Civics 101

For those who don't remember high school history class, the US Constitution wasn't our first rulebook. During the war to break from England, our lauded Founding Fathers drafted the Articles of Confederation in 1777. After the war was won, they discovered that the loose rules, leaving too much up to individual states and not authorizing enough power to the central government...didn't quite work.

So they went back to the drawing board in 1789 and created the US Constitution, the amazing document that, much like the Bible, is constantly referred to but seldom read and even less understood.

I would like to remind everyone that IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE REPLACED! We do not need a revolution, Bernie. We do not need to blow up the system, Reince.

The Constitutional Convention members designed a government in such a way as to dilute the power of any one person or group and to prevent rapid changes in power. It is an excellent idea that keeps the government centrist and stable. No demagogue can come along and seize power. No party can sweep in and radically shift the direction of the country in a single election. The decidedly cautious revolutionaries created an awesome framework for preventing a fickle electorate from swinging wildly from one ideological position to another. Yes, it means that change is slow. That's the point! (Now THAT is intelligent design I can get behind.)

If there is a flaw in their excellent planning it is that I doubt they expected the modern Republican party to act like toddlers who will ensure that if they can't win, nobody can. The "broken" government that everyone keeps talking about is the result of a refusal to compromise, which has resulted in literal government shutdown. But that is NOT the fault of the system, which, for all its brilliance, cannot force politicians or the electorate to act like fucking adults and work together to solve the nation's problems.

Happy Mother's Day?

Normally Mother's Day is that one day we take in spring to lie about how much we value mothers and motherhood, but this year we have a new selfish spin on devaluing motherhood.

To whit:

• a tweet from a woman claiming (I'm paraphrasing as I don't remember the exact quote) to tweet on behalf of all the mothers who find being a parent a happy thing that happened in their lives, "but not their reason for being."
• And the movie "Bad Moms."

First, if you have kids but being a parent isn't the most important thing in your life, you should have gotten a shelter dog, not a created a human being. 

OK, my children aren't pets.

If you brought another human being into the world, either planned or (shudder) by accident, that person is more important than you...at least to you. He or she is not a pet or a hobby, and if you think so, you should have left the baby at a fire station or emergency room at birth.

There are nearly infinite ways to be a good parent, but ALL of them start with prioritizing your kid first, before your job, your pedicure appointment, tee time, or tea time. If you're not willing to do that, why do you deserve a day of recognition for one of your many hobbies? What's next? A day to recognize the invaluable contribution to society of scrapbookers or mountain bikers?

Having said that, I move on to the problem of the "Bad Moms" movie trailer I saw last night. The premise is that a (totally HOT, upper-middle-class "working") mom is overwhelmed by the outrageous expectations she feels she must live up to in order to be the perfect mom, so she and her friends reject them and decide to be "bad moms."

Boy do I understand the pressure to be the "perfect" parent...because if you're not perfect, you must not love your kids, or so the spurious logic goes. I actually feel it more than "working moms" because I don't have the excuse of a job that gets in the way of ideal motherhood. ("Yes, I make mistakes, but I can't help it. I have to work.") But as much as I might enjoy watching a group of moms reject the straightjacketed, stick-up-your-ass, sugar- and gluten-free "perfect motherhood," and forge their own path to really good, responsible, joyful motherhood (which can include cutting loose, making mistakes, the occasional really poor choice, and even sometimes (briefly) regretting ever having had children), I suspect that the movie will piss me off more than make me feel in good company because I am not actually the target demographic. I'm not a "working mom," so I couldn't possibly understand the pressure these women are under, never mind that the schools are actually adapting to their lives, to my detriment.

• Really? I can't bake something for the class because they now require all shared foods be store-bought? (Mila, those grocery store donut holes would have been A-OK in my district.)
• Really? The elementary school performances all end at 8:15, after my kid's reasonable bedtime needed for the 6:30 reveille, because you all can't get off work early twice a school year? 

But more importantly, the movie trailer also contains shockingly few shots of either men or children, as if mothers exist entirely independent of fathers and kids, bringing us back around to my first point, that the capitalist feminist view of motherhood is little more than an optional unpaid side quest on the path to self-actualization.

So this year on Mother's Day, in addition to (most) men's insulting lip service claiming to deeply value the self-sacrifices born of love and made by women, some women seem to be arguing that the sacrifices simply aren't necessary. Rather than stepping up and calling for a more equitable sharing of sacrifice and work, or alternately demanding sincere, lasting respect for the most fundamental of "women's work," women themselves are devaluing motherhood as just something that they do part time when it's fun.

So happy mother's day?

Incidentally, my husband does truly value my work as primary parent to our children. My kids don't really appreciate me yet because to them, I'm air—ubiquitous, absolutely vital, and totally taken for granted—but they'll get there one day.

#HeyGirl

Feminist Ryan Gosling respects your sexual agency.

I've been stuck for two weeks or so between trying to understand what people intend by what they say and knowing that word choice matters. OK, OK, one word, in particular: girl.

I loved my Pilates/yoga teacher's rough translation of "namaste" as "you go, girl!" I had to smile when a toll booth worker passed me through the pay lane with a wave and a cheerful, "you're good, girl." I love the cute pink and pastel LEGO Friends sets. (Although I absolutely hate the stretched out skinny mini-fig replacements.) But despite drinking my coffee out of a pink mug in my pink office as I browse for a pink iPhone and pink MacBook, I still struggle with self-contempt in the moments when I'm emotion and (shudder) "girlie."

There should be nothing wrong with being a girl or being like a girl. It should denote immature femaleness, which should be, at worst, value-neutral as we work toward gender equality. I could put on my Humorless Feminist hat and mention that, in the real world, it is something of a double-edged sword because traditionally it undermines grown women by lumping us together with children—"career girls," anyone?—while its re-appropriation only serves to concede and reinforce that our value declines as we age. ("Really, even if I'm 40, I'm still cute and therefore worth something! Girl Power!")

But I don't want to freak out every time somebody uses the word girl to mean "female person of any age."

Except then there is this:

It's bad enough that porn stars, hookers, and strippers are regularly called "girls," but when a group of feminist women on NPR are talking about the (mostly) consensual sexual experiences of 15-21 year old females, they should not be persistently, insistently using the word "girls." A girl is a female child and a child cannot consent to sex, so if you're talking about a girl and sex, you're talking about child rape. Child rape is about as far from empowered sexual agency as you can get.

So I'll go ahead and assume you don't mean to insult me by calling me a girl even though I'm in my 40s, but pretty please, the moment you start talking about fucking, it's always WOMAN.