Sleeping Through Spring - A New Life

I have returned with a new life.

I don't plan on posting a large amount of personal information on this blog. I feel like I have enough people in my life - through Facebook and other, real life venues - that I can adequately vent the often unoriginal frustrations I face. (traffic, red tape at the DMV, etc.)

I reserve my space here on the somewhat anonymous internet to talk about things I feel confidently enough to espouse as the Real Me. This also ties into the name of this blog and me - "Easily Enthused." Because when I discover a topic or issue that I don't feel that I've "got a handle on," I very quickly get enthusiastic about it, passionately arguing and discovering until I feel I've reached a resting place, metaphorically speaking.

This is my area to explore ideas and challenge common knowledge - and that doesn't really have much to do with my day-to-day life.

In the past few months I've been rather engaged in modern feminist movements. As a child and young adult, I was taught and saw the world in a rather post-feminist way. When I bumped heads with some women in the atheist movement regarding "women's voices," I was schooled in pre-conceived my post-feminism arguments were.

Before this time, when I heard some right-winger bashing feminism, they got the eye-roll and hand-wave. Terms like "man-hating" and "Marxist" were discounted out of hand by me.

But this new (to me) face of feminism (especially on the Web) forced me to admit to myself that not only did I have a pop-psy idea of feminism, but it was possible that in my life I had not listened to some people who might've had a good argument because they were dismissive of feminists. If the feminists that they were dismissing were the same radical feminists I'd bumped heads with - well maybe I had to reconsider all points of view.

This prompted me to create this site and to make a concerted effort to better understand modern Feminism. Irony of all ironies - this decision would come right before and as I made one of the most gender-oriented actions of my entire life: getting married (to a woman.)

Simply signing some papers and exchanging loops of metal wouldn't quite be ironic enough, so chance decided that my college-educated and gainfully employed now-wife would also be forced to quit her job and become a housewife (until she could find a new job in our new city.)

This change has some very obvious financial aspects that I won't bring up here: that's nothing new. But both my wife and I came to a startling conclusion after about two weeks of my 9-to-5 absence while she played the role of housewife.

Our relationship (going on 4 years now) has seen every type of stress related to "workload" there is.
At one point she was the college student, and I was the low-income-professional barely scrapping by.
At another, I was the well earning professional while she was off studying abroad in an open relationship.
Most recently, we were both well-earning professionals pampering our cat and spending too much on food that would rot in the bottom of the fridge.
But now, we play the role of well-earning professional and bored-at-home housewife - and it feels so odd.

Our responsibilities have been divided in a very simple way: I pay the bills and bring heavy things upstairs in our 3-floor townhome - she takes care of the cleaning, laundry and most food preparation.

Since I spend most waking hours in my office at work, I had to rely on my wife's opinion of how her day compared to the "working world."

Her response was shocking. I've said that my dream job is Househusband. I love to cook and although cleaning isn't my favorite thing to do, once I get started, I surprise myself at how satisfying it can be.

My wife's response to housewifing has been - mostly boredom. She has time during the day for a nap and she said that once we get into a grove (we're in a post-move mess right now) that the amount of work for her in a day doesn't add up to the amount of time she'll have to get it done. (That would change drastically if we had a child or pet, but we have neither at the moment.)

During a drive, we were discussing it and believe we've come to an answer: appliances. If she didn't have the benefit of the dishwasher, washer and dryer, stove that didn't need to be constantly stoked, etc.... taking care of a house would be a full-time job, and then some.

But as it stands right now - coming from a professional used to working 40+ hours a week, it just isn't. The argument is that second-wave feminism has more to thank from Kenmore than MacKinnon.

Luckily for me, my wife is a post-feminist. She, who graduated from a small liberal women's college after studying American Culture recognizes that her life is not so different from that of men - and certainly not so different that it makes her "oppressed as a class." It's easy for her to be thankful for the hard work of first and second wave feminists and to facepalm the arguments of modern, man-hating Marxist feminists.

I didn't know this (explicitly) before I married her - but I'm not surprised. I know she's smart.

Victim Blaming

This is a short post. Hopefully someone who disagrees with me will pop in and answer this question I have.

How does anyone equate this:
"Wearing provocative/slutty clothing while alone in a bad part of town is an irresponsible thing for women to do."
with this:
"It is OK to rape women who are wearing slutty clothing while alone in a bad part of town."

That's it. Simple question.

I understand it's easy to make a similar jump if you assume bad intent on the part of the original proclaimers.

I assume good faith. When people say that women shouldn't wear slutty clothes, they're grasping at straws trying to change SOMETHING that will prevent it from happening again. The rapist, the one who really deserves the blame, has already disappeared into the night. The only person left is the victim. It's wrong that it works this way - and we should try to discourage it.

And the way to discourage it ISN'T by screaming "VICTIM-BLAMER!" at the person offering the offensive advice. I should know - I was once in that position.

What we should do is to calmly and firmly inform them that clothing has nothing to do with if a woman is victimized like that. It's just not an issue.

"Common sense" tells us that the rich people hopping around in their Armani suits and British coupes should be the biggest victims of robbery and carjacking. But alas, it is not the case. Poor folks are most often stolen from.

I want to admit, up front, that I had a problem with "victim blaming" for most of my life. I used to blame the victim. Until the day my car got "broken" into and my GPS unit and CDs were stolen. I complained on Facebook and was blamed for leaving my car unlocked. When I talked to the police they actually chuckled at me when I admitted I had left my car door unlocked. (It wasn't on purpose, I had arms full of groceries and forgot to go back out to lock the car after bringing them in.)

Eventually I realized victim-blaming is in no way limited to rape.

But just a few days ago I found the cure to victim-blaming. It was called "research." In all my life, no one ever took the time to show the evidence that what women wear is not correlated to their chances of sexual assault. But no, they decided to simply call me a victim-blamer and assume bad faith rather than uninformed ignorance. Pity for them and me. But mostly them.

Dan Savage Was Not Annoying

I've always thought that one should point out when people you normally disagree with get something right.
Quiet Riot Girl has an ongoing series of posts titled "Dan Savage is Annoying" that I'm quite fond of. I never really liked Dan Savage - and although I think he gives good advice, generally, there was something about him that I didn't like. I assumed that it was latent homophobia or something. I was happy to find that another progressive didn't like him.
So, when Dan was asked this question at Cornell University - I thought I knew what he was going to say.

Cornell professor Ritch Savin-Williams said in the New York Times that he's concerned that it's not about gay youth, but about gender-atypical kids. Is the "It Gets Better" campaign too narrowly focused?

I expected Dan to say that because gender-atypical straight kids were straight that they would be OK and didn't need the reassurance that the "It Gets Better" campaign afforded them. But no, he did a good job here. In fact, he pointed out that their campaign misses out on a key of their demographic (gay kids who can pass for straight) and still didn't denigrate the experiences of the straight-yet-gender-bullied tomboys and sissies out there.

In high school I scored very low on the hetero score among the guys in my school. I didn't play any of the sports that mattered (the ones ending in -ball), I enjoyed acting in drama and never dated any of the girls from my school. One year, a guy in my English class showed the determination to call me "fag" whenever he referred to me - for weeks on end. He said it out loud, often within earshot of the teacher. "Good job on your paper, fag." "I'm not gay." "It's OK if you're a fag, fag. You can be comfortable in your faggotry around me." (This boy is now a minister at a Southern Baptist church in Virginia. I Googled him.)

You might be asking why the teacher never called him out on this. Well, she was a closeted lesbian. If she had written up the pastor's son (did I mention that) for sexual harassment of another male student - well I don't think it would've been good for her career wise. One day she asked me to stay after class. She wanted to let me know that if I was gay, that I shouldn't be ashamed, or hate myself or anything. This was too much for me. I looked her straight in the eye and said "I'M. NOT. GAY!"
Her attitude towards me changed very quickly. She had no problem with me enduring slurs - as long as I was straight. Maybe she lumped me in with all those homophobic rednecks in Appomattox. Maybe she liked to see infighting amongst the "enemy." Maybe she didn't believe me.

Either way, Thanks Dan, for getting it right.

And if anyone is wondering why I got so angry at being called "gay" if there's nothing wrong with being gay - let me put it this way:

If you own an empty hotel and someone keeps putting up a "no vacancy" sign on the lawn, wouldn't you be more than a little pissed?

Attention Deficit Disorder

A.D.D.

Attention Deficit Disorder. I have this disorder. I was diagnosed with it when I was 12 years old - about the same time that the disorder was first being recognized by the medical community.

Pre-diagnosis (and pre-"treatment") I was a C or D student. I would study, pre-test, and pop-quiz myself with the help of my totally (even overly) attentive mother. It never did any good. She tried so hard.

One day, my mother read a magazine article and she took me to Duke University for "free" testing for a newly diagnosed disorder "Attention Deficit Disorder" that my mother was convinced I had. For me, a 11-year-old who was massively unpopular (for numerous reasons, including my yankee accent or my lack of academic or athletic skills) I looked forward to this chance to escape from school. I HATED school.

This was the summer between 5th and 6th grade when I went down to Duke. I am pretty sure I was down there for only 2 or 3 days. I only have a handful of memories from my time there, being tested, but two stand out:

1. Looking at an illustration of an squiggling lines - then being shown 3-4 sets of squiggling lines and being told to select the one that looked most like the first set.

2. Being told to navigate a metal pencil down a narrow set of lines on a piece of paper. I was told I could take as much time as I pleased.

There were a dozen or so other tests, but I don't remember the details of them. I do remember all of my tests taking place in a small room with a rather large mirror along one wall. I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but the senior Duke doctors in charge of the study as well as my mother were in that one-way-mirror room watching me take all of my tests.

In fact, the only time I remember acknowledging the mirror was as I was taking the "squiggly line test" where I tried to memorize a page of squiggly lines and point it out when the page was turned. If I recall correctly, I had gone through the first 6 or so pages of "spaghetti" without error, and I had made each decision in a matter of seconds. It all seemed really easy to me.
My main distinct memory of this test came as I quickly pointed out the last plate of spaghetti (unbeknown to me CORRECTLY) and my test-taker looked at me with bug-eyes and then shifted her gaze to the mirror. It was the first hint I got that there were people behind that mirror watching what I had been doing.

Eventually the tests were over. My mother and I returned home and I resumed my 6th-grade summer activities.

Before school started the next year my mother attempted to explain to me that the Duke University doctors had determined that I had A.D.D. (but not A.D.H.D.) and recommended "Ritalin" as a treatment medication. I was soon put on the medication -- twice a day at 8 a.m. and noon.

Seventh grade held a number of changes for me. I was now thrust into the multiple-classroom setting, where I moved from classroom to classroom during the day, rather than sitting in the same class all day long.

Eventually the first semester of my first medicated year went by - my interim report came home. It read As and Bs -- not a C, D or F to be found.

I am not going to venture a guess as to my parents' thoughts regarding my grades at this time. Suffice to say that I came home to warm encouragement and enthusiasm.

It obviously appeared to be a miracle drug. "TURN A C-D STUDENT INTO AN A-B STUDENT!"

But things weren't that simple. Living the Ritalin life was hard. For some reason it 'reset' my ability to "get" jokes. Sitting at the lunch table caused my funny bone to break. It took years for me to be able to understand A=B=C to make funny comments.

But in the meantime I was getting top grades, and what parent could complain? So I graduated and went to college thankful for my GPA and my recommendations.

What I didn't realize was that my disfunction would follow me after I graduated college and went on to the "real world."