionally, the system is set up - not accidentally - to take both a man's money and his access to his children if his wife or girlfriend decides she wants out.  And she doesn't have to have a good reason either.  She's tired of him?  He can say good-bye to his future.  The police and courts will work hard to separate him from both his family and his money.  Two generations of men have now grown up seeing their fathers fully shorn after divorce.  That's a bit of a disincentive for settling down.  

Want men to want to get married again?  Get rid of sexist Police State laws like VAWA,  make divorce harder to get, and give fathers default custody upon divorce.  That right there will make divorce rates plummet because while plenty of women don't seem to mind chucking their husbands, they do not want to lose access to their children.  

Women also have to realize that what men find attractive is not what women find attractive.  Men are not sexually aroused by advanced degrees in liberal arts subjects, and they don't care if you crashed through the glass ceiling at work.  They want to be around pleasant women who like men and will treat them with respect.  

Hingston ended her piece with this:

I want them to know: Now that I better understand their plight, I don’t blame them for it. And I’m sorry, along with all the other parents I know, for our own contributions to the mess.

On its surface this sounds okay, almost humble, except that it offers no solutions, nor does it take any real accountability.  I'm sure Hingston doesn't really think she failed in her parenting.   Previous editorials would indicate that she feels her generation, the Boomers, solved all of America's problems:

We did, you know. We took the stark button-down black-and-white world we were born into and Kodachromed it, tie-dyed it, made it a rainbow of races and genders and candy-colored Spandex bike shorts. You think our force lay in numbers, but you’re wrong. It lay in the vision we had. You can’t comprehend that, because you’re [Gen X] so low-key, so small-scale, so It’s about intimacy. No. It’s not. Thomas Jefferson had it right: It’s about happiness. If you’ve ever had an honest conversation with your mom or dad, you have us to thank for it. If you get time off from work to take care of a new baby or a sick relative, you’re welcome for that. Getting a tax rebate for making your house more energy-efficient? Bike lanes, pocket parks, hate-crime laws, legalized pot, death-penalty moratoriums, organic food, space telescopes, genome-decoding — don’t you see what we were doing? We were taking the American dream to the max, pushing to its limits the pursuit of freaking happiness.

Hingston has made it plain before that it's not just the men of Gen Y who are useless, although men are inferior to women and generally superfluous.  So I'm not falling for it.

P.S. I'd trade the bike lanes in a heartbeat for the 1965 divorce rate (10%). That Kodachromed world the Silents and Boomers created changed the childhoods of Gen X and Y dramatically for the worse.

Piece of Advice #101: Pencil "Have kids" into your life schedule

[I had so much positive feedback, including a number of truly touching comments, on my last post that I thought I'd continue posting Pieces of Advice when and if I truly had something of substance to say.  Again, thank you, dear readers, for your kind comments.  I feel humbled to think that I've actually been of real help to some of you.]

Recently in the news there has been a hysterical emotional outpouring of support for Planned Parenthood, that lofty, lefty, government-subsidized purveyor of baby death, and some have even suggested that free birth control is a core American value.  Which is a bit odd, given that the United States has a nonexistent population problem.  At the time of the 2010 census there were 87.4 people per square mile, and we grow in numbers only via immigration.  All of the screeching over nothing hints at a strange underlying agenda: keeping women from having children.  (And not just too many children, but any children at all.)  Again, this is odd, given that women were made to have children - biologically, it's kind of the point of women - and historically they've wanted to have them; were, in fact, proud of having and raising them.  But as so much of modern life is illogical and counter to nature, we'll just let that conundrum sit there for now.

Recently I watched three movies.  The first was The Pregnancy Pact, a film based on the events surrounding an explosion of pregnancies in a Gloucester, Massachusetts high school.  In this movie Thora Birch plays a late-twenties single woman who has a video blog devoted to teen issues.  She hears about what is happening at Gloucester, her old high school, and decides to travel there to interview the girls and the community about what is going on and why so many girls are getting pregnant.  The film makes a vague stab at being neutral about abstinence programs and school-dispensed birth control, but its whole point is to illustrate 1) that getting pregnant in high school can ruin your life and 2) that motherhood is a lesser choice than, say, having an exciting video blog career.  The lead pregnant teen makes a point of saying explicitly that she doesn't want a career, that she doesn't want to go to college, that she wants to get married and have children and stay in her home town, and that that's what will make her happy.  And the Thora Birch character looks incredulous and sputters out a number of better alternatives to marriage and motherhood including "start a rock band" and "plant trees."

The second movie was He's Just Not That Into You, based on the book of the same title which offered women key advice about how to tell if a guy is...not into you.  The movie has an ensemble cast composed of mostly childless actresses in their thirties and forties playing childless women with cube farm jobs.  None of them are happy.  One of them, played by Jennifer Aniston, has a boyfriend of seven years and wants to get married.  She offers him an ultimatum of marriage or breaking up, and they break up.  Jennifer Connelly's character is married to a man of significantly higher SMV (Bradley Cooper).  She kind of wants to try to get pregnant.  He cheats on her with Scarlett Johanssen.  The main character, Gigi, played by Ginnifer Goodwin, keeps getting the runaround from men until Justin Long takes her under his wing and tells her what's what.  Astoundingly, after giving her really solid advice and exhibiting no attraction to her whatsoever, he does a full 180 when she scolds him for never committing, tells her, "You're my exception," and renounces his poon hound lifestyle.  The fact that none of these women - NONE of them - has children and most of them aren't married is not remarked upon.  It doesn't seem worth mentioning.

The same is true in Bridesmaids.  Kristen Wiig was born in 1973, but has never been married, doesn't have kids, has failed in her career and now works a dead-end job, and lives with weirdos (and then her mother).  This movie was lauded as "powerfully authentic" and "refreshing."  The women in it are awful - crass, stupid, selfish, self-involved, catty, promiscuous, physically gross, and highly competitive.  Only one of them has children, and she hates them.

When I'd finished watching them, I couldn't help juxtaposing The Pregnancy Pact with Bridesmaids and He's Just Not That Into You in my head.  The message of the first was that fifteen is too young to have a baby, and at least one message of the second and third seemed to be..that children are superfluous to women's lives?  None of these women has children, and it's not even commented on.

Recently there was an article in the Daily Mail about where all the girls who had been in Kate Middleton’s Brownie troop were now. Of the twenty-four girls, now all women in their late twenties or early thirties, eight (8) are now married (1 separated), four (4) of those with children. Additionally there are two (2) unwed mothers, and four (4) engaged women (including one of those unwed mothers who is “saving to get married”). This means only a quarter of these middle or lower-middle class, at least somewhat educated women have produced children, and only half of them are even close to providing the kind of suitable environment for children their great-grandmothers slid into by default. And all of them, including the future queen, are past the age of easy fecundity. The rest of them have exciting careers in HR, office management, the postal service, and dental hygiene.

I've touched on this before, but the fact is that there is a limited window to a woman's fertility.  I know that the media says that singleness is great and that not all women want to be mothers, and I've heard a number of people say that they love having all their time to themselves and they can travel all they want and wallow in their Netflix queue and sleep in on Saturday mornings.  This may be true, but there are also quite a lot of women my age trying to squeeze out a baby at the last moment, desperate to be mothers before it's too late.
And who do all those childless people think will take care of them when they are old?  There aren't going to be pensions, and I'm not holding my breath for Social Security either.   The money is running out, and the youth have not been trained to share.  People only give sacrificially to those that they know personally and love.

Children are a lot of work and can be a lot of worry, but they are a great blessing.  A society that sees children as a curse or an encumbrance to be avoided at all costs is very sick.  People are meant to have families, to be a part of families.  Look past the Cosmo propaganda and pencil having children into your life calendar.  You may need to erase some of space set aside for partying, getting another degree, and traveling but those, while enjoyable, are of limited life value.  Look at the female characters in Bridesmaids or He's Just Not That Into You.  They were written by women screenwriters for women audiences, and not one of them seems happy.

(It goes without saying that the above will require looking for a suitable husband sooner rather than later.  Don't sign up for single motherhood.)

Piece of Advice #100: Don't rationalize bad mothering

Redbook offers its modern readership the classily titled piece,"WTF" Working Mom Moments! in which Paula Szuchman and Kate Ashford advise working mothers to forget about the guilt even when committing rather egregious neglect.  Because nothing - really, nothing - is more important than the paid work/personal satisfaction combo feminists have been touting to women for forty years.

An excerpt:

A few weeks back, I dropped my daughter, Ida, off with a neighbor and rushed to work. This is the sum total of what I know about the woman I entrusted with my 18-month-old's life: Her name is Lisa, she lives on my block, and she has two kids. I didn't — still don't — know her last name, and I forgot to take her phone number with me to the office. I had chatted with her a few times in passing, on my way to our neighborhood park, and she'd nicely offered to babysit. So when my nanny called in sick at the last minute, I took her up on it.

During my commute to work that day, I couldn't believe I had left my kid with a stranger. If I'd stayed home, would the office have come to a standstill? No. Would I have been fired on the spot for taking a day off? Unlikely. But in the panic of that morning, all I could think about was the giant to-do list waiting at my desk, the inconvenience I'd cause my boss, and, most importantly, the shame of failing to manage my personal life in a way that didn't interfere with my job.

It's as if the day I became a mother I'd made some tacit agreement to never let my new, non-paying job interfere with the one that gives me a salary. How hopeful I was — and how very wrong. I had no idea that life with kids would be so messy and unpredictable, so marked by those WTF moments when the urge to be a perfect employee and the urge to be a perfect mom rush at each other in a game of chicken. Inevitably, one of them goes screaming off the track.

Most of the time, it's only a temporary derailment. Your boss forgives you and your kid forgives you. What's tougher is forgiving yourself.

A sample situation in which I, grerp, would consider giving a stranger complete and total access to my son without getting her name and contact information: The world as we know it collapses, there is violence in the streets, order breaks down, and police go door to door rounding up people of my racial/religious/socioeconomic group to be taken to an unknown location for indefinite detention.

That's about it.  No hyperbole.  The nanny-calling-in-sick scenario doesn't even come close to making this action responsible or acceptable.

I get that women work.  I understand that with the terrible economy and the breakdown of the family, women often have to work.  I also understand that child care is expensive and often inconvenient and that parents frequently have to take what they can get and punt when things come up.  My family tree is filled with women who worked when their children were young.  Both my grandfathers were seriously disabled for periods of time, and my grandmothers stepped up to the plate.  My mother worked and worked outside of the home after I was 10.  This is not a working mothers vs. stay-at-home mothers rant.  This is a rant about putting first what should always be put first - your child's safety.

The above woman didn't  have to leave her daughter with a stranger. She chose to.  She didn't want to miss work.  She didn't want people to know that she doesn't have everything in her life under control.  And she probably didn't really want to stay home with Ida that day.  So she chucked her daughter into the arms of a women she didn't anything about and punched in.  And, having done so, she doesn't want to feel guilty about it.  So she writes the above, "Who's with me?" manifesto.  And women cheer her on because, well, we've all been there, haven't we?

What feminists do not acknowledge (but do know) about the work/motherhood dilemma is that it's not really much of a dilemma.  If you screw up at work, you will be fired.  To be fired from motherhood, you have to fail spectacularly and repeatedly, and this failure will have to be noticed and documented by teachers, social workers, police officers, and judges.  Therefore, work will always come first because the pushback for failure will be harder and more immediate from a boss.  To a child, "normal" will be what Mommy creates for her, even if that's neglect, abuse, chronic selfishness or the less malign flakiness.  

What irritates me most about these sorts of articles is the idea that women must jump on the 7-7 treadmill for the betterment of the child, for the fulfillment of the mother.  The majority of women out there working aren't doing so because they love it or because it's making their lives richer.  They're doing it because they need the money to pay for food and rent.  Their jobs aren't glamorous and never will be.  They're trapped because of the economy, because of divorce or single motherhood, or because of outstanding student loans.  And there is no "work/life" balance.  There is only work and then whatever you can get done after work - the same grind people had before the period of the mid-twentieth century American prosperity.  Only now Grandma's not living upstairs and can't take care of Baby while Mommy twists together silk flowers or does piecework, so Baby has to be schlepped to an expensive daycare.  And children get parked in front of a TV or a game center and stay up all night and eat fast food and gain weight and lose both their ability to pay attention and their ability to interact with real people.  

But it's all right in the end because "we become far happier once we accept that most days call for tough decisions." Or something.