Posts by Ashley:
- Beyonce
- Carrie Underwood
- Kelly Clarkson
- P!nk
- Tina Fey
- Amy Poehler
- Courtney Love
- Lady Gaga
- Ellen
- Whitney Houston
- Jane Lynch
- Jennifer Lawrence
- Emma Stone
- Zooey Deschanel
- Anne Hathaway
- Queen Latifah
- Kate Winslet
- Demi Lovato
- Wanda Sykes
- Mindy Kaling
- Tavi Gevinson
Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival: 9th Edition
April 4th, 2013The 9th Edition of the Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival is now posted! Check it out!
We need hosts for future editions, so if you are interested, contact me or leave a comment!
Gendered Dogs
March 19th, 2013I think you all probably know by now that I am very conscious about gender in almost every aspect of my life. I mean, I am the type of teacher that prefers to call a group of students “y’all” because I don’t want to say “you guys.” I’ve taught my students about gender differences in the way they are treated at school and out in the world. This year, I’ve also taught about vitctim-blaming, gaslighting, and how we market toys to kids. I think my gender-conscious resume is pretty well stocked.
One of my students was using an article titled “The Trouble with Bright Girls” by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. In it, it states that we as a society treat our bright girls differently than we do our boys:
Researchers have uncovered the reason for this difference in how difficulty is interpreted, and it is simply this: more often than not, bright girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice.
How do girls and boys develop these different views? Most likely, it has to do with the kinds of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children. Girls, who develop self-control earlier and are better able to follow instructions, are often praised for their “goodness.” When we do well in school, we are told that we are “so smart,” “so clever, ” or ” such a good student.” This kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness, and goodness are qualities you either have or you don’t.
Boys, on the other hand, are a handful. Just trying to get boys to sit still and pay attention is a real challenge for any parent or teacher. As a result, boys are given a lot more feedback that emphasizes effort (e.g., “If you would just pay attention you could learn this,” “If you would just try a little harder you could get it right.”) The net result: when learning something new is truly difficult, girls take it as sign that they aren’t “good” and “smart”, and boys take it as a sign to pay attention and try harder.
I find that this is probably very true of my students. They have been treated so differently – and continue to be throughout high school. As a result, it is much more likely that I see a girl completely give up and never turn it around, but I see boys fluctuate between good work and bad work all the time.
Now, this is anecdotal and not researched evidence, but that doesn’t matter because my students are not what made this article interesting to me. What made it interesting is how it made me think about how Tim and I treat our dogs.
Our first “born,” Penny, is an incredibly bright terrier mix. She is a wonderful, loyal dog who is full of energy and needs constant mental stimulus. I’m also almost positive that she understands literally every word I say to her, so when she doesn’t do what we want her to do, we are almost positive that she is willfully disobeying. She is definitely our “bright girl.”
Her younger “brother,” Bailey, is a lazy, cuddly beagle. He is perfectly happy sitting in an entirely different room than the pack, either staring wistfully out the window (and occasionally howling at passersby) or sleeping on his favorite blanket. His laziness sometimes comes off as unintelligence because he doesn’t ever quite get what we’re asking him to do. In these instances, instead of the expression of overt defiance that Penny gives us, Bailey’s expression looks more like, “Huh?”
With Penny, we often treat her as if she either gets a command or she doesn’t. If she does, she’s a “good girl.” If she doesn’t, we get a little frustrated. With Bailey, we often treat him as if the effort is the thing we are looking for. If we tell him to come to us and he makes it halfway, we praise the initial decision to follow the command, not necessarily the follow-through.
Now, you could argue that we do this because our dogs are so incredibly different and, therefore, require different training. Terriers are inherently very smart and quick to learn. Beagles, on the other hand, are notoriously low-energy. It’s possible that, if Penny were a male and Bailey were a female, we would still be treating them as we do now because of our breed, but what if we are treating them differently because this is the way we have been socialized to treat boys and girls?
I’ll never know the answer to this question, but it does make me think about how we will one day raise our child. Will we inadvertently treat him or her differently based on his or her gender, or will we be able to overcome that and encourage effort and success regardless of gender?
Only time will tell, but it definitely is food for thought.
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Linksplosion: Day Off Edition
March 4th, 2013I had a freebie day off today. A freebie day off is when you are pretty much the only person you know who has the day off. Everyone else is at work, so I stayed home, ate copious amounts of junk food, drank tea all day, and tackled a ton of stuff. I went grocery shopping, got a healthy meal in the slow cooker (vegetable barley soup, FTW!), did the laundry (seriously, I even washed my decorative pillow cases), caught up on the internet, submitted an article I’ve been working on for a long time to a major news outlet (fingers crossed…), wrote two more articles for other places and pitched a fourth somewhere else. Needless to say, I’ve been busy today, which is why I love freebie days off. I can get so much done (and eat so much food)! Oh, and did I mention I sat around in my leggings and neon socks with my hair in a crazybun all day? Well, I did.
I truly had every intention of writing a legit blog post today, but now I find I’m writing-ed out after doing all that writing for those other places, which happens often, and is why I’ve neglected this poor site this year. So, instead, I’d like to share with you a bit of what I’ve been reading today as I’ve been catching up on the internet. Enjoy!
How do you get teenagers to think feminism is cool? by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter
As far as we’re concerned, the jury’s still out as to whether or not the word itself needs, to slip into publicity speak for a moment, a “rebrand”. We certainly know from what young women are telling us that “feminism” is a dirty word, for a variety of reasons, perhaps most significantly because it’s “angry” it’s not “sexy” or “feminine”. Young women also expressed the feeling that feminism wasn’t really “for” them – that it was too complex and alienating and that they didn’t have the correct terminology. If you’ve read anything else we’ve written then you’ll know that we don’t see anger or verbose pomposity as effective recruiting tactics, but we need to go further than this and try and think about ways in which we can get young women thinking about gender inequality.
Infertility and a wedding: what if I can’t have children? by Anne
Six pregnancies and seven miscarriages later (one set of twins) we find ourselves facing the very real possibility that I simply can not carry a child to term. Three months seems to be average, though one pregnancy was lost at five months.
This opened up a whole host of questions. What if I can NEVER have a baby? What if he leaves me because I can’t have children? What if he doesn’t leave me but then is unhappy forever? What if we adopt? What if we try IVF? What if we decide to not have children, but end up feeling like we never fulfilled part of our lives? What if I can’t be happy without a baby? What if adoption/IVF is too expensive? If I do manage to get the money together, would it be more sensible to “buy” a baby or a house? What if buying a house means I can’t afford to adopt?
Reasons Girls Are Encouraged to Fail – and How to Change This by Regina Barreca, Ph.D.
Girls are often encouraged to retreat. They are permitted to demur and back away from their goals. So they bite their nails, they diet themselves into near invisibility, they cry behind closed doors.
What a waste.
When asked to explain exactly why they are reluctant to describe themselves as ambitious, my female students reply that if they seem too eager to get the “A” or to be elected to run some university office, they might lose friends. They will be regarded as ruthless. “I don’t want to claw my way to the top,” a sophomore told me. “I don’t want to seem arrogant,” said another. “I’m no better than anybody else” said a third. These are all dynamic, smart, and diligent students, none of whom wants to be called a “winner” in public because she thinks it might hurt somebody’s feelings.
Golden lads and girls all come to dust: School shootings and gender in a violent America by Sally Campbell Galman
Katz writes that “if a woman were the shooter, you can bet there would be all sorts of commentary about shifting cultural notions of femininity and how they might have contributed to her act,” but because the shooters are male, and US culture is notorious for its lexical inadequacy around male privilege or hegemonic, violent masculinity, the male shooter goes ungendered. These are men and boys conducting mass killings aimed at mostly women, children and occasionally other men. In the frenzied gun control discussions that followed Newtown, one man-on-the-street commentator observed that school shooters choose schools as targets instead of, say, police stations because of the concentration of guns at police stations. He was implying that schools are targets for the simple reason that there are typically no armed people there. The obvious logical problems with that argument aside, it seems instead that men with guns who are interested in killing multiple women and children mostly choose places that are full of women and also usually children as well. And what location more feminized than a school? The man in this case didn’t go to a shopping mall, or a dentist’s office, or to the zoo or a park. Instead, he went to a primary school. While we can’t know the mind of the man responsible, it is reasonable to say this was not serendipitous, but by design.
How to be an Ally: A Guide for Teachers & Other Adults by Alice Wilder
And if something does happen? I won’t be able to do anything. I will go to my next class and raise my hand a little less often than I usually would because I am focusing on keeping myself calm. I am focusing on helping my body feel safe. I am not focusing on Hamlet or geography. Later I might call my sister or friends to talk about it, but that doesn’t help me in the moment. My friends and I often talk about this feeling of isolation. After one of us deals with something, we often feel as if we are alone in our corner outside the cafeteria, left to try and help each other survive the day. We sprawl over the sidewalk and trade stories and advice. But often, it isn’t enough.
Photo Credit: RambergMediaImages
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Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival 9th Edition: Submissions Open!
February 28th, 2013The Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival is now accepting submissions for the 9th edition on Women in Art! Check here for more information, and get your posts in! The deadline is March 15!
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Feminism for a Younger Generation – #femfest Day 2
February 27th, 2013
Today, I am responding to the #femfest day two questions at fromtwotoone.com. The questions are as follows:
What is at stake in this discussion? Why is feminism important to you? Are you thinking about your children or your sisters or the people that have come before you? Or, why do you not like the term? What are you concerned we’re not focusing on or we’re losing sight of when we talk about feminism? Why do you feel passionately about this topic?
To participate, write a post and link up here!
Feminism is vitally important to me as a human being, a woman, a teacher, a friend, a sister, a daughter, a wife. Feminism has given me a voice, a vote, a reason to hang up the apron, a way to work and have a husband and have kids should I choose to do so. Feminism has given me a choice.
I don’t mean that feminists have given me all of these things in the literal sense, though that is also true. What I mean is that the knowledge of what feminism is has empowered me to better understand my choices, and to make choices I would not have otherwise made.
To that end, feminism is important for me, but it is vital for my students. I am reminded of an article I wrote last year, “Personal Connections Empower Students”:
I stood in front of the class, introduced myself and told them a little bit about myself: I’m married, we have a dog, I like to cook—the usual. After this, they had to fill out a form and put my name on it, so I wrote it on the board: Ms. Samsa. A hand shot up in the air.
“But I thought you were married,” the student called out.
“I am,” I responded.
“So shouldn’t you be Mrs. Samsa?”
I told the class that I didn’t change my name when I got married, and I briefly explained the difference between Miss, Ms. and Mrs. Then, I noticed a hand raised in the back of the room. It belonged to a girl who hadn’t said a word all day. I called on her and she paused for a second to search for just the right words before asking, “You have a choice to keep your name when you get married? I didn’t know that.”
My students have the choices and empowerment feminism has given every woman since the movement started, but what good are those choices if they don’t know about them? Just as my feminism has evolved over time, theirs must, too, and it starts with being made aware of the fact that they don’t have to blindly follow societal norms. They don’t have to change their names or have babies or even get married if they don’t want to, no matter who tells them otherwise.
If I can teach one girl the importance of the choices they have – the choices feminism has allowed them to have – I will consider myself successful.
Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival, 8th Edition: Feminism & Love
February 27th, 2013
I’m very excited to be hosting this month’s Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival! This month, we are talking about Feminism and Love, and what better time to do it than the shortest, coldest month of the year the month that holds Valentine’s Day, a day to celebrate love and relationships?
This month, we have many different interpretations of love. From being afraid of marriage to the difficulties of the first year post-nuptials, from babies to name changes, from music to dating, we’ve got it all. So, without further ado, I present to you, the 8th Edition of the Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival:
from two to one presents Why I Submit to My Husband posted at from two to one, saying, “I submit to my husband. My husband submits to me. We mutually submit to one another.”
Carrie presents Anders and the Altoid: A Story for Our First Anniversary posted at Don’t Be Afraid to Open Your Eyes, saying, “My favorite story about the wedding is about an event that I wasn’t around to witness.”
Tori presents What’s In a Name? posted at Anytime Yoga, saying that this is what happens “when folks measure my commitment to my partner by my last name.”
Ashley presents Reclaiming Wife: The First Is The Worst posted at A Practical Wedding, saying, “For the longest time after my wedding I was embarrassed every time anyone asked me archly, “So, how’s married life?” What was I supposed to say to that? That it was horrible; that within the first week of our marriage I was half-wondering if it was too late for an annulment; that we had each declared that if we’d known what it would be like, we wouldn’t have married each other because it was so completely different from what we expected?”
Debbi Pless presents Growing Up Is Hard to Do (Girl Meets World) posted at Kiss My Wonder Woman!, saying, “Topanga is my role model. And I have to say that I wonder what will happen when we get see into her marriage, thirteen years down the line.”
Ashley Lauren presents Tension Can Be Fun, but Relationships are Too posted at Small Strokes, saying, “What I love about this trend is that it shows that important, long-term relationships can take center stage and that they don’t end the show but rather add another layer to it.”
Emilie Littlehales presents Let’s Give Engagement Rings New Meaning posted at Role/Reboot, saying, “the only way to combat the sexist tradition behind engagement rings is to strip them of their original meaning.”
Danielle presents Epiphany & Adoption into God’s Family posted at Prodigal Magazine, saying,”It shouldn’t make sense to further exploit the most vulnerable in society for political gain.”
Jamia presents Looking Back on Love posted at Rookie, saying, “How Lenny Kravitz brought out the worst in me, and the best.”
Ashley Lauren presents I’m Not Ready for Babies, And That’s OK posted at Small Strokes, saying, “I am 100% sure I want to have kids. I am also 100% sure I don’t want to have them now.”
Leah Sipress presents Being an Educated Housewife is Possible posted at The Broad Side, saying, “I don’t understand why it is that people assume that because one is educated that they must be an economically active member of society.”
Sarah presents Scared Beyond Belief, Thrilled Beyond Dreams posted at A Practical Wedding, saying, “I recently became engaged, and my fiancé Mark is truly the man of my dreams. Except at night, in my actual dreams. In those he’s kind of a jerk.”
Elizabeth Spiers presents Why Developing Serious Relationships in Your 20s Matters posted at Medium, saying, “Now is the time to live!”
This concludes our carnival. Stay tuned for information about next month’s carnival. In the meantime, get your posts on feminism ready and submit them here, and you can find more information about the carnival here.
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Feminism evolves, or, at least, it should – #femfest Day 1
February 26th, 2013Today, I am responding to the #femfest linkup on loveiswhatyoudo.com. The questions are as follows:
What is your experience with feminism? What’s a story or a memory or a person that you associate with that word? Why does it have negative or positive connotations for you? How do you define the term, either academically or personally? What writers have you read whose definitions you want to bring out? Or, if you don’t have a definition, what are some big questions you have?
To participate, just write a post answering these questions and link up here!
Students like to ask me when I knew I was a feminist, or what made me become a feminist. I would love to have a straightforward answer for them, but the truth is, I don’t. There isn’t one true moment that made me a feminist. I read stories all the time about the “click” moment that women have had that have made them a feminist, but I don’t have that moment.
The truth is, I’ve been a feminist my whole life. My mom is a feminist, and she raised me to be a feminist, as well. She told me when I was a very young child that she wished she had kept her name when she married my dad, so I kept my name when I married my husband. She caught me giggling about a celebrity who had come out, and asked me why it was funny, setting me firmly on a path toward tolerance and acceptance.
To be sure, I didn’t know the word “feminism” until I was much older, but it never really held the awful connotation for me that it does for some women. I don’t think I’ve ever said, “I’m not a feminist, but…” There was just a time when I didn’t know the word, and a time when I did. I’m not sure if knowing the word made me more of a feminist than I already was, but embracing and being embraced by the feminist community certainly changed my views. As I started to make more friends who defined themselves as feminists, I started to become more confident in my activism. One of the best friends I’ve ever had, Jillian, and I met at a Chicago feminist meetup several years ago. At the time, I was engaged to my husband, and with the wedding planning came a desire to have the right image all of the time. I wanted to be “cool” and have a “cool” wedding with the “right kind” of music and people and flowers and dresses. I didn’t want to be too much of a feminist at my own wedding because I was afraid of how people would see me. I didn’t want people to roll their eyes from their seats and say, “There she goes again. That Ashley is just a crazy feminist,” subsequently shutting down any political agenda I had.
I think a huge part of the problem was that I had a lot of people around me tearing me in a million different places. Some of my friends just wanted to talk about babies and weddings, and some wanted more. One of my friends who stood in our wedding, found out that I was keeping my last name and my bank account and that we didn’t necessarily want kids, and asked me why we were getting married at all if this was the case. I wasn’t firm enough in my feminism at the time to see the societal issues behind this. I just got offended, quietly and alone, and didn’t say much of anything to anyone. Or I came here to write about it on this little blog.
These sorts of things happened all the time. I did make it through the wedding, but in the years since, I’ve noticed a significant distance between some of the friends that I had during those months leading up to our wedding and a closer bond between friends like Jillian, who never once made me feel that my choices were inferior or inadequate just because they weren’t the norm. (In fact, she always embraces all of my choices, even when I change my mind from one minute to the next, and she never makes me feel awkward or awful about it. She never calls me out on it, like some of my other friends do, saying, “But I thought you were against that,” just trying to catch me in a lie to feel superior to me in some way.)
I’m not saying that I am no longer friends with people I’ve held dear to me my entire life. Rather, I’m saying that, like my friendships, my feminism is constantly evolving. I’m adding new pieces and taking some old ones away. And that’s how it should be. No one should be so indoctrinated with a belief set that the ideas never evolve and change as we grow. Like the poet Taylor Mali said, “Changing your mind is one of the best ways to find out whether or not you still have one.”
The Guardian: Say no to armed guards in schools
February 20th, 2013I have my first ever piece up at The Guardian today! I’m so totally excited!!
The piece is published in the Comment is Free section today, and I’m talking about armed guards in schools:
On Monday, Congressman Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, and six other House Republicans took this one step further and introduced a bill that would fund the Cops in Schools program, which would give a total of $30m in grants to schools looking to increase armed police presence.
Putting more people with guns in schools is not the answer. By increasing police presence in school, we are guaranteeing that more students will be arrested – perhaps unnecessarily. Increasing police in schools will contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline.
Please, go read the article and comment and share!
Featured Image Credit: Bob Daemmrich/Alamy courtesy of The Guardian
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Where Do the Ducks Go in the Winter?
February 19th, 2013Oh my god, I love Catcher in the Rye. Seriously. Love it. Every time.
I tried to explain to my students the other day why I loved it. They haven’t read it, so they were confused. “Is it about baseball?” they asked. No, no. It’s not about baseball. And, if it was, what would make you think that I would love a book about baseball? “Is it a feminist book?” No, it’s not. In fact, Holden Caulfield isn’t even a particularly good person let alone someone who champions women’s rights.
I can’t even really explain it. There is just something honest about it. Holden’s inner narrative doesn’t try to pretend to be anything other than who he is, even if his outer self shows us differently. He just desperately wants to connect with someone. So desperately, in fact, that he calls upon many, many people as he wanders through New York, from a prostitute to a former teacher to his little sister Phoebe.
I see Holden in my students; I see him in myself. I see him in the most deeply troubled people who have graced my past, and in the people who would have you think they were extremely happy. Holden – self centered, whiney, desperate, lost, finding joy in small things, working slowly through his issues, working slowly through life – is all of us.
Originally posted on The Samsanator Tumblr
Featured Image Credit: condour
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This Is Teaching At Its Finest
February 18th, 2013I love love LOVE this article about teaching Macbeth to junior high students that appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago:
Reading Shakespeare sounds like pandemonium. They take 10 minutes just to give out parts, one boy always holding out for Duncan, wanting nothing to do with traitors.
Another boy, a seventh grader, large-eyed, with a lisp, has acted in “Macbeth” in an after-school program. He glides through Macbeth’s speech, opening and closing stout arms, declaiming, When I had most need of a blessing, the word Amen… His little hands shake as the other kids gape, impressed by this previously invisible boy.
When you listen to them, it’s like they’re playing. They mock one another and cajole. They fight over the good parts. The disciplinarian in me wants them to hold still, though it’s a play with plenty of standing and yelling.
THE new Common Core Standards for English Language Arts say students in grades seven and eight should be exposed to texts written in archaic language. I tell myself this is an exposure.
So much of teaching is messy and ridiculous. In this article, Ms. Hollander wonders what she might tell someone who walked into her classroom at this moment. On my best days, if an outsider were to walk into my classroom, they would see much of the same pandemonium. I say these are my best days because they are the ones when the most learning happens.
So much of Macbeth is standing and yelling. So much of literature is revolutionary, and revolutions cannot happen from a desk in the middle of a classroom. Good literature, the stuff that teaches us Truth with a capital T, is not just to be enjoyed in a quiet corner of the world. It is to be argued with and explored out loud. So much of the literature we are supposed to give our students whispers “yes” and affirms everyone’s delicate sensibilities. Real literature must yell a booming “NO” and turn our sensibilities on their heads, or else we do not have to think at all. Literature should boom and shout and make us think, whether we want to or not.
Education reformers want to turn teaching into a science. They want discipline to be clear-cut and swift. They want literature to whisper “yes.” They want teachers and students to whisper “yes,” as well.
What I love about Ms. Hollander’s article is that she doesn’t whisper anything. She embraces the mess and the art of both teaching and literature. She is the kind of teacher I aspire to be; hers is the kind of classroom I aspire to have.
This is teaching at its finest.
Featured Image Credit: andrewasmith
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Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival Edition 8 Deadline EXTENDED
February 12th, 2013The Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival Edition 8 deadline has been EXTENDED!
I will now be taking posts on Feminism & Love for the February blog carnival until February 22, and the carnival will be posted on February 27. So what are you waiting for? Submit your posts TODAY!
You can get more info here, and submit your posts here.
Fearless Females: Pop Culture Role Models, Redux
February 12th, 2013Y’all saw that my Fearless Females were featured on the Bitch blog for their awesome list of female role models in pop culture, right? Oh, and you saw it on Jezebel, too? Pretty sweet, right?
Well, since it got such a buzz, I figured I’d show you all a little behind-the-scenes glimpse of our creative process:
Yup, there’s the whole list.
My girls named a lot of women that surprised me:
What are your female pop culture role models? Any you would add to the list?
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Fearless Females: Pop Culture Role Models
February 1st, 2013I’m also at the Bitch Magazine blog today talking about pop culture role models for my Fearless Females!
I’m a feminist and a high school English teacher in the south suburbs of Chicago. Last year, one of the students in my class was inspired to start a group for girls at our school and approached me about sponsoring it. Of course I agreed! A few weeks ago, we tackled the topic of positive female role models in pop culture. The high school students came up with a list of eight current, mainstream “feminist idols” they and their friends look up to.
The list is a good insight into what interests teen girls these days, as well as hopefully a helpful resource. We talk a lot about degrading and regrettable portrayals of women in media, here are eight actresses and comedians my high schoolers are excited about supporting.
I’m not telling you who is on the list, though. You’ll have to read the article to find out.
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore
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Against Armed Guards in Schools
February 1st, 2013Today, I’m over at In These Times talking about why having armed guards or police officers in schools is a terrible idea:
I have spent most of my life in a school setting: first as a student, then as a high school teacher. In more than 20 years of observation, I have never witnessed a need for armed guards. Perhaps I am fortunate in this. But school shootings are still relatively rare, despite their high media profile; Implementing an armed police presence in every school because a few have been the scenes of heinous crimes would be like screening every white male in the school system for a mental illness because the perpetrators of such crimes are predominantly white males. It just isn’t feasible, nor does it help the problem; what it does is unnecessarily invade our privacy.
Read the whole article here!
How do you feel about armed guards in public schools? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Featured Image Credit: grendelkahn
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Fearless Females: Resources for Discussing Rape Culture
January 26th, 2013It seems all of my best lessons happen on accident. I believe that the reason for this is twofold. First of all, I am willing to listen to my students and discover what they are interested in discussing. Secondly, I am a news junkie and I almost always have at least one article at my fingertips to discuss with my students. I suppose you could add a third reason in here, which is the fact that very few topics are off-limits with me. I like to present my students with information on all sides of an issue and let them decide. All of this collided one day when a student entered my room very upset about December’s brutal gang rape of a woman in India that resulted in her death:
My student’s comments about the case sparked a discussion in my classroom about rape culture in India. I quickly found an article online about the case and we looked at it as a class so that my students could have an informed discussion. It didn’t take long, however, for comments to be about how “this sort of thing” happens in places like India, but not here in the United States.
A rape culture exists when sexual assault is rationalized and normalized. At the center of the culture is sexual objectification and blaming the victim. Sexist language, jokes, media images and laws feed the culture.
I had to correct these assumptions from my students. Rape culture in the United States is just as dangerous as it is in other countries. We read about a Texas cheerleader who was kicked off the squad because she refused to chant the name of her rapist. We also read about two star football players in Steubenville, Ohio, who allegedly assaulted a girl too drunk to resist. The boys posted pictures of the rape on the Internet. I shared these situations with my students and, as we looked at various articles on the Internet, I could see my students’ understanding of the world around them shifting. They were starting to realize that we do, in fact, live in a society that often times ignores rape, tries to cover it up rape and blames the victims.
This happened in class, but several of the students in that class attend Fearless Females every week after school, so we are going to carry the discussion over there. To prepare for this discussion, I have gathered several articles that are appropriate for students to read, and I am going to make copies for each student so they can write on the articles if they want to. After reading the articles, we will discuss rape culture and what it means for our society along with ways we can stop it.
It is important to note that I will make sure ahead of time that the students are all OK discussing rape and rape culture. I would hate to have a discussion trigger something for one of my students, so if any of the girls feels uncomfortable discussing this topic in any way and at any time throughout the meeting, we will stop and I have a backup plan. If you plan on discussing this topic with your students, please be sure to do this, as well. If students have experienced violent crimes of this nature, you do not want to trigger a resurgence of memories for the students, as your girls’ group, and your classroom, is supposed to be a safe space for discussion.
The first article I will share with my students is a TIME Magazine article about the changes happening on a governmental level in India after the rape:
Enhanced sentences, faster trials, better implementation of existing laws and gender sensitization of lawmakers are among some of the recommendations made by a recently formed panel reviewing India’s sex-crime laws after the Dec. 16 gang rape of a 23-year-old paramedical student, who later died as a result of the attack.
The three-member commission, headed by former Supreme Court Chief Justice J.S. Verma, was set up in late December during the wave of public protest and revulsion that rocked the country after the brutal crime. The commission was given a month to come up with recommendations and submitted its 657-page report on Wednesday. “We have submitted the report in 29 days,” Verma said during a televised news conference Wednesday afternoon. “The government, with its might and resources, should also act fast.”
The next is about changes made on a more personal level with the #SafeCityPledge:
After the “Delhi Rape,” women’s organisations across India have been raising awareness of how unsafe India’s cities are. The Blank Noise Project is one of India’s most prominent street-harassment projects and its “#SafeCityPledge” has captured the imagination of many young people across India. On New Year’s Day, as the sun took a slow dive behind the sands of Miramar beach in Goa, I, along with a smattering of men and women, took pledges to make our cities safer. We pledged to walk alone, to hold our heads high. The men pledged to intervene when they saw a woman being harassed. They pledged not to stare. We stopped tourists and locals and asked them to pledge. Some men agreed, willing to drive around Goa with pledges pinned to their backs. Others said no, bewildered by what was being asked of them.
After this, we will move to discussing issues similar to this, but closer to home. We will talk about the case in Steubenville, OH where high school football players raped a teenage girl who was too drunk to give consent and then the football coach tried to blame the victim. We’ll also discuss a Texas cheerleader who was kicked off the squad because she refused to cheer for her rapist. Then, we’ll wrap up with a discussion of Daniel Tosh’s recent rape “joke” (actually, an attack directed at a specific woman) in a crowded comedy club.
Hopefully, these articles will all work together to generate great discussion and encourage awareness among my Fearless Females!
Don’t forget to check out these articles and more for your girls’ group at my Evernote notebook.
Have you discussed rape culture with your students? Do you have any reservations about doing so? Leave a comment!
Featured Image Credit: Chryselle D’Silva Dias
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I’m Not Ready For Babies, And That’s OK: An Open Response to Janine Kovac
January 24th, 2013I love reading articles on Role/Reboot. In fact, I am on their list of regular writers. I try to write for them once a month because I appreciate their work in questioning gender norms in relationships – something I’ve been trying to do here in a much smaller way for a long time. You can imagine, then, how horribly offended I was when I read their article entitled “Maybe You Are Ready For Kids, You’re Just Not Paying Attention” by Janine Kovac. I not only felt it was condescending and awful, but I felt it was directed at women like me, who want kids but who truly believe they aren’t ready. Clearly, I was not the only one. Due to the large, negative response that Role/Reboot received for the article, they sent out an email to the regular writers looking for a response. I jumped on the opportunity, and they told me they absolutely wanted it. I wrote the article quickly and thoughtfully and submitted it. They did not run my piece. Instead, they ran another response by someone else who happens to be a mother. The response, “An Open Letter to Janine Kovac” was heartfelt and compassionate, but I am incredibly offended by the fact that they ran a response written by a mother rather than one by a childfree woman in the same situation as the one Kovac was addressing. I’m not saying they needed to run mine, but I think they should have at least allowed a woman without children to weigh in.
However, that is the benefit of having your own site – you can post whatever you want. Here is my response to Janine Kovac, and to anyone who has ever tried to pressure me to have children:
I am 100% sure I want to have kids. I am also 100% sure I don’t want to have them now.
Unfortunately, many women only hear the first part of that statement. Then they launch into a lecture about how I shouldn’t wait: “You’re not getting any younger. Wouldn’t you be sad if your husband didn’t get to be a dad? You’re never 100% ready, so why wait?”
Honestly, I’ve had these conversations in person so many times, I wasn’t surprised to read a similar sentiment on Role/Reboot, one of my favorite websites. In fact, I have friends and people I barely even know who take every opportunity in the conversation (and sometimes make their own opportunities) to ask me when I’m going to get pregnant, probably like Janine Kovac does to her friend, “Doris.” When this happens, I just smile and come up with another reason I hope will end that thread of conversation and mentally take note of how many times I’ve been asked this very question. My husband and I joke that, for every time someone asks us when we’re having kids, we add on another month. At this rate, we won’t even start trying until June of 2026.
In this day and age, when women are waiting longer to have children, “You’re never 100% ready” is a popular mantra. After all, it’s true. I absolutely agree that there is no 100% ready. But I do think that you can definitely approach 90%, and when I’m sitting at 50%, that’s not close enough. I’m no mathematician, but I am a teacher, and I know that 50% is most definitely failing. One of the best things anyone has ever told me was that you aren’t ever really ready, but having a baby is taxing on every single part of your life – from your relationship with your husband to the way your shoes fit you after pregnancy – so you might as well be as ready as you feel you can be. Another woman told me that the readiness and the desire need to match up because one without the other won’t cut it when it comes to caring for a child. Interestingly enough, both of these women are mothers.
To be fair, the concerns that Kovac and many other women have are valid. Let’s address a few, shall we? First and foremost, I’m not getting any younger. The clock is ticking. Before I know it, it might be too late. I realize that these things are said out of concern for my well being. After all, wouldn’t it be just awful if I waited until the ripe old age of 35, or even 40, to start trying to have a kid and then found out that I was well past my prime and unable to reproduce?
Actually, contrary to the societal narrative, this would not be the end of the world. In fact, I’m not even sure this would approach a tragedy for me. I know these women are just trying to inform me of the harsh realities of the world but, trust me, I’m already well informed. In fact, I think you’d have to be living under a rock not to know that women’s fertility starts to decline after 30, at which time the risks for certain birth defects also increase. By this logic, though, we should all start having kids in our teens at the peak of our fertility. I can introduce you to a few teenage mothers who would disagree with that. On this point, I am going into my “old age” with eyes wide open. If we can’t have kids when we’re older, that’s OK. In the meantime, we’ll have built up other important things in our lives. There’s also that three month European cruise we’ll take as a consolation prize because we can definitely afford it without kids. I think we’ll be just fine.
The next point that people love to remind me of is that my dogs are not like children. My husband and I have two adopted dogs, a terrier named Penny and a beagle named Bailey. Next to my husband, these two furballs are the loves of my life. I come home from work every day and all of my problems and stress melt away when I see their smiling faces and wagging tails. At night, we snuggle up on the couch with a big, fuzzy blanket and as they sleep on top of me, I feel so at peace. I look around me and smile and think that there is not one thing in the world that could make this life more perfect. Of course, that feeling only lasts for an hour at most before Bailey pees on something and Penny gets up and starts trying to open the cabinet door to get her toys out. We jump to correct their behavior firmly because we want to raise polite, well-rounded dogs. We love them even more, though, when they look at us with their big eyes full of apologies, and then we get back to our snuggles on the couch. Tell me again how this is different from having a child?
Most importantly, people like to laugh a little bit about the fact that my job is more important to me now than the prospect of having kids. “That’ll change,” they chuckle, implying that I shouldn’t try so hard now because I won’t want to after I have kids. There’s only one thing I can say to that, which is that I am a high school teacher. Every day, I am given the task of helping to raise someone else’s kids. I nag them for their homework. I make them clean up after themselves and alway say “please” and “thank you.” I give them tissues when they are crying in the hallway. I hand a boy an apple from my lunch bag when he tells me he didn’t have enough money for lunch. I notice when one of the girls wears long sleeves even in the heat of August, and when I refer her to the counselor, he tells me she’s been cutting herself and it’s good I caught it when I did. Yes, the more important job is to be somebody’s mom, but when someone else’s kids walk in my classroom door, I treat them like my own. I hope that my child’s teacher will do the same someday, for there is nothing more important than a child.
To all the Ms. Kovacs out there, I may be a “Doris,” and even though Connor, Travis, and Wilson are definitely names on my list of future child names, I’m leaning more toward Collin. If I have a daughter, I’m leaning toward Emily, and I’ll raise her to believe in herself and do what she most passionately wants out of life. If she wants kids, I’ll support that wholeheartedly. After all, what’s better than grandchildren? If she doesn’t, I’ll give her a few ideas of things she can say when people ask her when she’ll get pregnant. And then I’ll tell her the story about how I waited forever to have her, and I couldn’t have been happier.
Featured Image Credit: paparutzi
Quest 2013: Tragedy Makes the Teacher (An Introduction)
January 22nd, 2013For the past two years, I have asked my students to go on a quest through literature in my classes. They think of a time in their lives that they felt discriminated against or like an outcast. Then, they explain the situation and end with a question. This question guides them through the literature we read in class, and each piece of literature gives them a possible answer to their question. I’ve done this before – in fact, it was the inspiration for starting this blog all those years ago. This year, though, I decided to write another quest along with my students. I’m using this as “cheap therapy,” as my students last year told me they did. I am going to use this space to talk about school tragedies, since little else has been on my mind lately, so read at your own risk. If you want to keep up with my entire quest, click here.
I was a freshman in high school when the tragedy at Columbine High School unfolded on a television screen in front of me. I had come home from school to find the channel turned to the news rather than the mid-day talk shows my family was fond of watching. I looked on, wide-eyed, as surveillance footage repeated itself on the screen. I will never forget the images of kids my age lead by SWAT team members, running scared from the school building with their hands on their heads.
When I was a senior in high school, I was sitting in my biology class early in the morning. It was right at the end of the period and our teacher had given us some time to relax before leaving. She ran back in from the next-door lab room to tell us a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought nothing of it, not even sure which building that was on the New York City skyline. Later that day, our band director wheeled a television into the band room and we watched the towers fall on live television. I finally got ahold of my dad, who was supposed to fly out of Pennsylvania that day but, fortunately, didn’t.
Almost eight years to the day passed. I was in my first year of teaching, sitting in the lunch room with other teachers in absolute silence. We were watching the deadliest school shooting since Columbine play out on the screen in front of us at Virginia Tech. After the Northern Illinois University shooting in my second year of teaching, I found myself facing a classroom of sophomores as wide-eyed as I had been after Columbine. The only thing I could say to them was, “It’s not fair.”
After that, the dominoes started to fall. A shooting in a movie theatre in Colorado. Another in a Sikh temple in Wisconson. Then, twenty first-graders and six teachers killed in Connecticut. Again and again, I found myself in front of classes of wide-eyed students, trying to at least give them some hope, but mostly just justifying their anger.
These tragedies are unspeakable, and I find myself bracing for the next one even while hoping upon hope that there isn’t one. While the nation debates security measures and gun control laws, I find myself wanting to do something even more powerful. I find myself wanting to teach. I know a lot of teachers who see these tragedies – especially those that take place in schools – and want to leave their jobs. After all, gun violence is the number three most common cause of death in the workplace, and the number one cause for women. However, as soon as I stand in front of my students and we start talking about making the world a better place in spite of these horrible events, I know I am home. Why do tragedies such as these strenghten my will to teach while solitifying others’ desires to leave?
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After the Inauguration, Let’s Keep Talking About Gun Control
January 21st, 2013When you first start out being a teacher, you are worried about the lessons you are planning, whether your students are paying attention, and what prank they will pull on you next. After a few months, you might even worry about making sure your lesson doesn’t end five minutes before the bell is supposed to ring, leaving you with an awkward five minutes to fill at the end of class. These are basic needs in the eyes of a teacher.
The longer you teach, the more those basic needs are under control and the more you start to concentrate on external factors: education reform, what each election means for your job, if your pension will be around until you retire, school safety, gun control.
It becomes exponentially harder to be present at your job when you are worried for the safety of yourself and your students. It becomes even more difficult when your mother and your husband are also both teachers. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for parents.
The national debate on gun control has me hooked, mostly because it directly relates to my job. If the NRA has its way, and if the White House goes through with what they are talking about doing, we are going to see more armed police in schools. Of course, the White House is proposing giving more money to schools who want to implement security features, so that doesn’t mean that all schools will do so, but it’s hard to turn down free money to make your schools “safer.”
I, personally, don’t think that adding guns – excuse me, armed officers – to schools will make them any safer. More guns just means more people getting shot, even if the people who carry them are trained professionals. Check out these statistics from 2007:
New York City police statistics show that simply hitting a target, let alone hitting it in a specific spot, is a difficult challenge. In 2006, in cases where police officers intentionally fired a gun at a person, they discharged 364 bullets and hit their target 103 times, for a hit rate of 28.3 percent, according to the department’s Firearms Discharge Report. The police shot and killed 13 people last year.
In 2005, officers fired 472 times in the same circumstances, hitting their mark 82 times, for a 17.4 percent hit rate. They shot and killed nine people that year.
In all shootings — including those against people, animals and in suicides and other situations — New York City officers achieved a 34 percent accuracy rate (182 out of 540), and a 43 percent accuracy rate when the target ranged from zero to six feet away. Nearly half the shots they fired last year were within that distance.
In Los Angeles, where there are far fewer shots discharged, the police fired 67 times in 2006 and had 27 hits, a 40 percent hit rate, which, while better than New York’s, still shows that they miss targets more often they hit them.
Couple this with the fact that, as the ACLU recently reported, putting police officers in schools just increases the amount of arrests. Since school shootings are still, thankfully, rare, police will be more concerned with menial misbehavior rather than preventing huge tragedies. Furthermore, even one arrest on a student’s record dramatically decreases their chances of graduating high school.
My experience with police in these situations has not been great, either. We had a lockdown situation earlier this year during after school hours. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but it was unexpected. When I saw police officers standing outside my classroom, I went to ask them what had happened. They said I shouldn’t worry myself about it, then continued laughing about something in their group. No offer to help me out; no inquiry as to whether or not I had students in my room. The threat was no longer an issue and neither were we.
Adding armed police officers to schools will not make me feel any safer. Call me crazy, but I want my school to feel like a school and not a prison. I don’t see armed police guards as a solution to this problem. School is for education, so why don’t we spend some of that money on programs that will deter students from glamorizing violence? Why don’t we spend some money on after school programs to keep kids off the streets, where violence occurs far more frequently than in schools?
As excited as I am that our nation’s first Black president was sworn into office for a second term today, I hope that he gets back to work quickly to think about some more solutions to this problem, because armed police officers certainly aren’t going to help.
Featured Image Credit: cliff1066
Stop Comparing Ourselves to Others
January 17th, 2013In an effort to be more present, I’m trying to stop comparing myself to others. It seems that this envy or grass-is-always-greener syndrome is an epidemic among women in their late 20’s and early 30’s – at least it seems that way among my friends. To that end, I wrote about it at Role/Reboot:
The funny thing is, though, that a lot of my friends who are doing the things I perceive as awesome are wishing that they were living my life right now. My friends who are PhD candidates are wishing they could finish so they’d be able to get a job and have enough money to buy a house. My friends who are writing books are wishing they had more free time. My friends who are planning cross-country moves are wishing plans were finalized so they could stop feeling like they were in limbo.
I guess the grass really is always greener.
This feeling of inadequacy—maybe even envy of each other—that my friends and I are feeling is an epidemic among women in their late 20s and early 30s. It seems that, no matter what we do, we feel like we should be doing something else. Nothing we do is ever good enough, no matter how fantastic other people think it is. Being at peace with our choices is next to impossible, especially when we see others who are so happy doing something else that we’ve had on our own bucket lists for a long time.
Check out the whole post here!
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My Husband is a ‘Mansumer’
January 13th, 2013Apparently, my husband is taking part in a national trend that shows that more and more men are doing the household shopping. While I cook the weekly meals, Tim does all of the grocery shopping. Even if we need an extra something for a meal or if I want a piece of chocolate, he’s the one to stop at the store on his way home from work or get himself off the couch to go to the store. This has a lot to do with the fact that I both teach and write – essentially working two jobs – as well as cook the meals and take care of other tasks like gift-buying. He feels as if this is a way that he can contribute to the household. According to the global media agency network, BPN, this is the way many men are feeling right now:
40% of men are now the primary grocery shopper in the household; 44% of men say they equally share in housecleaning and a whopping 86% of men agree being a man equals doing what is necessary to keep the household running. And that includes buying the holiday gifts.
While I love to see these kinds of numbers showing a shift in attitudes, I know that it comes at a price. First and foremost, BPN has tried to coin the awful term “mansumer” to describe these men who shop for their households. Because, you know, they can’t just be normal “consumers.” Fortunately, the term has yet to catch on.
More importantly, with more men making the decisions about what products to buy for the household, that means that more marketing will be directed toward men. This explains those gross, “not for women” commercials we’ve been seeing lately. Here’s a great clip from the CBS Early Show on the man-marketing epidemic:
Now, I love the Oldspice Man as much as any other heterosexual woman out there, but I understand that these hyper-masculine commercials are actually pushing us backwards in terms of gender norms. When we champion manly men and girly girls, we are just creating a deeper divide between the sexes, and making anyone who doesn’t take a place on one side or the other an outcast.
Unfortunately, it looks like this trend is here to stay. According to TIME, many unexpected items are being marketed to men from groceries to laundry detergent to Barbies to fashion.
While I think it’s wonderful that men are taking responsibility for the household duties that have stereotypically fallen under women’s domains, we need to be wary of championing hyper-masculinity in our culture. This type of machismo is what leads to horrifying violence against women, as we’ve seen all too frequently lately.
Featured Image Credit: theimpulsivebuy