Feminism

A Revolutionary Road


We spent most of Saturday scouring Edmonton for cross-country skiing gear. After a particularly fruitless stretch (it’s very late in the season and stores are picked thin), we stopped at the Chapters across from Camper’s Village on Whitemud to use the washroom and grab tea and snacks. As I waited for the barista to finish up, I caught sight of a middle-aged couple sitting at a nearby table. He read the paper and she thumbed through a book, reading sections of it out loud to him. They didn’t make eye contact and if I hadn’t been sure she was reading to him, I would have wondered why two strangers were sitting together in a coffee shop.

The book? The Idiots Guide to Surviving Divorce.

Rob and I watched two dvd’s this past week. Revolutionary Road with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and a French-Canadian film from 1986 titled The Decline of the American Empire. On the surface, they have nothing in common. The first found its base in a 1961 book of the same name. It’s considered to be one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th Century. Written several years before Betty Freidan’s feminist treatise, it clearly calls out the hollow existence of suburban 1950’s American. While I don’t think the author intended for it to be a feminist novel, the movie clearly sees it that way. The second movie supposedly derives from a book of the same name that one of the main characters wrote. All the characters save two teach at an unidentified university. The film spends most of its time going back and forth between the four men and the four women who have been acquainted, intimately, with each other for a long time. The decline in question concerns male/female relationships and the discussions are driven by sex. Sexual infidelity to be more precise.

Interestingly, both films deal with couples who don’t know their partners, make wildly inaccurate assumptions about each other and feel incredibly entitled to put their own needs ahead of the success of their relationships.

The French film, though billed as a comedy, makes a viewer feel embarrassed for the characters more than anything else. Revolutionary Road, however, made me cry.

Winslet’s character commits suicide in the last fifteen minutes or so of the movie. She performs an early second trimester abortion on herself in the master bath using what appeared to be a douchebag and a pointy piece of hard rubber. She does this with full knowledge of the danger, and the film makes it clear she expects to die. Though she is portrayed as a bit flighty and prone to hysterics, all I saw was a woman who’d made choices for her life thinking they would turn out differently in spite of the fact that her choices really only lead in the direction of where she ends up.  I understood her frustration. I just couldn’t fathom such a willful denial of the obvious – she had options. Options that would have been socially ostracizing for her given the time period, but she had them. She wanted life to be different without sacrifice or great effort on her part.

I felt sorry for DiCaprio’s character. Rob didn’t. The character floated through life on charm and half-assing, rising to challenges on whims really only to see those brief moments of effort be rewarded out of proportion. None of that is off the mark, and the film doesn’t give much background for the couple. We don’t know how they got from A to B, just that they did. It seemed to me though that his apathy was driven by her need for them to be more special than the suburban crowd.

They viewed suburbia as a trap. The people around them as complacent and willing accomplices to their enslavement. They saw the hopelessness and the pointlessness. They were wise and better than that.

Maybe. But perception is all. We live primarily in a moment that changes with every moment that passes. The impermanence should liberate us. Inspire. Instead these two look back constantly at a moment in time when anything was supposedly possible and they choose to walk the road that led them to where they were. It didn’t occur to either that they might be “trapped” because they were too lazy or frightened or both to take the roads. Or that one life is really as good as another if you decide to make it so.

Anyway, it made me cry. I understand her longing for freedom. To be just her and to answer to no one’s dreams but her own. I remembered me in my little house in Valley Junction before Rob and before Will. Just me. Sometimes I do miss that house. But, it was lonely. Loneliness so deep that I can still feel the echo. Even in widowhood I was not so profoundly alone, and I am grateful that I will never experience that again in my life. I can’t imagine someone longing for that.

The REAL Lesson of Tim Tebow? Choice.


Tim Tebow plays quarterback at a college in Florida. Aside from that, the only other fact I know about Tim is that his mother was working as a missionary in the Philipines when she was pregnant with him. She became ill and needed heavy-duty antibiotics, which doctors warned her could potentially damage the fetus. In fact, the doctors worried that Tim would die in utero, putting his mother’s life in danger too. They urged her to consider terminating the pregnancy. She weighed the option against her faith and continued with the pregnancy. Tim is a Heisman Trophy winner today.

During the Superbowl this coming Sunday, The Focus for Life group will run an ad about Tim and his mother. The ad’s message clearly being that given Tim’s accomplishments in football, what a loss his non-birth would have been.

The loss to professional football aside, what strikes me about Tim’s mother is that she was given a choice. Her doctors presented her with the medical facts, their recommendations and allowed her to make her own decision. Wow. A woman granted the right to choose. Powerful.

Women’s rights groups are beside themselves with horror at the idea of this ad running. Focus for Life is an anti-choice group which makes the story they are championing all the more necessary to be heard.

Pro-choice groups are lobbying CBS (the network airing the Superbowl) to nix the ad. Ridiculous. Stop being old school reactionary. Women’s groups amaze me with their short-sided hysteria. Let it air. And then spend a lot of time reminding people that Tim’s mother had a choice. What a woman chooses is not the point. It’s never been the point. The point is HAVING A CHOICE.

What is so difficult about that message that the choice people constantly manage to screw it up?

Cutesy Feminism


Sandra Tsing Loh annoys me even more than Caitlin Flangan.

I wrote a post about her over the summer or maybe it was earlier fall. She is the writer who got tired of her marriage but instead of working on her issues, she had an affair which precipitated her divorce. She has a live in relationship now – and I won’t go into why I think those types of set-ups are usually doomed from the onset – and she finds herself, again, the breadwinner.

Her recent piece in The New York Times (read it while you can, they are putting the pay wall back up soon) is on needing a wife. Because every good feminist needs a wife to offset the uselessness of her husband, the stuck in the 1950’s Reagan-era nostalgic Neanderthal caricature  sperm donor her biological clock blinded her into breeding with.

I get tired of hearing this worn out bit of nonsense.

Oh, it’s not nonsense that while women have gained full-time employment outside their homes in near parity numbers with men over the last three decades, men have not picked up the home-making or child care slack at the same rates. In fact it’s not even a decent comparison when one looks at the numbers.

What is tiresome is the whining.

I hate to quote Dr. Phil here, but the man made a valid point when he said. and repeatedly,

“You teach people how to treat you.”

If your mate is not shopping, cooking, cleaning or caring for offspring in a share and share alike way, say something about it. Tell him/her what you expect. Why you expect it. Work out a compromise that is agreeable to you both.

But men can’t be reasoned with, women argue. And they should just see that work that needs doing and that I can’t do it all. What is wrong with them?

Nothing. Just as there is nothing wrong with women who don’t seem able to get their minds around the fact that men, despite evolution, still can’t read our minds or make the correlation between housework and foreplay.

I was the breadwinner in my first marriage and my late husband did the cooking. In fact, he insisted that grocery shopping be a bonding experience for us – something that made me crazy because he had to go up and down every single aisle in the store whether we needed to or not. Shopping took less time when I was a single mother wrangling a toddler who refused to sit in the cart than it did with her father.

He would have done the laundry too but his indifference to sorting my colors and materials would have totaled my wardrobe.

He got mad at me when I did yard work. I had summers off, being a teacher, and time to do it that he lacked. But he found yard work soothing and exercised his gender veto.

Our motto from the beginning was that nothing be stewed over. If someone had an issue, discussions needed to happen.

“I can’t read minds,” he told me.

Now I stay home. It’s just the way things worked out. Rob would be just as happy – happier really – if I was bringing home the bread instead of shopping for it.

If the majority of the cooking, baking, cleaning, shopping etc. falls on me, it’s because I have the time. Rob willingly chips in, and even more often, simply does things without my having to mention it at all. Laundry, cleaning (he does the bathrooms because my allergies don’t mix with harsh cleaning products).

And mind-reading is off limits, though we are so alike that sometimes I bet we could do it if we just practiced a bit.

You trained your husbands well, women will marvel. But truthfully I did nothing aside from open my mouth and express my thoughts on how a marriage should work. I did it more often with Will than I do with Rob, but I was Will’s first wife and Rob had 27 years of partnering tucked away in his resumé when I met him.

There are no abbreviations. Like children, spouses assess the lay of the land and act accordingly. Men and women. Dr.Phil’s hackneyed home spun advice is valid.

The whole “needing a wife” thing is cliché. What women need is to speak up, and probably screen men a bit more in the beginning to ward off that buyer’s remorse some many end up with.