Some vintage Bitch Ph.D.

The New York Times recently covered a study about gender dynamics in same sex-relationships, and what hetero couples can learn from them. One of the major areas covered was division of labor. I feel like this is a huge hot button topic for a lot of couples. Even, well maybe even more so, for couples who fancy themselves feminist, or at least progressive.

These are rocky waters to navigate both because and despite the fact that we, thank god, don’t have ideological differences about the division of labor in our house. We both agree that it should be equal, with one partner picking up more of the slack when the other is particularly busy (read: Bar/Bri). The problem is that no matter who is busier, and no matter how the work is being split on any given week, one person is doing the vast majority of the mental and emotional heavy lifting. And our conceptions of busy vary as well. My busy consists of say, taking the LSAT tomorrow, or being so deathly ill I can’t rise from bed. B is busy if he’s sitting on the couch stressing about Bar/Bri. Or, you know, is really, really tired.

M. LeBlanc at Bitch Ph.D. had an amazing post a while back on “How to Be a Feminist Boyfriend.” This isn’t exactly a primer piece for your average male firmly entrenched in the vice-grip of the patriarchy. It’s more of a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge for men who already proudly display their progressive ideals like a badge of honor. A long but lovely excerpt on the mental aspect of the division of housework:

“Not being a jerk about housework involves much more than just doing what you're asked to. This is not the time to say "but sometimes I cook!" Obviously, if you're not doing your fair share, you need to work on that, and do so immediately. But since this is directed more at men who already have some awareness of gender issues, I'm going to dig a little deeper. If you truly want to understand how to make your housework a conflict-free zone, you need to start paying attention to mental work. Who's the person to say "we need more toilet paper," "I think the trash is getting smelly," or "we're having guests tomorrow so we better get this place in shape"? If your relationship is anywhere close to the average, chances are, it's your girlfriend. Luckily, doing more mental work is easy: 1) Pay Attention. 2) Speak out when you notice something that needs to be done. 3) Even better, offer to do it. A sentence like "I think we're running out of clean clothes, and there's no detergent left, want me to pick some up on the way home?" will be music to your lady's ears. If you claim that you somehow just can't notice what's going on with the house (and I don't really believe you; chances are you just don't give a shit), then look at it as a game. It's like those "how many coca-cola bottles are there in this picture?" kid's games.”

My dear liberal lover picking anything up on the way home is something I sit at my desk and daydream about for hours on end. You know, as opposed to calling me and asking me to pick it up on the way home. Or even worse, not even knowing it needed to be picked up in the first place.

B will do almost anything he’s asked to do. He will occasionally even chip in on his own when he sees me working by myself. But it’s that “mental work” aspect that he just doesn’t seem to get. He rarely empties the clean dishes from the dishwasher without prompting. If I hadn’t initiated the dumpster run for our mountain of moving boxes, they probably would have lived on the balcony for an indefinite amount of time. He almost never has an idea for dinner, despite the fact that he’s an excellent cook. If pressed, he will choose from several choices I present him with.

The point of this isn’t to rant about B. He’s light years ahead of his dad, or even my dad, who for the record is the official cleaner of all floors in my parents’ house. Really, at the end of the day, I’m more confused about it than anything. How do you know when you’re being such a stickler about fairness that you’ve lost the spirit of a teamwork approach and everyone filling in where they’re needed? Is B falling under the spell of the seductive whispers of the patriarchy, or is he just plain lazy? And I can definitely be lazy myself, so I’m not one to judge. Is the problem not that he’s under-working, but that I’m over-working? My low tolerance for messiness means I get home from the office, walk in the door, and proceed straight to the kitchen to clean up the breakfast dishes before he even has a chance. But if I gave him a chance, if I fought everything in me and just left it, would he take it? Or would 10:00 pm roll around, and we’d still be starving, with a dirty kitchen, and piles of unfolded laundry? Do we actually have a gender-role based division of labor issue, or simply different ideas of what constitutes clean?

Naturally, we should talk about it. But last time I tried to have this conversation, he got upset that I was questioning his commitment to an equal division of labor. And understandably so. When you talk about this with a progressive guy, you’re cutting right to the heart of who he believes he is. But the good news is that who he believes he is, aspires to be, and is constantly becoming, is something that I admire, respect, and love. And aspire to myself. That’s definitely a great start.

Thank you Dad for never taking me to a purity ball

So a few weeks ago, I started and never published a post about my anxiety over telling my father that B and I were moving in together. My father is very religiously conservative, and on top of it, conservatively Asian. One thing that's dawned on me in the last month or so as I've dealt with this whole moving in thing is that I'm not really sure any more which one - religious beliefs or native culture - has more effect on the conservative and somewhat authoritarian way he raised us. I used to take for granted that it was religion.

But now that I'm a little bit older, I'm kind of appalled at myself for not realizing how much our differences are actually cultural. And not only cultural, but cultural intermingled with generational. My Dad is Filipino, and even in Filipino culture in the Philippines, I've heard that there's a huge generational divide between people of my dad's generation, and people of my generation. My Dad and I unfortunately have it in double or triple doses, because since my Mom is American and white, culturally my sisters and I have always been more American than Filipino. And add on to that the religion factor, and friends, you've got a whole lot of differences between my dad and this adult daughter.

So you can imagine I was quaking in my patent leather sandals over telling him I was moving in with my lapsed-Catholic/agnostic lawyer boyfriend. But you know what? The whole thing turned out surprisingly well. I went up to the cabin with my parents the week before B's law school graduation, when all his family would be in town and chatting away about the happy news. I planned to tell him on our morning run. Let's just say I told him about 15 minutes in, and the 30 minute run ended up being a 45 minute run. With a 15 minute cool down walk. And yes he did moralize a little bit, but he listened as I rationally explained my reasons and points where I disagreed with him. And he never lost his temper, or raised his voice, which is saying a lot.

In the end, I was pretty pleased with how it went. Imagine my surprise when, at lunch last week, he tells me he'd like to take back some of the things he said. Instead, he wanted to say that he respects and supports (yes, supports!) both of us. He realizes that we are both smart and mature adults, and we would not have come to such an important decision without giving it some very serious thought. And he is behind us. I'm tearing up just thinking about it.

In light of all that, this article in the New York Times over the weekend made me appreciate my dad even more. Considering my background, my biggest feminist pet peeve is abstinence only education. A close second are purity balls, and all that they represent. I was excited to see this issue covered in the New York Times, but I have mixed feelings about the tone. There was mention of the fact that the majority of teens break their purity pledges, and that they're less likely to use condoms when they do. But throughout the article, I just felt like screaming at my laptop: this is weird, wrong, and creepy on so many levels! How anyone can calmly and impartially recount a narrative of the evening is beyond me. I realize the benefits of presenting the story that way, but part of me wanted to author to say something, anything to acknowledge how completely messed up this purity ball was, from the very concepts and values behind it, to the smallest little details of the evening. And some of the girls were so young. Do they even fully grasp what they are promising? Somehow I'm afraid that's kind of the point. A commenter on Feministing linked to this great post on the NYT article on a blog I'd never seen before, Womenstake.org. It's the National Women's Law Center's blog, and they do amazing work, so I'm sure I'll be reading it a lot more.

I really believe that the worst of my fundamentalist upbringing did not come from our home. It came from the private schools and the churches. The camps and the retreats. And some of my parents' worst mistakes were made when they were younger, newer parents. In a way, I see them as victims too. They were, and still always are, trying to do the right thing. The fathers who take their daughters to purity balls claim that they are showing their daughters they love them by purporting to take ownership over their virginity, and guarding it till they can pass her off to another man. While I'm not questioning that they love their daughters, what they're really doing is telling them is that their only value is in their virginity, or lack thereof, and in association with the man who currently has domain over it. My dad, in contrast, is showing his daughter he loves her by borrowing his buddy's pick up truck and helping her move in with her boyfriend. I'll take that type of love any day.

Fundie flashbacks: We want to tell you what to wear edition

Joshua Harris, can't you leave a girl alone?

As a child, a hobby of mine was reading and picking apart Christian lifestyle books of all types, particularly the ones that purported to tell me, specifically, how to live my life. Or ones that told other people how to tell me how to live my life. In my tween years, I started out with some classic James Dobson. I think my parents had the good sense to keep this gem somewhere other than my dad's office bookshelf, but you'd better believe I got my hands on some other ones. I would read, and then methodically report back to my parents with my criticisms of books such as Dare to Discipline, and a couple years later, when I was compelled to read it in school, Preparing for Adolescence.

In case you haven't had the pleasure of reading some of Dr. Dobson's finer work, The Strong-Willed Child could be renamed "How to Crush Dissent and Original Thought in Persons Under the Age of 18." Dare to Discipline is how to hit your kids without getting reported to Child Protective Services. And Preparing for Adolescence teaches girls to slut-shame themselves in case there isn't someone else there to do it for them, along with other misinformation about teens' emerging sexuality, which would be entertaining if it wasn't so dangerous.

You have to find little things like this to amuse yourself and keep yourself sane when you're growing up in fundie-land. But a book came out when I was the tender age of 16 that was anything but funny. And it became a raging sensation with fundamentalist fathers everywhere. The book was I Kissed Dating Goodbye by a man named Joshua Harris. The basic premise of this book is that dating as an institution is flawed, and good Christians should forgo romantic love of all types until they're ready to wed, and which time they should begin pursuing "courtships," which will eventually lead to marriage.

Now, being out of that scene for so long, and beginning to be more involved feminist issues, I see even more fundamental problems with the book than I did at the time, such as the fact that he presupposes that everyone ought to aspire to the fundamental institution of the patriarchy - heterosexual marriage. But even at the time, I could see how a catchy introduction fell into a string of logical fallacies, in everything from his core arguments to his use of supporting evidence. Unfortunately, this time, my critical examination of this latest fundie-festo was less a precocious pastime, and was more rooted in the deep fear that he was right, and I was somehow inherently bad for dating.

If Joshua himself, or one of his minions, was reading this blog right now, he would probably say, "See, Shells, that fear you feel is your heart telling you that dating is in fact wrong." And adult Shells would tell him, "No, Josh, that fear is the result of sixteen consecutive years of brainwashing to believe the sexual fearmongering that spews forth from the pens of creeps like you." Of course, when I was sixteen, I didn't know that. Ever since I can remember, I've been cursed with being the perfectionistic, type-A person that I am. When you have that type of temperament, and you're raised in a fundamentalist Christian environment, and books like this come up, you're put in a difficult position. You know everyone will think better of you and admire you if you follow its prescriptions. But you also know it's bullshit.

So I compromised. I kept my boyfriend, but had a very publicly non-sexual relationship with him. I literally had parents coming up to me and telling me they wished their kids would behave more like my boyfriend and I, and that we were a wonderful example. At the time, I felt like I was having my cake, and eating it too. But now, I see how this strand of Christian philosphy, and many like it over the years, have continued to warp the way I approach relationships and sex, even though I've long since abandoned them.

Which is why it all came flooding painfully back when I saw this. It turns out Harris's little brothers have picked up the torch, and created a survey that helps Christian men dictate what women should wear so that they don't "stumble," titled The Modesty Survey. (Sound familiar? Maybe because stuff like that is written into the laws in places like, oh, Saudi Arabia.) I don't have the energy to pick it apart right now, but there's some great feminist analysis by Jill at Feministe, and by The Happy Feminist, who I love because she's a feminist and a lawyer. There's also a hilarious parody at Pandagon that definitely raised the depressed spirits of a recovering surf of fundamentalism.

Now off to bed so I can dream about tying Joshua Harris to a front row seat of any given catwalk at Fashion Week...