Happy Birthday Raq!

Happy Birthday Kathy!

OMG it's finally Friday. Such a long week. Yesterday somebody emailed me to ask about something they had asked me to do earlier, and my mental response was DUDE, I sent you that over a week ago. I went into my sent email to retrieve it, and it turns out it was from this Tuesday night.

In other words, I approve of Jesse's weekend plans wholeheartedly.

The issue is that most families can't afford the choice of stay at home mom, because most home need as many incomes as they can get. That's what makes it a false choice.

If your definition of choice excludes the ones with material as well as social consequences, what are we left with, exactly? This is a No True Scotsman argument.

If your definition of choice excludes

Who's excluding choices? I argue for its non-disparagement in the part of my post you do not quote. I'm just saying that "some people don't like it" isn't a material barrier. "Some people can't make it" is a more material barrier but that's not a good enough reason to not have the choice.

Have I been vague about that? I thought I'd been consistently pro-choices in all my posts.

Please point to the part in my post where I said choices should be taken away.

Choice feminism, in my experience, argues that since feminism is about having more choices, all choices are equal and nobody's choices can ever be examined in a broad social context. The alternative isn't taking anyone's high heels away, it's having a conversation about the face that the choice to wear high heels exists in a more complicated social and historical context than "because I like them."

Please point to the part in my post where I said choices should be taken away

Please point to the part in my post where I say in your posts that you said choices should be taken away....we could go on forever, since apparently neither of us are reading each other's posts.

The alternative isn't taking anyone's high heels away, it's having a conversation about the face that the choice to wear high heels exists in a more complicated social and historical context than "because I like them."

I disagree with the idea that there's just one alternative (just as there isn't one movement, there are also more than two), because I can point to others, to people who simply say that "high heels are anti-feminist". They're in the post I linked to yesterday. That is, in my experience, what choice feminism is a reaction to. The people (not named Jessica, which I *never* said) who exclude some things from a feminist way of living.

Of course your motivation for wearing heels bears examination. But that doesn't mean that every woman who says "But I do like them" is always dealing with something more darkly nefarious than that, and there are noisy contingents who claim just that. And the proposition that some anti-choice feminists make that "We must only wear flats" should go unexamined but rewarded is incredibly facile, and I rage against them too.

skipping, just cause.

nice but needy director I support walked the length of the building to see if my boss was in and tell me there were several things in his out box that I had failed to pick up. dude! either call for that shit or bring it with you when you walk down.

my goals for today are to not cry to work, get my timesheet in on time, pick mac up on time, and no fights at home.

weekend plans are Sat. morning soccer game, dropping mac off for a playdate, losing my shit, and possibly hanging pictures. Sun. teach another lesson for lent, have boys over for a playdate and maybe work in the yard.

An interesting thing about choice feminism (at least, as I understand it) is that it can work both ways. Because culture places both genders into expectation boxes. To be clear, the expectations seem more likely to weigh more heavily on women.

But I grew up in a culture where men watched baseball in summar and football in fall. Men went hunting and fishing during the appropriate seasons (which included ice fishing in winter). Men fixed leaky faucets but could only cook on a grill. And so on.

All of which made it kind of awkward for a short, skinny, unathletic, unhandy boy who liked nothing better than to "stick his nose in" (the phrase my mother liked to use) a book.

Ideally, that the stay-at-home is dad should be as unremarkable as that the executive is mom. (As well as that dad comes home to dad, or mom comes home to mom.) (And I should also say that, in an ideal economy, a family could get by on one income, so stay-at-home would be more doable. But on that score, I'll have to dream.)

An interesting thing about choice feminism (at least, as I understand it) is that it can work both ways. Because culture places both genders into expectation boxes. To be clear, the expectations seem more likely to weigh more heavily on women.

...

All of which made it kind of awkward for a short, skinny, unathletic, unhandy boy who liked nothing better than to "stick his nose in" (the phrase my mother liked to use) a book.

Yeah, I can relate.

I recently realized that I'm still bitter about all the homophobic harassment I received in the dorms in my freshman year. That might be why I've had few heterosexual male friends as an adult.

I actually met a woman who had a BA in semiotics from Brown who had worked as a stripper.

I had a BA in anthropology from Vanderbilt when I worked as a stripper.

msbelle,

I have been thinking about you. hang in there. I hope you have a decent weekend.