review: How To Be A Woman

Newsflash! Feminism is not fusty, fussy and frowny.  It’s fun, funny and frivolous. After all, ‘it’s a good time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill and we haven’t been burnt as witches since 1727.’ But, as Caitlin Moran, concedes ‘a few nagging questions do remain.’

Indeed.

If the blurb on the back of the book is to be believed, Moran has the answers to the questions that every modern woman is asking. 

After finishing it, I’m not quite so sure. Some of the questions about botox and brazilians seem less like the concerns of ‘every modern woman’ and more like the kind of things you might find posited as ‘issues’ in Cosmo. 

Having said that, I do think it’s great that this book has struck a chord with many girls and women, who have found something of value in it, and have, hopefully, taken up Moran’s call to re-define themselves as ‘strident feminists.’ And if it then encourages them to take a deeper look at the serious, momentous and urgent stuff rather than simply guffawing at an anecdote about getting really drunk with Lady Gaga, then Moran will have achieved a great deal. Several reviews have already welcomed the book in this way, and I think it’s difficult to argue with the positive impact a best-selling book about feminism can have. I myself was interested in her insider's take on how the media construct representations of female celebrities as 'everywomen' (basically, by asking when they're going to have a baby all the time).

Other reviewers have, however, criticised this book because of what they perceive as its inherent snobbery and focus on the mores of a particular social set, likening it to a Victorian etiquette book in the process. More broadly, I think the book reveals the limits of individual memoir as a ground for political action. Memoir gives a writer license to retreat into the authority of subjectivity, so, in Moran’s case, one could be forgiven for thinking that brazilians appear to rate more highly than rape as a feminist issue (although I realise it’s not a zero-sum game and there is a relationship between the two). I found myself torn between interest in Moran’s memoirs - she’s lived an interesting life and spins many a funny yarn about it - frustration at her wanting to make a joke of everything all the time, and exasperation at some of the supposedly empowering solutions she trumpets (burlesque and female-centric porn will set us free apparently. Um, really?) 

Yes, the personal is  political, and (paraphrasing bell hooks) ‘there is no joy in appropriating someone else’s oppression’. The power of consciousness-raising rooted in personal experience is then to elevate it to the structural: ‘I’m only earning half as much as that doofus of guy doing the same job as me’ - ‘me too’ - ‘let’s start a revolution!’ The idea is that even those not directly affected will recognise that ‘there but for the grace of God ...’ 

All the amusing anecdotes and hilarious romps involving lots of booze, Lady Gaga and so on got a bit wearing after a while. I couldn’t help but think that while there was a lot of strategic mileage to be had out of the ‘feminism is fun, dontcha know’ schtick that there was also a disavowal of some righteous anger as well. Women aren’t meant to be angry, so it was disappointing to see Moran, in interviews promoting the book, quickly pointing out that she’s a funny feminist not a scary or awful one. 

Sure, pioneering feminists like the suffragettes might’ve shared some laughs over a gin or three, but they went on hunger strikes, chained themselves to railings, lobbied politicians, and even threw themselves under horses because they were bloody well PISSED OFF at not having the vote and not having the right to own property. Similarly, second wave feminists probably had a rollicking good time at consciousness-raising sessions, protest marches, and speculum parties. But they were also pretty incensed at being poorly paid for their work, being stuck at home with small kids all day while being treated as little more than children themselves, needing male relatives to sign documents for them, being subject to overt sexual harassment as part of daily working life, being unable to decide their own reproductive futures, and, in some cases, being legally raped by their husbands. 

Pretty hilarious stuff, when you get down to it.

And yet, there are other moments when Moran drops the quips that have a quiet power. In the book’s postscript she poses herself the rhetorical question ‘so do I know how to be a woman now?’  Instead of the expected self-deprecation, she writes ‘I distrust this female habit of reflexively flagging up your own shortcomings ... I’m talking abut the common attitudinal habit in women that we’re kind of ... failing if we’re not a bit neurotic.’ Her response to the question instead? ‘Kind of yes, really, to be honest (pp 297-8).’ Not exactly strident, maybe still a little neurotic, but progress nonetheless. 

Where the book is most powerful - and given its theme - most pertinent to this blog, is in the chapters on birth, mothering, not-mothering, and abortion. These chapters are the strongest because the amusing anecdotes and wry asides retreated - but, you’ll be relieved to know, didn’t disappear entirely - to include moments where, to put it bluntly, shit gets real. Particularly confronting was her chapter on abortion, which aimed to show that deciding one’s own reproductive fate is about more than what happens in cases of rape and incest. 

Here are a couple of selections from these chapters:

(on birth): of course, I haven’t told you the half of it. I haven’t told you about Pete crying, or the shit, or vomiting three feet up a wall, or gasping ‘mouth!’ for the gas and air, as I’d forgotten all the words. Or the nerve that Lizzie damaged with her face and how, ten years later, my right leg is still numb and cold. Of the four failed epidurals, which left each vertebra smashed and bruised, and the fluid between them feeling like hot, rotting vinegar. And the most important thing - the shock, the shock that Lizzie’s birth would hurt me so much; would make me an animal with my leg caught in a trap of my own bones, and leave me begging for the doctors to take a knife and cut me free. // For the next year, every Monday at 7.48am, I would look at the clock and remember the birth, and tremble and give thanks it was all over, and marvel that we both survived. (pp 221-2)

(on deciding to have an abortion) This isn’t who I’m going to be again: another three years of being life support to someone who weeps for me, and rages against me, and who knows, when they’re ill, can only be relieved by resting their head on my belly, and dreaming they’re back inside. My two girls ... are all I want .. I’ll do anything for those girls. // But I will only do one thing for this baby - as quickly as I can before it goes any further (p 271)

To me, these stories offer a much more powerful version of the personal is political than the chapters which preceded it. By putting herself out there in this way, Moran really has the potential to speak to other women’s experience and effect change. But that's all a bit po-faced and serious, innit?

In which I have my say ...

This week’s post is a brief one as I have been using my limited mummy-blog time to write a submission to the New Zealand parliament on proposed legislation to extend the current paid parental leave provisions from 14 weeks to 26 weeks. For those in New Zealand, there is still time to make a submission if you would like to. The closing date is 5 October 2012, and a few organisations have made it very easy to submit by drafting short online forms with sample text in support of the extension. All you have to do is add your name and hit send. You can find a non-partisan one at the 26 for Babies campaign website, or one supported by the Labour party on their website. 

My own submission can be found here in PDF format. Feel free to draw on any of the points I make or resources I have used. Personal submissions can be made via Parliament's website.

Thanks!

Normal service will be resumed next week.

La vie en rose?

This morning, the baby - or the toddler, as I should henceforth call her - made a beeline for her one pink top and insisted on putting it on. ‘Oh dear,’ I thought, trying my best not to make it seem like a big deal. ‘It’s started. She’s about to cheerfully undo all my attempts to give her a life in technicolour.’ Teenagers with a penchant for black have nothing on the monochromatic world little girls are encouraged to inhabit these days.

On the way to the supermarket, we stopped at a second-hand toy and book sale. The community hall was bursting at the seams: parents tried to stop their kids running off with toys before they’d paid for them, kids tried to wheedle their parents into just one more toy, and everyone frowned at those foolish enough to wheel strollers through the narrow lanes either side of the trestle tables. Wading through this sea of humanity, toddler long since abandoned somewhere behind me, I couldn’t help but notice by the meerest of glances which stalls had stuff for girls and which didn’t. Three guesses how I managed this feat of deduction? Yep, they contained items that were predominantly pink and glittery. There were pink dolls-houses and wands. Pink tea-sets and vacuum cleaners. Pink phones and tiaras. Gender-stereotyping, what’s that?! 

‘To the books,’ I thought. ‘They won’t let me down!’

I finally found a table that mainly sold books and started thumbing through them. One box was full of ‘girls’ books’.  Without exception, every one was about fairies or princesses or fairy princesses. I felt depressed and, remembering the pink shirt preference of the morning, a little worried. Of course, no-one was forcing me to buy these books, but the fact that there were so many of them all together, clearly intended for another little girl just to love really bothered me. 

It was not always the case that books aimed at little girls so blatantly inhabited the role of fantasy (and not the Tolkien-kind either). ‘When I was a kid’, to wheel out a hackneyed phrase, stories for girls seemed to be dominated by horses and ballet. If you had two X chromosones, you were apparently pre-programmed to dream of Follyfoot or Sadler's Wells. Of course, these were manufactured gender preferences too, but at least they were a bit more real and, more importantly, active. The girls in them had to work hard to succeed at their dreams, they had to do stuff in order to try and be successful - and they didn’t always succeed either. 

Now, it may well be the case that these fairy princess stories are about the one fairy princess who rebels against her royal fairy upbringing and redefines what it means to be a fairy princess - I feel ridiculous even writing that - but, here's my issue, why are they fairy princesses at all? Can’t a girl be rebellious or ambitious or whatever other defence is usually given for stuff like this without first being represented as either an ephemeral imaginary creature or an ephemeral technically-real-but-totally-Disneyfied-to-the-point-of-unreality creature?

I’m starting to get worked up again just thinking about it.

You may well think, ‘where’s the harm’?  It’s only toys and books, no-one’s forcing you to buy them, and your daughter may well totally love these kinds of books when she gets older and then what will you do? And, anyway, it’s it only natural for little girls to like this stuff?

Well, no, it isn’t. And that’s the problem.

Recent research by neuroscientists such as Cordelia Fine and Lise Eliot has shown that there are some small sex differences in children’s brains, but that they are not as great nor as 'hardwired' as we are led to believe. Eliot, for example, found after an exhaustive search that there was ‘surprisingly little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains.’ In fact, she found only two that had been reliably proven: boys‘ brains are larger than girls by around 8 to 11 per cent, and that this difference shows up around the onset of puberty when girls‘ brains finish growing about one to two years earlier than boys’.  Before the jokes start coming, she considers this difference to be on a par with boys‘ greater height and weight at birth and in adulthood (Pink Brain, Blue Brain, p 5).

So little girls aren’t pre-progammed to like fairy princesses after all? Woohoo! But then why do so many of them seem to gravitate towards it?

The obvious answer is money. Pink items are aggressively marketed at young girls who then use their pester power to wear down even the most intransigent of parents. How cunningly simple to gender everything so parents will have to shell out twice if they have children of each sex. In Cinderella Ate My Daughter, journalist Peggy Orenstein describes the sheer magnitude of gendered merchandise on offer: 

The annual toy fair at New York's Javits Center is the industry's largest trade show, with 100,000 products spread over 350,000ft of exhibition space. And I swear, at least 75,000 of those items were pink. I lost count of the myriad pink wands and crowns (feathered, sequined and otherwise bedazzled) and infinite permutations of pink poodles in purses. The Disney Princesses reigned over a new pink royal interactive kitchen with accompanying pink royal appliances and pink royal pot-and-pan sets (though I would have thought one of the perks of monarchy would be that someone else did the cooking). There were pink dinnerware sets emblazoned with the word princess, pink fun-fur stoles and boas, pink golf clubs, sleds, tricycles, bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles and even a pink tractor. Oh, and one pink neon bar sign flashing "live nudes" .... "Is all this pink really necessary?" I asked a bored-looking sales rep hawking something called Cast and Paint Princess Party. "Only if you want to make money," he said, chuckling. (Read more here) 

Fine, but I’ve also seen plenty of hand-knitted, hand-carved and hand-painted things to think that this isn’t only about the dollar. It seems a bit of a coincidence that the profusion of pink fairy princess products exploded in the 1980s, around ... oh ... the same time as mainstream culture mounted a backlash against second-wave feminism (detailed magnificently by Susan Faludi in Backlash: the Undeclared War Against Women way back in 1991 and, more recently, picked up in respect of the ideology of intensive mothering in Douglas and Michaels’ The Mommy Myth).

Eliot’s research offers insight here too. Her main field of study is plasticity, which is premised on the fact that the brain actually changes in response to its environment:

Simply put, your brain is what you do with it ... Learning and practice rewire the human brain, and considering the very different ways boys and girls spend their time while growing up, as well as the special potency of early experience in moulding neuronal connections, it would be shocking if the two sexes’ brains didn’t work differently by the time they were adults. So it’s all biology, whether the cause is nature or nurture (Pink Brain, Blue Brain, p 6).  

Putting on my best conspiracy theory hat, I can’t help but think then that there’s something going on when little girls are being bombarded with fairy princesses and pink irons and glittery plastic high heels with precious little else to relieve it. Namely, that patriarchy is insidiously working to disempower women from birth. And when people shrug and say it doesn’t matter, or it’s only natural, it’s sending a message loud and clear - whether it’s meant intentionally or not - that this is what little girls should like and be like. And, that one day, not too far away, this is what they will as women become (well, not actual fairy princesses, but you get the idea). Pinkification of girls can also be considered potentially damaging to little boys as well, as it defines extremely narrow notions of femininity and the ways in which girls and women should be treated because that’s what they like / are like. 

And yet ... what about agency? After all, nobody has to totally follow the cultural script that is written for them, and that applies to both parents and children.

As with most things these days, my toddler is showing me the way. She may have opted for a pink t-shirt this morning (maybe she was sick of getting mistaken for a boy too), but once we got to the sale she made a bee-line for the first thing that grabbed her attention: a blue wind-up car.

Maybe we’ve got a little while to go yet before Cinderella comes knocking. 

The milk of human kindness?

Kate Middleton’s breasts are not the only ones being pawed over in the media at the moment: mothers are copping it too.  

Breastfeeding appears to be the latest beat-up of mothers in the media. Hardly a day goes past, it seems, without some story or other about mothers and what they do with their breasts. Some cite mothers who sing the praises of breastfeeding, others tell of the stories of mothers were made to feel bad for not being able to breastfeed. Some articles push the ‘breast is best’ message, while others opine that sometimes breast is not best after all and most mothers don't even met their own breastfeeding goals. Some articles even carry opinion polls: did you breastfeed and are bottle-feeding mothers vilified? As if they are a disinterested party, newspapers also observe that the breastfeeding debate has 'gone sour'.

Of course, there’s those celebrity breasts too: Jessica Simpson is apparently addicted to breastfeeding while others proudly and publicly trumpet their plans to do it . Even Posh Spice, fourth time round, breastfed, describing it as ‘heaven’. 

And, a few months ago, the media struck gold: a seismic backlash and counter-backlash over an anti-smoking advertisement (which was not actually about breastfeeding at all) featuring a celebrity father who was bottle-feeding his young child. The furore over this one seemed to leave everyone reeling: bottle-feeding mothers, breastfeeding mothers, breastfeeding advocates, and fathers who wanted to be involved in the care of their babies. 

This explosion of stories about breastfeeding seems to me less about what is best for children (and way way less about what is best for women), and more about divide-and-rule - just like it is with artificial divisions created between stay-at-home-mothers and working mothers. The reality is that many women both breastfeed and bottle-feed:  one mother I know principally breastfed her children, but, as a full-time working mother, also supplemented with formula. Other mothers I know who were unable to continue breastfeeding, persevered for several weeks to try and give their babies the benefits of breastmilk, then switched to formula, so their babies didn’t, y’know, starve. Others breastfed for several months, but switched to formula before the magical 12-month mark either because they just couldn’t take it any more or their doctor advised stopping breastfeeding for the sake of their own health. Some women also formula-feed from birth, while others exclusively breastfeed and continue breastfeeding until their children choose to self-wean. Breastfeeding, like so much else when it comes to mothering, is a spectrum not a monolith.

Society remains deeply conflicted about women’s breasts. While public health officials, following the guidelines of the World Health Organisation, push exclusive breastfeeding for at least six months as the ideal, ‘the public’ are reportedly and repeatedly squeamish at the sight of a woman baring her breasts in public and latching a baby or young child on to them. Images, such as that on a recent Time cover of a woman breastfeeding her toddler, which generated a great deal of comment and controversy, are considered beyond the pale. 

Mothers therefore seem to be getting some pretty mixed messages about breast-feeding: do it at all costs to the exclusion of everything else but don’t even think about continuing past about eighteen months because that’s just plain weird.

Hmmm ... okay. 

Meanwhile, the actual women on the other end of those much-handled breasts are given pretty short shrift. Some report being made to feel like bad mothers if, for whatever reason, they can’t or won’t breastfeed. While others who want to breastfeed their children for as long as the children want it are labelled as freaks and even child-molesters. Those who advocate breastfeeding and want to support mothers establish feeding, are frustrated by extreme depictions of their work (some advocates are even described using references to Nazism and Islamist fundamentalism. I mean, really? Just because they think breastfeeding is best and want to try and help women feed their babies?) 

Yet another example of women caught in an impossible and contradictory double-bind that means all women fail situation. How unusual.

I have to say, even some feminists are uncertain about what it all means, and have debated whether breastfeeding is feminist or not. Some consider that it is, while others confess a deep ambivalence, and still others contend that formula-feeding has been an important development in freeing women from biological servitude (though if you want to breastfeed that’s okay too). My own feeling is that this is entirely the wrong question to be asking. Breastfeeding in itself is neither feminist nor unfeminist: supporting women to make the best choices they can for themselves and their families in the circumstances in which they find themselves is.

I personally breastfed for a just over a year, and have never used formula. But here’s what I had going for me in order to make that ‘choice’: 

• the physical ability to do so
• a baby who seemed to know how to latch on properly herself (and not all of them do)
• no severe side-effects such as cracked nipples or mastitis
• no other disability or illness that would affect my ability to breastfeed
• a baby with a good appetite who took to solid food well, meaning that breastfeeding became much less time-consuming after about 8-9 months
• a supportive husband, who got the baby up for every feed during the night, and, recognising the toll it took both physically and emotionally, stepped up and took on other domestic jobs
• a decently-paid job from which I could choose to either take a long period of parental leave in order to focus on the baby or return to work and have breastfeeding breaks, privacy to breast feed and/or pump milk.

All that support notwithstanding, I’m not sure I would share Victoria Beckham’s view that it was ‘heaven’.  Here’s how I felt about it: 

• pleased I could do it, especially after a difficult birth that didn’t go at all the way I thought it would
• bored at being stuck in one place while the baby fed for up to 90 minutes at a time 
• resentful at being the only one who could do it
• worried that the baby wouldn’t gain enough weight (health authorities might push you to breastfeed but with their obsession with weighing them, particularly in the early days, it can send a message that breastfeeding isn't very reliable)
• a sense of duty and obligation that if I could do it I should

These are probably not the noblest reasons for breastfeeding, but I’d be lying if I said that I loved it every single minute of every single day. And I think the media and wider culture does all mothers a disservice to perpetuate sentimental and misleading ideals about breastfeeding. I don’t see how it will encourage more mothers to breastfeed if there is not also some honesty about what it takes to do it: time and a lot of patience, support (from partners, families, health workers, and the wider community), understanding, societal structures and practices that can accommodate it, a little bit of luck, and, yes, knowing there is a formula tin available if it is needed.  

Guess that just doesn't make for an attention-grabbing story though, does it?

on perfection

I’ve been away on holiday for the last week. Yesterday we flew back from sunny warm Brisbane into a howling Wellington gale. ‘It’s great to be back,’ we thought, as the plane heaved to and fro in the strong winds and came dangerously close to flipping over on the tarmac. Landing in Wellington in such conditions seems like taking your life in your hands. 

En route back home, while being herded through Immigration at Brisbane airport, something - or, rather, someone - caught my eye. Walking ahead of us in the line was a youngish woman who had clearly already spent a great deal of money on physical enhancement. Her long unnaturally blond hair tickled her waist, and her tan was a perfectly uniform shade of golden brown. Slender as a rake, her large unmoving bosom defied gravity. Trying not to stare, I wondered, like Seinfeld before me, ‘are they real?’

On seeing this woman I didn’t feel envy, pity, or disgust, or any emotion at all. Rather, I had a quite disturbing sense that she didn’t seem to be really there. She was somehow out of place and out of time, different in kind to the harried women who chased after wilful toddlers, and the teenage girls who fiddled with their mobile phones. Perhaps she was a futuristic android from another planet. Or perhaps I had just watched Bladerunner too recently. Perhaps she was a celebrity that I didn’t recognise.

I have no idea if she was a celebrity. One could argue - though I don’t particularly agree - that it’s part and parcel of a celebrity’s job to look good ergo it’s perfectly okay to have cosmetic surgery and so on. What celebrities are attempting to achieve with all this work is the ability to look good in still photographs. Most of us mere mortals will never interact with the living breathing versions of sculpted celebrities, and the media will attempt to gull us that the photoshopped images we see of people with frozen stretched faces are simply the result of good genes. 

Given the proliferation of various techniques for enhancing, altering and distorting  photographs, one wonders why they bother. Even those celebrities who apparently don’t want all their wobbly bits airbrushed away are subject to the virtual scalpel. Basically, it just costs less in terms of re-touching if the subject matter is relatively ‘flawless’ to begin with.

Seeing the woman at Brisbane airport might have got me thinking about the beauty myth, about objectification, and what it all might mean for raising a daughter.  Instead, however, I found myself thinking about perfection. Both in terms of physical perfection and perfection in mothering. 

Philosophically, the concept of perfection has a complex and even contradictory genealogy - so much so that the greatest perfection is thought to be imperfection. More conventionally, perfection means completeness, flawlessness, the best, even saintly. It is all the things for which we are meant to strive. 

But it is also static and, dare I say it, boring.

If something is hypothetically complete, flawless, the best, then there is nowhere else for it to go; it cannot move.  Which is why perfection also means ‘to bring to an end’.

It is not perfection that is dynamic, interesting and life-affirming, but rather the striving for it. Usain Bolt, for example, strives to run faster and faster, eroding his times by fractions of seconds. But, if a runner ever achieved the impossibly perfect sprint of zero seconds, they would in fact be standing still or running so fast as to appear to be standing still. They would be such a perfect runner that they would not be running at all. 

Thinking about striving for perfection reminded me of media obsessions with dead mothers, which I have blogged about previously. Dead mothers are perfect: they are selfless, endlessly giving, and existed for no other reason than to perfectly nurture their children. There is no way a living woman could measure up to this ideal. How could she? She can breathe, move, think, and speak. Even the once-animated woman being morbidly eulogised in these articles could only achieve perfection by bringing her self to an end. Like the perfect runner, the perfect mother does not actually mother at all.

But even ‘striving for perfection’ is still buying into utopian thinking and the ideology of stasis to some extent. Similarly to the concept of perfection, a utopia is both a ‘good place’ and ‘no place’. To strive for perfection in the form of a utopia is to aim to remove yourself from place and time because you believe another time and place (usually the future) is better. Such utopian thinking, striving for perfection, has been responsible for some of the worst excesses of violence and depravity throughout human history. Perfection can be pretty chilling when you start thinking about it.

What to strive for, then, if not perfection?  Doesn’t that just leave pointless meandering?  Perhaps. Or maybe it means focussing on the here and now rather than wistfully looking back to the past or speculating on potential futures. There’s certainly plenty to be getting on with (she writes, one eye on the living room clutter at her feet ....) Or maybe striving without perfection is like flying into Wellington in a gale: you don’t know if you will get there in one piece or be brought to a premature end, but you still try and land.

So this post isn’t just pointless meandering, I want to finish by returning to the woman at Brisbane airport. I’m a little troubled by the way I have used her as an object of study for this post. True, her attempts at physical perfection have a ‘look at me’ quality to them, but aren’t they also a means of hiding in plain sight, of trying to maintain control and stillness in a world that is chaotic and constantly changing?  It got me thinking about why she wanted to invest so much time and money in trying to look perfect, who she might be, and what her story was.

Wouldn’t that inevitably imperfect story of movement and change, if she would tell it, be more interesting than whether or not she had actually achieved the goal of being a perfect size ten?

'Hello Wembley!'

In September last year my baby was nine months old. We had just come through a rough patch with her waking in the night. I had more or less physically recovered from the birth and was starting to adjust to daily life with a baby. And it was starting to dawn on me that a part of my former life was missing, namely, having my own interests and activities. Last September, I realised that I needed to do something for myself each day. Otherwise, I could go crazy.

Two of the things I liked best to do - reading and writing - were not ideally done with a baby around. Unless of course I was content to read and re-read the collected works of Spot. So I had to find something else to pass the time. That was then I decided to learn to play the guitar. Actually learn it this time, that is. I had tried on two previous occasions to learn it and, after a burst of initial enthusiasm, had quickly let it slip. This time was going to be different. Not least because, as my husband commented, if I was keen for my daughter to learn an instrument in the future, then having had me, rather than just him, role-model that, might help. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

It seemed the perfect solution. I already owned a guitar, a legacy of the last time that I had tried to learn it. I could keep one eye on the fret board and one eye on a crawling baby, as I tried to manipulate my fingers into the right chord shapes. My baby seemed to approve of this plan, and graciously allowed me up to 45 minutes a day to make strange noises with the funny-shaped object. She also liked to crawl over and pat it, leaving trails of smudged tiny prints in her wake. With the guitar sitting up on its base, she’d also happily pluck at the strings and try to eat the plectrum.

Encouraged by her delight at making sounds with her own hands, I kept to my practice each morning. The amount of practice I could do - while not a lot on any given day - did add up over the course of a week. I could soon make all of the basic chords and play some simple songs (i.e. ones with three chords that were not too fast). Over the next weeks and months, I built up my repertoire of songs, upping the difficulty level and aiming to increase the number I knew by heart. 

Nearly a year has gone past, and I still practice every week, although a little less often now that I have returned to work. But, as she is able to amuse herself a little more than when she was a baby, I’m able now to practice for a bit longer when I do. Learning more difficult songs, and trying to play along with them to work out the strumming pattern has increased my enjoyment of the music and made me appreciate in a different way the skill that goes into it.

But why is my new-ish hobby featuring in a blog on feminism and motherhood you may ask? Certainly not to show off - I may be better than I was a year ago, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. And I haven’t even mentioned my singing yet!  Rather, it’s to reflect on how patriarchal constraints work in leisure activities, as well as in work. There are many reasons why I didn’t properly learn the guitar the last two times I tried, and the main one is that I didn’t commit enough time and energy to it.  

But why didn’t I do that?

Part of the reason is because I received over and over the message that, on the whole, girls don’t make the kind of music I like. Their main role is to listen to it, support the guys who play it, and - if they’re really lucky - feature in the lyrics. Sure there are exceptions: in my hometown, for example, there was an all-female band, and a few bands who had one or two female members. The first time I tried to learn the guitar was also the moment more widely when Riot Grrrl received a lot of attention, and - contrary to the retroactive mythmaking - Britpop produced a range of female-fronted and female-dominated bands. But it’s hard not to conclude that these amazing women received such attention because they were (and are) exceptional. As Dr Johnson might have said, ‘a woman’s guitar-playing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’  More conventionally, women are meant to be the object, not the subject of art. Or, put another way, women are supposed to inspire it rather than make it.

Let me give you one example of the kind of gate-keeping that put me off in the first place. 

Feeling very enthused about my decision, I told one of my male friends at the pub one night that I had just taken up the guitar. I thought, mistakenly, that he would be similarly enthusiastic and maybe offer some words of encouragement. Wrong. 

Instead, he said, ‘Give me your hand.’ 

‘Huh?’ I thought. Mystified, I held out my hand. 

Grabbing it, he dug his fingernails sharply into the soft flesh on the tips of my left hand. I looked at his grinning face a bit blankly and wondered what he was doing. 

‘Can you handle this?’ he asked. 

‘Handle what?’ I said.  

‘This,’ he said and dug his fingernails in more sharply. 

‘What are you doing?” I said, snatching my hand away.  

Satisfied to get the reaction he wanted, he said, ‘That’s what you need to handle if you want to play the guitar.’ 

The fingernail test stung a little, but not as much as the clear message that I was trespassing somewhere I didn’t belong. 

Thinking back on this incident, I wish I’d had the wit to say something like ‘Every month my body of its own accord subjects me to way more pain than this could ever be and I cope with it. Do you really think a little bit of temporary isolated pain in my fingertips is going to bother me? Go and shove your sexist bullsh*t.” But I didn’t. And, a little while later, I stopped learning the guitar.

Many years later, a combination of boredom and a new-found appreciation of my physical capabilities, took me back to the guitar. Now in my late ‘30s, I have no illusions about what learning the guitar will lead to, other than some relaxation, enjoyment and another way to interact with my daughter.

And, although I don’t have any strong feelings about whether she should be a musician or not, I want to offer her the chance to make the music rather than simply inspire it.

'by putting them second, you're really putting them first'

This time yesterday I was in the air, flying up the country and back again for work. I really don’t like flying, but needs must, and there I was pinioned to my seat as the plane starting to taxi down the runway. ‘Is it too late to get off?’ I panicked to myself, as the safety briefing started to roll. 

For the third time in as many years, Air New Zealand has changed their safety briefing. I thought the one with the Gin Wigmore track and body-painted otherwise-nude flight attendants was quite clever, the one with the All Blacks less so (not least because of its homophobia) and this one - an animated two-hander voiced by Melanie Lynskey and Ed O’Neill (wtf? Al from Married with Children?) plain odd. Hearing it twice in one day did nothing to improve the so-called jokes either. Still, amongst all the ‘witticisms’, were the usual safety tips: the brace position, location of life-jackets and emergency exits, and instructions for what to do when the emergency masks fall. 

As in most other briefings, you’re reminded to put your own mask on first before helping others. But this time there was more. Accompanied by a staunch cartoon gorilla mum facing down a lion, Melanie Lynskey told us in a jolly voice that ‘in nature, it’s normal to put your children first’ but when the masks come down ‘by putting them second, you’re really putting them first.’

Air New Zealand in feminist motherhood parable shock! As feminist Andrea O’Reilly notes, the commonplace airline instruction to put on your own mask first before helping your children is ‘an appropriate metaphor for feminist mothering. Mothers, empowered, are able to better care for and protect their children.” 

But what does it mean in practice to put your children second, while really putting them first (aside from when putting on masks, that is)?  What does it mean to be a feminist mother and parent?

I recently stumbled across the fabulous blue milk blog on feminist parenting (subtitle: thinking + motherhood = feminism) and was struck by a project the writer had undertaken: canvassing her readers on what they thought made a feminist parent. She set her readers ten questions and received an overwhelming response - mostly from women, it’s true, but also from some enlightened men, and also from a range of different family types. You can read the results of her survey here. 

What I was particularly interested in was her question to parents about how they defined feminist parenting. It struck a chord because I suppose it’s the main thing that I have been trying to figure out for myself with this blog. The full list of responses to that particular question is available here. 

Even from this small selection, respondents to the survey defined feminist parenting in diverse ways. Some saw it in terms of gender neutrality, others saw it in terms of role modelling, or actively critiquing social conventions, others in connecting with other women and parents, others as behavioural, others as an awareness of social relations and the ways in which privilege operates. It got me thinking about the things on the list with which I identified, and how I would define feminist parenting. 

The (unfinished) list that follows is a result of my thinking so far: I was interested to see that some items on the list involved contradictions or balancing acts. Bear in mind too that these are my aspirations for feminist parenting, and on a given day - particularly one preceded by a poor night’s sleep - I usually fall well short:

• role-modelling a ‘strong, capable female figure’ - especially when I don’t particularly feel like one - but also showing that it is OK to be tired, grouchy, and vulnerable sometimes 
• demonstrating that domestic work is not solely women’s work, but is worked shared by everyone in the house (she’s already clocked the ‘daddy broom’, for example)
• trying to have ‘some of it all’ rather than buying into the media constructions of ‘having it all’ or, worse, ‘doing it all’, by carving out time for myself to pursue my own interests
• trying to role-model a feminist relationship, by, among other things, challenging conventional naming practices and thinking about different ways to show family identity for all the family
• challenging gender conventions in regard to femininity while simultaneously trying not to send a message that being female is therefore bad 
• role-modelling the importance of what people think and do rather than what they look like (that’s my excuse for bad hair days and I’m sticking to it!)
• and, as she gets older, I will no doubt be increasingly concerned with the sexualisation of children and trying to counter the incredibly narrow and misogynistic messages that currently circulate in culture about female sexuality, without being repressive.

No pressure then. 

Starting to make this list made me realise that aspiring to feminist parenthood is not a recipe for smugness (as aiming for perfection might be). As one respondent to the blue milk survey wrote:

Feminism has not necessarily made me a better mother. It’s given me ... an alternative, perhaps kinder model for self-critique, instead of worrying about whether the house is clean enough, I’m thinking about whether or not I’ve met my own social or intellectual needs, in order to ensure I’m fulfilled and happy, which in turn makes me a better more resilient, more patient mother.

As the plane left the ground yesterday, and I guiltily left my baby in the care of her father for the day, I felt somewhat comforted by the message ‘by putting them second, you’re really putting them first.’ Because if I want to succeed at being a feminist parent, as opposed to a perfect parent, I need to let go of the idea that it is me and only me who should be responsible for looking after her all day everyday, before everything else always. 

For the duration of the flight, at least.