Women Love Smartphones

Especially moms. I could’ve been paid truckloads of money to tell these people this simple fact! The reason is that moms love to catch up on email and update their blogs without having to lug a laptop around. One secret of momhood is that there’s a good 75% of what your child is telling you at any given time that is just idle chitchat and you can secretly scan a few headlines or see who texted you with one eye while other makes sure the kiddoo is not bleeding, crying, or in distress with the other. The other 75% of the time you’re waiting on your child. Waiting for him to finish one last swing across the monkey bars. “Five more minutes” of playing with his friends. Waiting for him to use the bathroom. So why not see what your ten thousand best virtual friends are up to? And moms, they are worse than tweens when it comes to Twitter.

So far I have resisted Twitter. It should be called Oversharers Anonymous, and I am OA #1. It’s bad enough that I blog!

I Promised You Bastards, Polygamy, and Deadly Queen Bees

And so you shall have them. But not necessarily in that order.

Or, Fuck You Freud, Part 2. My mama can kick your ass any time.

Hairless Asian Women*

i was intrigued to see an asian woman on the cover of NY Magazine. okay, so she’s holding a bare foot. one that is not her own.

it’s probably a stinky gross one with gnome-length toenails. if it’s not stinky, gross, and with gnome-length toenails, the asian woman probably had something to do with its transformation into a buffed, waxed, and polished extremity.

and, far from kissing it worshipfully–as soon as you leave? she’s gonna make fun of your nasty-assed feet in the back room.

A Mamafesto for the (Un)Common Woman

lately it’s dawned upon me that i’m a Type A hippie. that means i’m 200% to the max hippie, dude.

Chicks Making Flicks

as one of the above-mentioned chicks making a flick, i read this article with great interest. you’ve seen these before; every so often an entertainment/culture rag will have a roundtable discussion about the state of women in hollywood. have they gotten any farther? are there any more than there were 10, 15, 20 years ago?

Fembots, The Twenty-First Century is Calling You

not sure what to do with these fembots from 1948…have them de-programmed, or hire one to cook and clean for me?

Donella Cecrle, 36, spent years in the corporate world, traveling the nation to sell computer software — and far out-earning her husband, Andy. Subservience wasn’t in her vocabulary. Neither was homemaking. Most days, dinner was takeout from the Mexican restaurant down the street, or a quick meal at IHOP.

But about six years ago, the couple worked through a low point in their marriage with prayer and Bible study. Slowly, Cecrle said, she began to realize that she needed to change. When Cecrle became pregnant, she left work for good and now stays home with their two preschool-age children.

In what time she can spare, Cecrle works toward a bachelor’s degree at the seminary. She started this semester with a homemaking course, which Dorothy Patterson, 63, teaches at her dining room table (artfully decorated with sprigs of autumnal berries and curls of pumpkin-hued ribbon).

Cecrle credits Dorothy Patterson’s lectures on God’s vision of womanhood with helping her embrace her role as helper — and restrain her instincts to take charge. “I have to be able to shut my mouth,” she said.

seriously, now, i guess “submitted” christian wives never get divorced, do they? because then they’d be so far off the employment curve, the only work they could get is janitorial/prep cook/childminding in nature.

now this is wrong so many ways it makes my head hurt. it’s wrong to devalue “women’s work,” like housecleaning and raising children, and so on. because it’s damn hard work and valuable, even if poorly compensated in the marketplace.

but it’s also wrong to act as if men never leave, die, or act badly in such a way that no self-respecting woman would stay with that.

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Things That Reassure You of Your Chinese Americanness

Part in the First

I think I’ve done it all–gone through a hyper-political Angry Young Woman phase (coinciding with residence in more-politically-correct-than-thou Berkeley, both town and gown versions). Been confused and oblivious as a kid; flattered (!) when friends said, “I don’t think of you as oriental, I think of you as white.” Felt wearily post-racial as Yet Another Racist Depiction of Us Yellows rears its ugly head and I have only so much raging against the machine left in me. (Actually, it’s the weird fetishization of mass media images as the overdetermining source of identity and stereotype that makes me tired…is there somewhere we live which is not wholly within our tiny spheres or the vast soup of media? Academia, could you move on to some more nuanced critique, maybe?)

So, Things That Reassure You of Your Chinese Americanness Despite Feeling Most Days Like Any Other Tired Mama-Writer-Filmmaker Trying to Make Her Mark

• understand just enough Mandarin Chinese to know that the fast-talking person on the other end of the line calling during dinner is trying to sell you a phone card, long-distance telephone service (to China), or a new mortgage.
• lack just enough verbal Mandarin Chinese ability to scowl at the caller: “I’m on the no-call list and that means ALL telemarketers, xiao jie.” So I hang up–it speaks volumes in any language.
• no shoes inside the house. Cuz shoes, they step in all kinds of crap. Sometimes literally.
• I will wash and re-use ziplock sandwich bags.
• I will spend three hours or more searching for the best deal online to maximize star rating/low price for a hotel.
• I squeeze the produce and thump the watermelons. Pre-bagged produce is for suckers/gwai lo….unless it’s mesclun mix.
• I avoid chinese restaurants where there are an abundance of white patrons/scarcity of chinese patrons, yet I slavishly follow Jonathan Gold’s recommendations. When my LA-livin’ cousin from Singapore doesn’t have any recommendations, that is.
• instead of saving up every plastic bag and marginally re-useable business sized envelope (bonus if the stamp’s not cancelled!) in a version of Immigrant Gen OCD v1.0, I do ABC Gen OCD v2.0, also known as “eco-friendly”: World’s Largest Collection of Brown Paper Grocery Bags, plus Old T-shirts Saved to Wash the Car. I think there’s even a pair of my toddler son’s old clean cotton training undies saved to buff the car as well. The ball made out of rubber bands is where v1.0 and v2.0 overlap.

Stay-At-Home-Mom/Work-Outside-the-Home-Moms

a new tempest in the stay-at-home-mom/work-outside-the-home-mom teacup: linda hirshman’s article in The American Prospect, “Homeward Bound.”

the reader’s digest condensed version:

• “choice” feminism, where well-educated upper middle class women make the overdetermined “choice” to stay at home and raise kids, is in practice regressive in its politics and has potentially bad results for women
• the public sphere has had to accommodate itself to feminism (women in the various professions, etc) but the private sphere has not
• divorce makes it exceedingly likely that previously upper middle class women who abandoned careers will be left substantially impoverished single parents

hirshman suggests 3 Rules to counter those stupid “Rules” that were supposed to help single women get married:

1. Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.

upon exploring her points further, we discover that “qualify for good work” means don’t major in the humanities and social sciences, or do so only at your potential earning peril.

ahem. harumph. says this humanities doctorate. then again, am i bringing home the bacon? not yet.

2. treat work seriously

means don’t have unrealistic expectations of the work world, a sort of “learn to play team sports and take your lumps on the playing field like a man” exhortation. it also means don’t job-hop or use family as a refuge against the slings and arrows of climbing the career ladder.

this i’ll give her. girls cave too easily.

3. don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry

means marry someone younger, a partner in a dependent position (someone foolish enough to be an english major?!), or an older, more established man. if all else fails, marry a liberal man and hold his feet to the fire to make sure he picks up on the second shift too.

this advice seems all over the place. haven’t geriatric dudes been hooking up with fresh young things since time immemorial? what’s so progressive about this? your sugar daddy is likely to be from a PRE-feminist era and probably likes your lack of status, money, and experience in contrast to his. try to be someone substantial around the wrong sugar daddy and often you’ll just get your wings clipped. younger men of late–readers of laddie mags–seem to have gone right back to the 1950s starting with all those stupid cigars everyone seemed to be smoking in the late ’90s. i’d say men who took feminism seriously are probably college grad vintages ’82-’95. any other years and the grapes were likely off. and marrying a liberal man…well, it still takes effort holding feet to fire, doesn’t it?

marriage advice, down to the types of men to go after…sounding more and more like jane austen, isn’t it?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young woman in possession of a brain, must be in want of a wife.

see? not so far off the original after all. make the “wife” a housekeeper or maid or nanny and all’s easy and right with the world. it seems like a crucial blind spot in hirshman’s article that she doesn’t take into account that former high-powered attorneys and what-have-you turned moms most likely do have paid help. so we’ve left the snake’s tail only to find ourselves in the snake’s mouth: only upper middle class women get to stay at home with the kids and have a moment to spiritually or intellectually self-actualize, because they likely have hired help.

now, i cop to hiring someone to clean every so often. that’s only because i follow hirshman’s “virginia woolf” style admonition to let the housework go pretty religiously. i can and have had dust bunnies the size of tumbleweeds under my bed, and so on. i am nobody if i ain’t murdering the angel in the house. while some might be outraged, as i was initially, to discover that Ms. “500 pounds a year, a room of one’s own and a lock on the door” Woolf had a maid AND a cook, i kinda get it. not everyone was born martha stewart. some of us hate her with a passion.

but better than hirshman’s solution, which i think still relies too heavily on liberal humanist-rugged individualist feminism of the upper middle class white woman kind, is to do it ethnic style. yep, my retired in-laws and parents are over at my house cooking, cleaning, tending to the Nubbin, and basically enjoying themselves greatly several times a week. it’s become their job. they get up, bring meal fixings, or sometimes offer to pick up the tab for takeout, and they get to feel purposeful, spend time with their chopped liver kids and genius unique demi-god grandson, and i get several hours a week to do my thing. my parents and in-laws have even come with me on shoots for the doc, to take care of the Nubbin. they are totally amazing.

it’s not if there haven’t been a few bumpy spots, but hey–therapy’s a given. for the Nubbin and us. i like the “it takes a village” solution and i think it can work as long as we’re all reasonably healthy and functioning. it’s probably the one thing i’d add to hirshman’s list of how to be a mom with brain:

get your family on board and close by. don’t try to do it all alone and have a meltdown in your home.

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