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Archive for December, 2009
Communes!
In Rants, Sex/Love on December 15, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Would you share a farm with this girl?
(In Which I Declare What I Could Have Said A Lot Less Complicatedly As An 8th-Grader Who Idolized Hippies …)
It started with reading this Sandra Tsing Loh article in The Atlantic, I think.
Loh notes that today’s “creative class” mother – with her flexible, creative job; her city life; her egalitarian marriage and child-rearing ideals – actually has it worse than her previous-generation counterparts, because of the absence of a built-in family and community structure.
Working for the AARP, I come across a lot of things about multi-generational households, and I’m convinced that they offer a lot of benefit, for all parties involved; that our nuclear-family model of housing and living (which was, in so many ways, engineered in early- to mid-20th century America to push housing sales and create demand for railways and street cars)—our method of splintering off into smaller and smaller household units, of aging parents on their own back in Midwestern cities and suburbs, or shuttled off into nursing homes and retirement communities, of modern moms and dads raising kids in isolation—is all just a mess.
At this same time, I’ve been reading Laura Kipnis’ Against Love: A Polemic
Kipnis gets into this whole explanation of earlier revolts against marriage (or examinations of it, at least) in the U.S.—of the pamphlets and townhall meetings and intellectual discussions about the issue in 1800s America; of the transcendentalists and others who sought alternative forms of marriage or companionship and domestic life. These ideas used to be taken seriously, she writes, but the whole 1960s commune/free-love movement and the subsequent backlash and mockery that created have relegated any questioning of this sort into a hippie cliché.
Flash to last night, and I’m talking with my friend Morgan about yurts. Specifically, that her and her roommate, Sam, have been, for years now, looking into and researching and dreaming about getting a lot of friends together on a farm, out west, or in a college town, and living in yurts off a main house and practicing communal farming and living, etc.
And I laughed, because this is exactly the conversation that keeps playing out, over and over again, amongst me and my boyfriend and my friends in Brooklyn. We have a few friends who’ve actually started, who’ve left the cities (New York, Cincinnati) behind and ventured out to California, to Alaska, and started apprenticing at farms. We have other friends with family ties to maple farms in Scandinavia, avocado farms in SoCal. We’re tentatively and dreamily exploring our options. We’re starting with hallway gardens and kombucha brewing classes and volunteer sessions at the Greenpoint Rooftop Farms. We’re engaging in grand conversational fantasies with one another whenever we see things like a 15-room hotel for sale in upstate New York. We’re discussing these things with friends in other cities—like Morgan and Sam in Chicago; but also friends in Boston, friends in Cincinnati, friends out in California already. Everyone’s feeling this vibe.
From the yurt conversation, Morgan and I got on the topic of marriage, of children, of monogamy, spurred by the fact that the reason I’m visiting Chicago my best friend from college having a baby. She’s the first person Morgan or I are friends with —real friends, not high school friends, not the kind of friend who’s still in your home town and whose life bears no real connection or resemblance to your own—who has been married, and now, who’s having a child. Morgan and I were pondering the implications of this.
And then and there, I developed a philosophy on life and love and marriage and children and society (one that I didn’t even know I felt until I was espousing it to Morgan as if it was a long-held system of beliefs).
The only way, I realized, that all of this would work in my life is for it to take place within a multi-adult/couple/family communal living situation.
I’m not totally averse to monogamy, to marriage, to children even; but I also could never do it as part of a totally secluded nuclear family unit. I think a lot of people my age feel the same way. For whatever reasons, though, it’s not totally feasible or desirable to move back to our hometowns, to create multi-generational, communal households within our own extended families. But it may be feasible to do so amongst friends?
What if, as we age—as we reach that inevitable stage where people really do start wanting to pair off, to maybe make relationships legally and economically sanctioned, to start forming families—my friends and I all did it together? And combined it with our collective desire to be a part of the land, to create food and art together? How wonderful would it be to have those things—a life partner, children if you lean that way—without the confines of having to rely on the totally illogical goal of having one person meet all your needs in life? You could serve as each other’s companions, creative partners, domestic helpers, chefs, housemates, and friends. You would, of course, still get some of all of this from your primary partner. But you wouldn’t have to rely on them exclusively for all these things, and thereby diminish the primary love/sex bond you have with them.
I’ve pretty much decided in the past 12 hours that it’s the only possible way for me to live, create and grow old.
“Orchid Children”
In Ask Dr. Science!, Ephemera, Sex/Love on December 11, 2009 at 2:18 pmOne of the most fascinating articles I have read in a long time:
Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.
And while we’re on genetics, check out Kay Hymowitz’s City Journal article, “Femina Sapiens in the Nursery,” too.
Evolutionary psychologists are sometimes accused of not giving proper due to the flexibility of the human brain. In her recent book Mothers and Others, for instance, Hrdy argues that just as animal males don’t tend to their infants, so human fathers can’t be expected to hang around for the long run. But at their best, scientists are apt to describe the brain as chemically and neurologically predisposed to certain behaviors—nurturing babies in the case of women, for instance—while capable of adapting these behaviors to enormously varied environments. Sometimes those environments even change the brain’s chemistry, a process that the writer Matt Ridley calls “nature via nurture.” When Hrdy presumes the fecklessness of men, she underestimates the environmental pressure of social norms. The human record suggests that social norms, especially the universal one of marriage, can reinforce fathers’ ties to their children, which in turn might even become part of the male neural architecture. Recently, neuroscientists have even discovered evidence that married men’s testosterone levels fall at the birth of their baby.
I concede no opinions about ev-pscyh yet, but Dr. Science approves:
That is quite possibly the best account of the topic I have ever read! She pretty much gets everything right. The science doesn’t prescribe social policy, but rather informs it. How do we come to grips with all of the evolutionary inertia/path dependency that has built up over millions of years, reconcile it with our visions of what “the good life” ought to be, and set ourselves on a course to a better society?
That is the debate we ought to be having, but step one is accepting where we are at the moment with regard to our understanding of the world (science). And yes yes yes, our decisions about the kind of society we choose to create and live in will, over eons, create new selection pressures and reshape our evolutionary trajectory. And as Kay so eloquently points out, technology has already done a lot to change the selection pressures. Maybe a million years from now, our descendants will bemoan how much nature predisposes us to an asymmetrical paternal investment into offspring and they will create new technologies and social policies to swing nature back in the other direction once again.
All just a little bit of history repeating …
In Feminism, Media, Sex/Love on December 6, 2009 at 11:55 pmOne of my particular cultural irritants, as of late, has been what can be scapegoatedly pinned on Ayelet Waldman or more broadly described as the “bad mother” genre. What a strange symbol of our times, these women hemming and hawing over their perceived psychological transgressions against the pathos of motherhood, their defiant reclamation attempts in Oprah-friendly memoir form . How ridiculous; how tedious.
So I got a kick out of Sandra Tsing Loh’s December Atlantic article, “On Being a Bad Mother,” in which she reviews both Waldman’s Bad Mother and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch:
What better phrase to describe marriage among those of my own bewildered demographic slice—parents of the Creative Class? We start with the best of intentions. In her 20s, the Creative Class female carves out a cool Creative Class career, like Writer. She meets a man with an equally cool Creative Class job—say, Devoted Documentary Filmmaker of the Obama 10-Year African Kiva Water Project. In their 30s, the baby comes: the Creative Class mom is pitched into hormonal bliss (at least at first); the very same week—argh, the timing!—Gates Foundation money suddenly comes through for the Obama-kiva-water-project documentary. Clinking champagne glasses, both spouses agree that Dad must fly to Africa for two months to finish filming while Mom cares for the baby. (The last thing she wants is be a 1950s nag—and how rarely does Gates money come through, how important is drinking water for Africa?)
After kissing her husband goodbye, the Creative Class mother now begins to care for their baby, alone, in New York, or Los Angeles, or whatever cool city they’ve moved to. She’s isolated from her stem family—the grandma, aunts, and in-laws (who all love children!) have long been left behind in notoriously un-Creative Lompoc, Fort Lauderdale, or Ohio. She can barely maneuver the stroller down the four flights of stairs to get to Gymboree ($20 for 45 minutes, and you have to actually stay with your nine-month-old and drum). Result: the 21st-century Creative Class mom’s life is actually far worse than that of her 1950s counterpart. Her husband works as many hours (and travels more), but life is uncomfortable on his salary alone, and the isolated mom has no bingo-playing moms’ group to ease the unnatural, teeth-chattering stress of one-on-one care of her child.
But every time I read these sorts of things—this, or Tsing Loh’s last Atlantic article, about her affair and divorce; Elizabeth Weil’s New York Times Magazine article about working on her marriage, and all the bloggy disccusions around it; books like Against Love and A Vindication of Love, both railing against modern “companionate” marriages in their own way; all these late-boomer and Gen X women at once enchanted and neurotic and furious with our current exemplars of marriage or motherhood or monogamy—I am left wondering (and depressed) about what fights we Gen Y (and beyond) women will face in this realm. So much of the current angst seems to be a reaction to the 1970s woman’s reaction to the 1950s woman’s lifestyle/dilemna/ideal … it frustrates me. I’m tired of those battles; they seem silly and cliched and obvious.
But our battles are going to have to be a reaction to these. Or a backlash. And what will that look like? All I know, when I read these things, is that I don’t want to be any of the women in these essays. I don’t want their problems, don’t want their lives. I wonder how they possibly got there, and then can see myself getting there. I think the avoidance of all that will all be so simple, but then they, as women in the 70s and 80s, probably thought the same thing about that 1950s woman.
My Feminine Perspective
In Feminism, Media on December 1, 2009 at 9:48 amI could say a lot about Helen Rittlemeyer ’s Doublethink piece on women’s Web sites and blogs, but I’m going to focus on her relatively minor criticism of gender skeptics and their lady-blogging:
… liberal feminists like Kerry Howley, Amanda Marcotte, and Tracy Clark-Flory are gender skeptics who don’t believe that a “feminine perspective” exists. (Which raises the question: If their brand of feminism is right and gender differences are really as superficial as eye color, why have a gendered blog?)
This seems like a cheap shot, a deliberate conflating of ideas for the purpose of a ‘gotcha, silly liberal feminists’ that falls apart with any examination.
Not believing that an inherent “feminine perspective” exists (which is the position of most gender skeptics I’ve read) in no way means that a) a learned gender perspective does not exist, b) there are not topics of concern to women which some may feel don’t receive enough play in mainstream or non-gendered press/blogs, and therefore require their own separate outlet, or c) it’s not beneficial for readership/branding/intellectual/whatever purposes to gather a bunch of women together to talk about women’s topics. I fail to see how any of those three things negate a belief that we aren’t born with preferences on football or the color pink.
My other serious contention with the piece is that Helen seems to take Double X and Broadsheet as representative of all women’s blogs. I know for brevity’s sake it’s necessary for a writer to focus on a few examples. But using only these two, similarly-constructed women’s blogs leaves out some important contrasting types, and makes me think Helen was being this selective only to avoid having to delve deeper than her core argument that women’s blogs are lazy, chatty and unintellectual.
One of the most popular women’s blogs, Feministe, often offers a much more intellectual approach to and long-form critiques of feminist issues. This isn’t always great; Jill is the only writer currently there that can pull it off interestingly. I’ve stopped reading Feministe, for the most part, because there are only so many intro to queer theory essays I can handle. But it is a women’s blog with a slightly different approach.
It’s also a for-love endeavor, versus a for-profit endeavor (as Broadsheet and Double X are). Whether you’re a women’s blog, a sports site or CNN, page views do, somewhat, dictate content, something which Helen’s essay fails to address entirely. I don’t read Marie Claire and expect that that “editorial” content about the best new brand of lipstick was completely and solely the brainchild of some enterprising, lipstick loving reporter. Economic reasons for the creation, tone and content of any publication, women’s blogs included, is a major aspect to overlook.
