Aesthetic Snafu

When we got married eighteen months ago, I kept my last name.  In some ways that’s almost the prototypical feminist action, right?

I didn’t change my name and I certainly took advantage of the battles of my feminist fore-bearers.  I get pissed off when friends and family write to me as Kathryn HisLastName and livid when it’s Mrs. HisFirstName HisLastName.

I didn’t change my last name but keeping it wasn’t a feminist act.  I never thought about changing it  because of my father who was passionate about our family history, who took me to see our family’s ancestral home months before he died.  I kept it because it I already owned the family merchandise and pay my clan dues, and because I’d already gotten used to both saying “no, that’s three Ls” and “no, it’s pretty much phonetic and thus not McLenin, McLennan, McLeod, or McLachlan,” and because HisLastName is Jewish and I’d rather have a conversation about why I kept my last name than why I kept my religion.

All of those are great reasons, but they’re not feminist reasons.  I wear my choice with pride and don’t mind that it makes some people think I’m a feminist, because I am, but just because I’m a feminist doing something doesn’t make it a feminist choice.

This is a long way of saying that the second thing I did this morning was to read The Feminist Housewife and the accompaning Jezebel commentary.  It introduces a lot of feminist concerns, that housework and childrearing fall on women even in egalitarian households, that the modern workplace isn’t overly friendly to having families, that woman tend to get screwed by a lot of the workplace anyhow, that childcare can cost one person’s wages.  In these conditions, becoming a SAHM (stay-at-home-mom) is a perfectly fine pragmatic choice, even a preferred one although one that can be fraught with fiscal problems as women unfortunately lose their earning potential.

Although some do, I don’t think that decision makes one a bad feminist or not one at all.  Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do or even what you want to do.  At the same time, it’s not automatically a feminist choice either, even if a feminist is making it, such as our NYMag protagonist.  Just because a woman does something, it isn’t automatically feminist.  It just is, and I don’t hold it against her one way or the other.

This bullshit on the other hand…:  “I feel like in today’s society, women who don’t work are bucking the convention we were raised with … Why can’t we just be girls? Why do we have to be boys and girls at the same time?”

Yes, a woman who calls herself a feminist, who is being called a feminist, just equated having a job with being a boy and staying home, minding the kids as being a girl.  That’s some grade-A bullshit there.  That’s 100% anti-feminist bullshit and I think we should call her on it.  Not on staying home, not on leaving her job, not even on her making a point of massaging her husband’s “work-stiffened muscles,” or that she thinks that maternal instinct is a biological fact, but that she is says such bullshit, on the record no less, and calls herself a feminist.  I know that there are people who hear that and think oh, she hates SAHMs (and men, and leg shaving, and…).

I don’t. I just hate bullshit, especially when it’s be sold as feminism.  Gender essentialism isn’t cute, even if you use boys and girls instead of men and women.   We can’t just be girls, Kelly Makino, because you’ve decided that boys are the ones who work and the rest of us girls over here?  We have fucking jobs.  We’re doctors, teachers, police officers, social workers, bloggers, and yeah, SAHMs.  Stop selling us (and yourself) fucking short.

This is one of those days when I ask myself, “who thought it was a good idea for me to be an expert on the labor market returns of the Chilean educational system?  I don’t even speak Spanish? Or econometrics?”

Spoiler alert! Consistent with the literature, youth orchestras in Curanilahue improve test scores on both the PSU AND the SIMCE(!!!!); the results are both significant and robust.  Who would have ever guessed?  Well, except, you know, the literature.  Lucky for us, and by us I mean academics and I guess me, the literature is nice and never says I told you so.    We should probably send a thank you note, maybe some flowers, or a man in a horse suit who dances and sings some sort of You’re a Good Neigh-bor song.

I am still the most sane person in this coffee shop.  Who thought that that was a good idea?

The woman next to me keeps saying “I don’t trust her.”  I am hoping very much that I am not that particular her, whoever she is.  She should distrust the men on the other side of me who are discussing card counting using their two coffee cups as some sort of very abstract demonstration tool.  Maybe she doesn’t gamble.  That would probably be best.  Maybe I shouldn’t procrastinate.  That too would probably be best.

A week ago you got links and social commentary.  Today, you get a goose. Please enjoy it responsibly.

Update: my client just gave me an extension. Thank god.  I can go back to deleting “Children’s and” in peace and not panic.