Sexism

Personhood? Really? Sigh


fetus 10weeks

So here in Alberta the municipal  elections have come and gone.  In my own county of Strathcona and in the city of Fort Saskatchewan there are new mayors.  Both women.  And Calgary, to our south, now has a Muslim mayor, a Harvard grad who lives in his parent’s basement.

We are indeed the liberal utopia sometimes.  Aside from the long waits at the walk in clinic, the pig shit smell from basically unregulated mega-hog farms and the kow-towing to big oil. Little things really, “n’est-ce pas?”

But even with its imperfections Canada/Alberta rarely make me cringe in horror the way politics from down under does, and it makes the American mid-term election in a couple of weeks so much harder for my ex-pat self to stomach.

We bask in the light.

While they get ready for The Handmaid’s Tale.

What I don’t understand is how an ad that is more lie than fact gets aired, or what kind of mental defect a person must have to believe that granting legal status to fertilized eggs and embryos is a good idea.

Cue the goose-stepping pregnancy police, and get ready to smuggle birth control pills across state lines because the madness isn’t contained to Colorado. Nebraska is hell-bent on stripping women of their right to reproductive control as well. And I believe Montana is hatching up some personhood scheme along with a doubt-digit handful of other states.

Why? Because they’ve run out of other options. Unless they can somehow upend Roe v. Wade – not impossible but clearly too much work with Obama stacking the court with women – personhood is their last stand.

There isn’t a scientist or doctor worth his/her degree who agrees with the insane notion that life – people life – begins at conception. Not one. Not a shred of credible science to back it up. It’s all based on notions of God and soul, a realm that invites multiple interpretations as a matter of course with nary a hint of agreement anywhere unless it’s the Supreme Court giving the nod to the idea that businesses are a notch above the unborn in the eyes of the law.

And this is so not about saving babies. That’s the ruse. It’s about controlling women. Stripping of us rights and autonomy. Period.

How this is any different from the “socialism” people quake in their slippers about while huddled around the flat screen cheering on Hannity, I don’t know.

Clearly infringing on the rights of women of reproductive age doesn’t bother anyone on the right. But so much doesn’t bother them that I wonder if they’d even notice a regime change from “democracy” to “totalitarian state”. Maybe if the news preempted “Glee” or “Dancing with the Stars”.

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Old Women with Long Hair


Blond long-haired young lady woman watching th...

Image by mikebaird via Flickr

Dee insisted on having her long hair cut to shoulder length just before the start of the current school year. I quizzed her extensively right up until the stylists began shearing because Dee’s hair has always been long and I wanted no teary trauma in the aftermath.

But she has been quite chipper and pleased with her shorter do. I don’t see her growing it out again and in her dream world, it would be shorter. She balks at pixies only because her curl would never succumb and she isn’t a fan of fussing with her tresses.

I admit to toying with the idea of cutting my hair as I watch my daughter delight in her new look. Aside from the curl, our hair is not of similar texture or thickness. My locks are dense, coarse and the only way I could go short without adding fuss time to my daily routine would be to have myself sheered like a sheep.

And then there’s the whole aversion to short hair thing I have.

Part of it stems from my parents’ stubborn insistence that I have short hair as I was growing up.  It was a curly tangle that I resisted allowing anyone to comb when I was quite small which accounted for some of their stance, but it was also a way to deal with the fact that I was not as feminine as they hoped I would be.  If I would not be a proper girl, then perhaps I should look more masculine.

I talked them into letting me grow out my hair when I was in fifth grade.  It made it to my shoulder before my father ordered my mother to take me to the beauty shop and have it hacked back to my ears.

I liked it long. He didn’t. The battle was on until I simply declared my independence as a junior in high school and let it grow out. I didn’t do more than a cursory trim and thin for the next ten years. In college, it hung to the middle of my back. As it was the most feminine thing about me, I treasured it. And as it attracted the most attention from men, I wore it down as often as I could.  For a girl who’d never aroused much male interest, I saw my long hair as a plus.  It enabled me to shake labels like “tomboy”.  A notion that I still regard as an attempt to force me to be someone other than who I was.

When I hit my early thirties, the questions about when I would finally go back to short hair for good began.

I watched as some of my peers cut their hair off, prompted by birthdays or babies. And I noted that in the press there was an obsession with fashion gurus and their opinions that long hair and old women didn’t mix.

There’s lot of bunk about hair changing as we age and that it simply looks ratty on older women. A lot of that though is damage to hair caused by the shampoos, dying, heat from blow dryers and curling irons and other artificial things we do in the name of shaping and styling.  Hair, like skin, changes but probably not as drastically as the movers and shakers in fashion would like us to believe.

Long hair as seen as a desperate attempt by older women to retain youth.

Seriously?

I see more desperation in boob jobs, Botox and extreme dieting, but oddly that is largely ignored or worse, is seen as a rational response.

Long hair is an act of rebellion. Women have their life stages, right? Maiden, Mother and Crone. We should go gently shorn into that good cronehood. I question the “crone” stage. I am betting that it’s a male term plastered over a much more realistic female one.

My hair began in rebellion but it remains because it just works better for me.

Whether women can go short is more about hair texture, face and skull shape and neckline/length. The same applies for adding inches.

And then there is personal style, temperament and image.

Many other intangibles as well.

So I bristle at the “old” thing. My hair length, like my laugh lines and the sag of my breasts are all mine to embrace or reject or remold.  Not society’s and certainly not some fashionista’s from the world of Make Believe where women are deemed obese beyond a size four. What would someone who doesn’t deal in reality know about real women anyway, I ask you.

Someday, when I am quite old, I may shave my head completely. Just to make people wonder why and to get a good look at my head – which really hasn’t been seen since I was about two and a half. But until then, I will maintain length.

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A Little House-Wife’ng on the Prairie


Oil painting of a scullery maid by Jean-Simèon...

Image via Wikipedia

There is a reason why women abandoned the kitchen in droves once the combined effects of modern conveniences and access to the workplace kicked in. And that reason?

Kitchens are the equivalent of salt mines. Backache inducing, mind-mushing and mostly unappreciated work.

Subtracting the last bit for myself personally because my husband appreciates enormously and often, the aching back and low-level of intellectual stimulation will not induce many of my gender back to the scullery no matter how Home Depot dresses it up.

Today I baked, laundered, raked and tidied.

For hours.

And I am not a pioneer homemaker or even my Grandmother. Despite my personal fetish of mixing up foodstuff from scratch, my wifely arsenal includes an industrial mixer, an oven that doesn’t require the need to stoke it with wood (that would need to be chopped), a microwave, a blender, a food processor and a dishwasher (which praise be to my husband is installed and in service again). And still, the morning and a goodly chunk of afternoon later saw me just finishing and not even close to cleaning or yard-work.

Here’s where the feminists – married some, but mostly single – chime in, “Where is your husband? Division of labor violation alert!”

But he was mixing cement and applying scratch coat to the sides of the house, and seriously, labor division is an illusion. Always was and continues to be this fantasy that ruins more relationships than it should.

Reality is that Rob tends to the big house things – like siding, roofing, knocking out walls, installing hardwood and all things mechanical, electrical and plumbing related. I make the trains run on time, which isn’t glamorous or easy to point a finger directly at most days but necessary none the less.

And I teach yoga. Which is fun and good for me besides while Rob girds up to head back to literally dig a salt mine at a nearby chemical plant. It is neither fun nor good for him – as his recent heart attack attests to.

The point then? There isn’t one aside from the obvious, which is that fair is an ebb/flow thing, and when one gets all bean-counterish about it – joy is naturally sucked right out of one’s  existence.

There is nothing overwhelmingly odious about modern life that probably isn’t self-inflicted by unrealistic expectations that are imposed on us from the outside.