What I learned in my teacher inservice today

I had a teacher inservice today and the presenter was actually not too bad for most of the time. He was engaging, interesting and attempted to keep us awake by asking questions and encouraging us to ask him questions and then the last ten minutes of the presentation happened. He ended with some thoughts on boys. Ok so boys in education, I am a male and I know that the pendulum in education has swung toward the idea that males are not ready for schooling or some other such bullshit. Males are 1.5 years behind neurologically and so we are still developing and not ready for schooling. Anyway... so I learned other things today. All of this is either in the handout he gave us or he told this to it. He did emphasize that this is all on average and that no one single boy or girl should be used as an example. I am not making any of it up.

- Boys are not able to multitask.
- It can take up to 7 hours for a boy to process emotions, which really means that boys are not able to process emotions because hell we can't multitask so while we are supposed to be multitasking on emotions and something else of course the emotional processing gets lost.
- When trying to talk to boys about feelings, keep it short and simple.
- Boys have more cerebrospinal fluid, which is because "boys hit their heads more and like a football helmet evolution provided boys with extra cushioning."

Now I have no issues with looking at the differences between boys and girls and learning styles. There does seem to be some credible research that says that boys and girls learn differently. Boys tend to be more spatial and math oriented (although not this boy) and girls tend to be more language oriented. There is also research that suggests that boys tend to need more movement and tend to be tactile-kinesthetic learners. So ok to looking at the differences, but I draw the line at things that I see as blatantly stupid or wrong and that set back gender relations.

The whole boys cannot process emotion sounds like it was created by a man as an excuse as to why men have to be macho all of the time and can't show their emotions. Boys are not able to understand emotions so why bother with it. If they want to hit someone, don't even try talking to them about how that might make the other person feel, boys are too emotionally stupid to understand this. And if you absolutely, positively have to talk to a boy about feelings or emotions keep it simple. Don't overburden them with such girly things such as their emotions and feelings. Oh and boys can't multitask so don't bother asking them to be able to focus on more than one thing at a time. And neither the lack of the ability to multitask or the lack of the ability to understand feelings are their fault, they are made this way, so don't bother trying to fight evolution or God or whatever made them the way that they are. And evolution also provided men with more brain fluid as they are prone to banging their head on things and their brains need cushioning. WTF!?!

When I hear this shit about how boys can't learn, about how boys and men can't become emotionally aware and then bullshit like evolution provides a brain cushion for men because we like to bang our heads into things, I get annoyed. I waited several hours before I put up this post because I knew I needed to calm down a bit so that I could be at least somewhat coherent. But really people, What the Fuck?!? This whole ending on the bullshit about boys made me reconsider everything else this man said and I had to find some of the statistics that he quoted about other things. Such as the fact that apparently for every hour of Baby Einstein that a child watches they develop 6-8 less words. (If you do not know what Baby Einstein is then consider yourself lucky as I will not link to such an evil and horrible product.) I had to look up this fact and according to this article in Time magazine, this is in fact true, but really I didn't want to have to look up other facts when I got home but this fucking idiot had to make me do it when he starts talking total shit about head banging boys without providing a shred of evidence or research.

We have a long way to go to a gender neutral society

I found this poem while looking at the magazine for the company Syracuse Cultural Workers. The original poem is by Nancy R. Smith and is below.

For Every Woman
By Nancy R. Smith, copyright 1973

For every woman who is tired of acting weak when she knows she is strong, there is a man who is tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable.

For every woman who is tired of acting dumb, there is a man who is burdened with the constant expectation of "knowing everything."

For every woman who is tired of being called "an emotional female," there is a man who is denied the right to weep and to be gentle.

For every woman who is called unfeminine when she competes, there is a man for whom competition is the only way to prove his masculinity.

For every woman who is tired of being a sex object, there is a man who must worry about his potency.

For every woman who feels "tied down" by her children, there is a man who is denied the full pleasures of shared parenthood.

For every woman who is denied meaningful employment or equal pay, there is a man who must bear full financial responsibility for another human being.

For every woman who was not taught the intricacies of an automobile, there is a man who was not taught the satisfactions of cooking.

For every woman who takes a step toward her own liberation, there is a man who finds the way to freedom has been made a little easier.

I am not sure there is much else I need or want to say about these two poems. The poem by Smith is still very relevant 35 years later, so much so that it is now being adapted for children. We have so much farther to go in creating a truly gender neutral society. Is this something that will ever exist? I am not sure, but I am trying to make sure that the children I work with realize that no matter what their gender they are free to express themselves however they want. Boys can wear dresses, girls can build with legos and blocks, boys can cook, girls can be good at math and science and boys should want to read. Girls should be competitive with the boys both academically and athletically and boys do not need to feel ashamed when a girl does better than them. Although a gender neutral society may never exist, I will continue to try and do my part to destroy the ideas of the traditional gender roles for those children that I teach. We need to go beyond women are weak and men are strong and recognize that we are all strong at times and we are all weak at times.

NOTE: Sorry for the weak title, but I think I used up all my creative energy writing this post and it is still early and I have not had my coffee or any type of food yet.

God is genderless

God has no gender is a common idea, I think, for most of us progressives. Either you are an atheist and the non-existence of God mean that naturally something that doesn't exist doesn't have a gender or you are progressive enough and probably a feminist and see God as non-gendered. So this concept was not new to me, but it was still interesting to see this article about this idea. Apparently, a Reform Rabbi has been studying the name of God in Hebrew for the past 13 years and has discovered that if you spell it backwards than it would be the words for he-she in Hebrew. The name he is referring to is the Holy name of God in the Torah, it is the one that is unpronounceable. There are probably some caveats I should point out, first this is from a Reform Rabbi which for those of you who do not know, is the liberal arm of Judaism so this will still hold no weight with the Orthodox arm of Judaism. Two, you have to spell the name backwards to get this result and I guess the argument could be made that if you move letters around enough you can get any result you want, especially from the Torah where it is written without vowels, so you can put whatever vowels you want in a word and change the word entirely. But even so, this Rabbi believes and I would tend to have to agree that the concept of God to the ancient Israelites may not have been male, it may have been non or dual gendered.

As GG and I were talking about last night, the concept of God should transcend gender. As humans we give God a gender and anthropomorphize God so that it fits more easily into our concept. It is much more difficult for humans to conceptualize something that is beyond conceptualism and has no gender. We need God to have a gender so that we can identify with God much more easily. Also, by making god male, it also continues the empowerment of the male gender which is patriarchal societies is, of course, important. There has been a move toward more gender neutral language, I know within Reform Judaism as I grow up in that arm of Judaism and saw the changes for myself, but I am not sure that the same amount of gender neutral language has infiltrated too much farther into Judaism and I have no idea within Christianity of Islam whether the liberal arms of these religions have moved away from patriarchal language in prayer books. (As a sidenote to those who understand Hebrew, I really wanted to type siddur there as that just seems to be the right word for a prayer book for me.)

The comments, which I have not read this morning just last night when I first found this article, are almost as interesting as the article itself. There are quite a lot of people who are saying, of course god has no gender, God does not procreate and gender comes from the presence of sex organs and so no sex organs no gender. There are also plenty of people who are saying that this idea of a gender-less God is a really great idea. There are a number of them and I agree with this that point out that in the article repeatedly God is referred to as a hermaphrodite and that is probably not the best language that can and should be used in this instance. Then there are the trolls, which I find slightly entertaining here. There are the atheists who come on and say, there is no god so why are we arguing about this. That is nothing but trolling, you are not adding to the conversation and for you there is no God but for those who do believe in God this may be a valid argument. And then there are the ones who are vehement that God has to be male, it says so in the bible. It says God is a male and he sent his child to save us, that we are all sinners for even thinking that God is not a male. Hmmmmmmm... well I have to respond to this on my blog cause well it is my blog. The Bible comes from the Torah and the Torah was originally written in Aramaic and then translated to Hebrew and then translated to Greek and then translated to Latin and then onto all of the modern languages. And along with all of those translations, many of those translators didn't actually speak or read the language they were supposed to be translating, for example the translators from Hebrew to Greek didn't necessarily read or speak Hebrew. So assuming that based upon the fact that you know read the Bible in English means you have any idea what it says in Hebrew let alone the original Aramaic, is just ignorant. There are all kinds of weird language anomalies in the Torah, so I just laugh at people when they assume they are so smart cause they know that Jesus spoke English.

FYI: Not all women vote the same

According to this article, there is a deep divide among feminists over who should be the Democratic candidate, surprising isn't this. I mean don't all women vote the same, don't they all share the same brain and the same thoughts, well don't they. Oh yeah that is right, feminists are people and people have different thoughts from each other. Just as not all men vote the same, then not all women will vote the same. And if not all women will vote the same, than that means that not all feminists will vote the same. This is yet another article which tries to make everything black and white in this Democratic campaign. Apparently, since there are a variety of different opinions among feminists on the blogoshere and in the main stream media there is this huge divide. The feminists will forever be divided and if we do not unite soon, than our vote will be meaningless in all future elections ever according to this article. This article does nothing, but talk about how the two sides are basically warring. There is even a quote where Clinton supporter Gloria Feldt, former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, says, "We're squandering an opportunity to be seen as a voting bloc that turns elections. Unless we are working together, in a strategically thought-out effort to vote in our own best interests, we are in danger of never having another election where people will say women can determine the outcome." Now I hope this is taken out of context and I am sure there was more to it than this, but really is this article and this quote really saying that if women do not all vote for Obama or all for Clinton, than every politician can forget about the female vote forever. I don't think anyone who discounts 50% of the population has much of a chance anyway. The final thing I can say is that there is a lot of worry about if the opponent's supporters will support the candidate even if it isn't their candidate, well I am not seeing many feminist voting for McCain, so it is not like he will get these votes. Sure there is a possibility that Clinton supporters (I am sorry to make this conclusion, but I just can't seem to find a way for Obama to lose at this point) will not vote in the general election and that would hurt Obama and we as feminist and feminist supporters (remember I have issues calling myself a feminist) need to vote for whoever the Democratic candidate is against McCain, but still McCain is not getting the feminist vote anyway. So yes, there are differing opinions in the feminist movement, but so what. Not all men vote the same, so why can't women have differing opinions as well.

Why can't women have sexual happiness?

This article discusses that at least one female legislator in Ecuador wants to make a women's sexual happiness a law. This has, of course, caused great controversy as the male legislators are uncomfortable with the idea that women are not just baby carriers and sexual objects. How dare women want to be more than just men's playthings? Have they no shame? Next thing you know they will want to be treated equally with men outside of the bedroom too, for shame. The idea that women's sexual happiness needs to be legislated and possibly even put into a constitution saddens me a bit. The fact that women are not granted the same types of allowances to be sexually happy as men troubles me. But the fact that someone is trying to do something about this is exactly what is needed. Someone needs to stand up and say well if we need a law that says that women should have the right to not just be the property of men, than dammit it should happen.

One of the other legislators is accusing Ms Soledad Vela, the legislator responsible for this new idea, of "orgasm by law". This is obviously inflammatory, it is saying that she is only trying to say that all women should have orgasms. This may not be a bad thing, but it is also not what I would guess this women is trying to do. She is attempting to provide a law that would make abortions legal, make anti-rape laws stronger and give women more power over their own bodies. She is just trying to create laws that allow women to be equal to men in society. Yes, I know this is a radical idea, women as equals in the bedroom and in life. I know that for many men the idea that women should have the legal right to have control over their own body is rather radical i.e. the abortion debate, but this should not be that radical. We should be able to recognize that men and women both have a legal right to their own bodies and should have the right to have that control from being able to have an abortion if they so wish to being able to say no to a rapist and not just stranger rape, which is really uncommon. the rape that usually happens, the one that happens when a women is raped by someone they know, a relative, a friend or their significant other. So if a law is needed than I think we should have one here in the U.S. The religious right is creating laws that would undermine human beings, they want to get rid of abortion laws and they want to outlaw gay marriage, so I think, on the left we should fight for laws that empower humans. We should fight to make the laws that support abortion stronger. We should fight to make gay marriage legal on a federal level and we should continue the fight to make all people male and female equal under the law.

I am not saying that the Left is not already doing this, just saying we need to continue fighting the good fight and pointing out that countries that are supposed to be behind us are actually ahead of us in some issues. I can't even imagine a legislator proposing a law that women encourage women to be able to obtain sexual happiness let alone putting this in the Constitution even if we were making a whole new one.

Feminist parodies

I am stealing this from Fran who stole this from Dr. Zauis. These are great videos and if this is good enough for them, than it is good enough for me.

Masturbation and witches

I am reading The Botany of Desire and will review it when I finish with it, but there was something interesting that I learned about today which explains the myth of the why witches ride broomsticks. According to Pollan, the author, he mentions how it seems that it was the whole idea of the garden as a means of beautification is a relatively new concept, and that for much of the time gardens were used more for practical purposes such as to create medicines and healing salves, no shit, right. Ok so then it comes to where gardens were a place for people to grow things that would intoxicate and possibly even poison people, again, no shit. So now you may be wondering where the whole masturbation and witches thing comes in, well it seems that it was common practice for "witches" to create potions that at times used datura (otherwise known in some species as jimsonweed and is a hallucinogen), opium poppies (from which morphine and other opiates come), belladonna (another hallucinogen), hashish, fly agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria, another hallucinogen), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). This mixture was then combined with a hempseed-oil based ointment which was then applied vaginally. This then allowed the "witches" to "fly". So what was the easiest thing to apply this ointment, probably a broomstick. He mentions that they used special dildos, which could also be very true, but really a broomstick makes as much sense. So you are walking along and you see a women straddling a broomstick, you wonder what the fuck this women is doing, you already think she is a witch, so then what is she doing, well she must be getting ready to fly or travel somewhere, I mean why else would a person sit on a broomstick like you are riding a horse. So witches fly. Also, I can see where within a group of women who are all applying this ointment, and they are talking about it, they probably do feel like they are flying at times. So not only within the group, but also on the outside of the group, witches now fly using broomsticks.

So now you may be wondering why I even brought this up, other than the obvious, I learned something new today and wanted to share it, which is also true. But I also see this as another example of when women who did not need or have a man for sexual pleasure had to be labeled. There had to be something wrong with them, I mean within a patriarchal society does not every women need a man for sex? Now the patriarchy also says that women do not have individual sexual needs so using a broomstick or another dildo makes no sense within the patriarchy. Women should not want or need anything other than a man between her legs, right. So again, a man walks past the house of a women who is alone, widowed or having never been married, she has a broomstick or something else between her legs and she is happy, ahhh she must be a witch. No women should be happy without a man, right. This is again, the patriarchy or in this case possibly one man deciding she must be a witch purely because she has no husband. I hadn't really gotten this far in my thought until I started typing, but then how many "witches" that were burned were either lesbians or never married? These women had to be witches, they did not need a man. The whole idea of saying they were able to cast a spell on you is just ludicrous, medicine was very primitive at this point, so it was very common for a "doctor" to be using the same potions and plants that a witch used, the difference, she was a woman. This leads me to my favorite Monty Python scene ever, the witch scene in Search for the Holy Grail.



So other than that being a fucking funny clip, it also makes my point perfectly. She was a witch and how did they know, because she looked like a witch. Well, they added the hat, the clothes and the nose. So now, she still looks like a witch, huh. Oh and she cast a spell, but he "got bettah". The reality, ok so this is not real, but still... is that she probably didn't have a husband and/or had rebuked some man's interest in her, so she must be a witch, what other kind of women would not want a man? I know there are probably a thousand other ways to come to the same conclusion about the "witches" and the patriarchy, but isn't the addition of the reasoning why the broomstick is associated with witches just an interesting twist.

Feminism and me

So now that I have gotten the silly posts out of my system for now, I wanted to do a more serious post on something that I feel asleep thinking about last night, Feminism and me. I was inspired to start thinking about it, like I don't usually, but really think about it and my own thoughts and perspective on it after reading this post by Melissa over at Shakesville. And then I went there today to find this article again and well to read some more and I found this post by Kate Harding. It renewed much of what I was already thinking about when it comes to my own perspective on feminism.

To give you a bit of a background on my mother because this is important to my whole point, I would consider my mother to a first generation feminist, at least as I understand it. She has always been a strong female, she has always made of point of talking to my brother and I about the fact that men and women are equal which was reflected in my growing up and my parent's house. I can remember at one point, my mother making a point that we do not objectify women or their bodies in their house and that this was not acceptable behavior with my parents. This grew out of her seeing the album cover for a CD with a scantily clad women on the front. Now the fact that this was for a female rapper, which she had no way of knowing, did not change the fact that she and my father did not feel as though this was material that was appropriate for me. She did not ban me from listening to the music or censor me in any way, but this point was still made. This varies from other topics where I had teachers who felt that my brother or I were reading books that were not appropriate for us, Tom Clancy nnovels in my case and Bram Stroker's Dracula in my brother's case, both comments made by the same fifth grade teacher. My parents stuck up for mine and my brother's rights to read what we wanted to read. So when she told me that an album cover was not appropriate it stuck with me. Yeah I didn't totally understand at that point, but I did start to not make sure that albums that I thought they would not like, I covered more. This does not change the fact that I still listened to them, but I was more conscious of what I was listening to.

Fast forward to the present, well about mid-June to July when I started to blog read on a very regular basis and not just read some idiot my brother was friends with who did mostly self serving, egotistical fluff pieces most of the time. I started to read many writers who were women and were strong feminists. Sure, I was conscious of feminism and the desire of equal rights for men and women, but here I was reading more impassioned ideals. I was reading about the ways in which the patriarchy hurts not only women, but also men. I was reading about the subtle ways in which we have been so conditioned to not even realize that the patriarchy is still very strong. I guess I knew we still live in a very patriarchical society, but it took more than that for me to wipe the haze away from my eyes. It took people saying look at this advertisement, look at this comment, look at this whole notion of life and what it means and see how fucked up it really is. How much we hurt ourselves as fellow humans when we value one gender over another. And it was like a cloud lifting, I began to see the world around me in such a different way. Now it took a while for this to happen and I am still struggling to fight my own biases and misogyny, but I am fighting and I am noticing how my actions and the actions of those around me do affect the whole world. I am beginning to see that we still have a long way to go in fighting to truly create a society that is free from sexism, along with racism and all of the other -isms that we humans like to use to label others.

But I have to say though, that I struggle to consider myself a feminist, truly. I read on a blog (I don't honestly remember which one and it could have been on several) the whole idea that as a man it is hard to define yourself as a feminist. I am uncomfortable with this label for me. First, I generally dislike labels anyway, but this one I really struggle with. I find as a man, the world is still tilted in my favor. I find that I still have many of the advantages and that in many cases, I don't realize till it is too late that I have gained an advantage purely because I am a white male. I do not have the same fears when I am walking down a street late at night as I have heard women express, now part of this is that usually if I am out, I have Logan with me or I am in a very familiar area, but still... I don't have to think about the fact that those who have been in power, and hopefully this will change this year, have looked like me. I don't have to deal with society judging my worth based upon my looks, my weight or the size of my clothing. I am allowed to grow older and have wrinkles and even have my hair turn gray, although I am losing mine, but this is still more acceptable in men than women. I never have to deal with someone blaming my bad mood on hormones or "that time of the month."

And the biggest issue and the one that I guess I think about most is that I never have to worry about my reproductive rights. As a male, I am encouraged to reproduce and there is no negative stereotype attributed if I have had a lot of sexual partners, which I haven't, but still. I also can never get pregnant and so i do not have to worry about whether I would have an abortion or not. Now this does not absolve me of any responsibility, in fact I think, it means I have more responsibility. As I have to be able to be responsible for my own actions and not cause my partner to feel as though she has to make this decision. I would be there for my partner, but I have felt for a while now that as a male, my job in this debate is to help to support my partner. It is not my body hence I cannot and should not tell you what you can and cannot do with it. This is why I am pro-choice. I am male and so I have NO right to tell you that you cannot make this choice. The whole idea of pro-life as a male makes absolutely no sense to me. How can any man ever tell any women what she can do with her body? Now I would agree that no person, male or female, has the right to tell someone what to do with your body, but as a female at least you have the same "plumbing" and so have some idea, as a male I have no idea and cannot even begin to understand. So, am I a feminist? NO. But I consider myself on the same side.