Learning to Fly

Lauren has an impressive post on growing up, becoming a feminist, and being determined enough to succeed. DJW at Lawyers Guns and Money follows up with a family remembrance on how feminism shaped his life, and the negative implications of patriarchy for men also. Both very worthwhile reads; in fact, you're better off going there than sitting through this blather. So go.


So, why am I a feminist?

As both of those writers point out, the roots can go pretty deep. My family was lower middle class. I don't remember a time that my mother didn't work, and crappy restaurant/waitress jobs too with lousy hours and shitty pay. Health insurance? ha. You should see my teeth. Barely managed basic dentistry appointments, let alone something esoteric like orthodontia. Us kids were what came to be known later as latchkey kids, and were on our own for a lot of the time. Basic cooking skills and such came pretty naturally.

My father had an opportunity to go to college, but my hometown had always had a strong anti-educational streak inferiority complex developed by being right next to UW- Madison. So he passed, and I always got the feeling that he deeply regretted it. Although he insisted that all three of us siblings get some kind of secondary education, I'm the only one that went through traditional college.

So when I went to college, it was on a wing and a prayer. Couldn't get into UW-Madison because I didn't take the right classes, so I 'lit out for the territories' as it were, scraping together tuition costs through summer jobs, part time jobs, some student loans and a couple of meager grants. And during reagan's happy years, the student loans were reduced every fuckin year; my refusal to acknowledge the man as some kind of Sainted Statesman is through painful personal knowledge of the effects of his happy-go-lucky batshit insane economic policies.

So I managed to get through, and learned to make hard choices because of it. At one point, I had to sell my guitar to make tuition (because student aid was fucked up and wouldn't be in time to make the deadline); one of my friends never really managed to forgive me for that. One summer I lived in Milwaukee upon the kindliness of friends; I didn't have a place to live and couldn't afford one if i did.

The people who tell you that you can work your way through college are idiots, fools, or likely both. I worked every month I was in college, sometimes at two jobs, and never - not once- made enough for tuition, let alone living expenses. This months cut of student aid by Congress is unreasonable and ridiculous, to give tax cuts to people who for the most part have never had to work a day in their lives as hard as I worked through college. It is a cold, callous move to further prevent people form working class backgrounds from improving their lot. And to reiterate what I said above, the members of Congress who voted for that cut know that, or are idiots.

But what does all this have to do with feminism? well, after working through the service sector, seeing the difficulties of women throughout the working world, as well as watching my mother (who eventually got a bookkeeping job) It always just made sense to me that men and women both in the service world deserved a little respect and sympathy for the work they do. And from that, it was just so obvious that men received that respect much more often than women did.

And at home, my parents shared the work as they had to. My father was mostly responsible for the laundry, and had to make dinner a fair amount of the time. Both of them worked together reupholstering furniture. At one point, every piece of furniture in our living room was picked out of the trash, and they re-did it; I lugged a couch around from dorm to college apartment that never cost more than a couple of bucks in fabric. Eventually all of it's legs broke off and I left it in an apartment with bricks holding up the legs.

But then, in college. I wasn't part of a particular social scene, I wasn't in sports, I wasn't in the frats. What were my hopes for dating? hardly any. so as I said, in blatant self interest, it always seemed to me that the more women who decided to ignore traditional mores, and who believed in birth control, the better chances I had. And in a college town like Platteville, with it's dearth of women, that's an important consideration.

After I graduated from college and got my first professional job, I took the opportunity to treat my parents to dinner and tell them that it was their example that gave me the work ethic and determination to get through college, get a Master's degree and thanked them for the things they taught me. I wasn't going to wait until too late, like so many do.

As the stereotypical white guy, I am all too aware of the advantages I did have. I am aware of it because of the difficulties I see others work through. If I had been of a different race, or a woman, I probably wouldn't have managed to persevere through college, that additional obstacle would have been too much.


Interestingly, Amanda at Pandagon responded to these posts here. In the course of her post, she talks about the recent holidays and the male/female divisions of the family. Reflected in it, I can see my parents influences in our family today. Although my parents are gone, at our holiday get togethers, my brothers generally take it upon themselves to do most of the food.

So i guess I've pretty much always been a feminist because it never occurred to me that there was any other reasonable choice. It's kind of as Kurt Vonnegut says when asked why he is a humanist, "Because of the Sermon on The Mount, sir."

The reality is that true gender equality is in the best interests of both sexes and that regardless of the choking and spitting of the patriarchy, and the knee jerk reactionary fits of the Dobsons and the Falwells, history and time are on the side of equality and will eventually win out.