Almonds

I hate almonds. I really, truly, with a burning firey passion, hate almonds. They are awful. They are like eating little wood chips.

And yet, they are on every list of healthy foods that athletes should eat.

So, every day, I muscle my way through a 100 calorie bag of raw, unsalted almonds.

I feel like one day I will begin to like them. One day my palate will adjust itself to enjoythe simple, healthy things in life. 

Not yet. 

Caveat Emptor

I often wonder if my husband regrets marrying me.

I feel sorry for him. Perversely, I typically feel sorry for him at times when he infuriates me the most. My husband has been cast in a difficult, if not impossible, role. He is a privileged white male married to a radical feminist. He readily identifies as a "feminist" and knows enough to hate it when I call him a "white male,"  but he has difficulty accepting that his privilege makes his life experience fundamentally different from those who do not benefit from similar status.

Difficulty accepting privilege is not his fault, nor is it unique to him.  When faced with privilege, white males often think that to be associated with privilege "takes away" or "minimizes" the hard work associated with their life achievements.  This is not so. Instead, take the example of golf. A hole-in-one on a PGA-rated course is a difficult achievement by any definition, no matter who you are. However, a hole-in-one may be more feasible if one has a driver, than say, a  5- iron. Or a putter. Socially-valued biological differences can be seen in a similar way.

As described by Allan Johnson in his book The Gender Knot (1995)[1],  a social group is superior to the extent that the society in which it exists is dominated by, identified with, and centered on said group. They key aspect of white male dominance is oppression, which creates and sustains power differences between the dominant group (D) and the oppressed group (O). Oppression includes not only superior positions which allow D to acquire greater income and wealth, but these superior positions allow D to mold social culture in ways that serve D's interests (for example, control of the content of media and the passage of legislation). If Ds occupy all of the positions of power, then D as a group become identified with superiority even if most D are not powerful in their individual lives.

Quote

Sent to me by one of my favorite people:

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

                                                           -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., novelist (1922-2007) 

Media makes the champions in all arenas easily accessible. Chrissy Wellington, Martha Stewart, Anne Marie Slaughter, I measure myself to all and find myself short.

Against whom do you measure yourself?

Control

I want to talk about control. Specifically, self-control as it pertains to food. A woman’s control over amount of food, type of food (vegetarian? Organic? Raw?), and body weight are such a huge part of “doing femininity”[1]  in a way that is almost overwhelming. My self-control (or lack thereof) is likely the predominant source of my failure feelings on a daily basis. Almost every morning, one of the first thoughts I have is one of regret and failure for something that I ate or drank the day before. [2]

The average person makes at least 200 food related decisions every day.[3] 90% of these are done without conscious awareness. An inactive person burns 1,200 calories on average, and most modern individuals are fairly inactive unless we are making the mindful decision to work out (which can be added to this base rate). Running, one of the highest calorie burning activities, burns about 100 calories per mile. To burn off one Hershey’s Kiss, I have to run one-quarter of a mile.

Self-control has long been linked to morality. Perhaps because of its connection to the seven deadly sins. Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy, and pride all concern emotions and appetites, and emotions are historically associated with the female in the Aristotelian tradition of the male/female dyad (reason/emotion).  Recall any chocolate commercial aimed at women, using the words “sinfully good” or “indulge yourself.”

As discussed earlier, women, in the Western theological tradition, are historically seen as inherently sinful.  Women’s physical bodies tempted men into lust, and were therefore seen as having a greater bent for sin. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, ascetic practices of eating and fasting proved the practitioner’s ability to overcome the temptations of the flesh (appetite and sexual desire). [4] One document, written for monks in the fifteenth century, stated “it is impossible to extinguish the fires of concupiscence (doing it!) without restraining the desires of the stomach.”[5]

Perhaps because of the perception of women as more prone to sin, women have historically been particularly attracted to fasting as a means of self-discipline. See, for instance, Rudolph Bell’s book about self-starving women, Holy Anorexia (1985), that gives an account of women officially recognized by the Roman Catholic church as saints or holy women. Self-starvation was a means to establish an independent identity and garner recognition within the church.

Mailing List/ Housekeeping

Readers, I have a mailing list. If you would like to be a part of the Failure Project, or be notified when new posts come out, shoot me an email: chanellea@gmail.com.

Cookies are still on offer. I have two batches going out this weekend (Thank you Jeremy and Adrien! You rock!) The offer is this: if you promote this site somewhere and send me a link and your address, I send you homemade cookies. Om nom nom.

Finally, if you are here you should "follow" this site. This shows publishers that people actually read it and will buy it when they pay me to write it (hooray!).

Thanks everyone. For everything.

Natural Mother

There is nothing natural about motherhood.  The ideal of motherhood many women internalize as the standard has been termed the "motherhood mystique."[1] The motherhood mystique captures the popular belief system in which being a mother is supposed to be "natural, easy, and always enjoyable, and that optimal child development requires a full-time mom." ... Right. Raise your hand if your motherhood experience fits that description. Better yet, send me an email- I want to interview you for the book.

I was an idiot about motherhood before I became a mother. Take a conversation, repeated on more than one occasion with multiple people:

                                                                                          

                Them: "So, are you going to breastfeed?"

                Me: "Well, yeah. It's the healthiest thing."

                Them: "Okay, well have you read up on it/ engaged a lactation consultant/ some other research about breastfeeding?"

                Me: "Um, no."

                Them: "Well, don't get discouraged, it's always difficult the first time."

                Me: "Why does everyone keep saying that? I'll figure it out. We're mammals. It's in the name. By definition we are required to be good at this."

(All the mothers in the audience groan.) Like I said, I was an idiot.

Popular media perpetuates and exacerbates the motherhood mystique by the use of almost universal portrayals of "happy, calm and competent mothers,"[2]  Good mothers are patient, nurturing, kind, soft-spoken. [3] Take, for example, a content analysis study of mothers in Parenting magazine:[4]

"the images do not reflect the stressful nature of parenting. Stories about difficult situations were typically accompanied by blurry photos or drawings in which the mother's face was turned away from the viewer, thereby erasing her emotions. Visual portrayal of mothers' negative affect was limited to cartoons, which trivialize the anger, stress, and frustration inherent in managing difficult children or situations by provoking laughter.”

Motherhood is supposed to come naturally, it is supposed to be easy. Any woman who is impatient, loud, annoyed or otherwise at the end of her rope is seen to have something wrong with her. To break the code of silence on this is to be labeled a "bad mother." Some women break the silence with reckless abandon, see Nikki at momswhodrinkandswear, my new favorite site. But breaking the code of silence is dangerous, and she regularly has to remind readers that her site is humor, even then she has many detractors. Even I have been guilty of the bad-mother reaction. While pregnant for the first (and thus far only) time, I ran into a woman with a two year old. She started asking me about my maternity leave, etc and made the following statement:

"I love X more than anything in the whole world. But let me tell you, by the end of my maternity leave, I was ready to get back to the office."

My reaction: bad mother. What a horrible thing to say. What mother wouldn't want to spend every waking moment with their child? But by the end of my maternity leave, I was pulling-my-hair-outready to get back to the office. That woman and I have since become best friends.

One of the base level disconnects that creates the environment in which women feel failure is the unintentional conspiracy of silence with regard to the difficulty of mothering.  An integral part of this project is to break that code- to acknowledge that the challenges we face are difficult and complex. We, both as women and society, tend to minimize the difficulty of the challenges we face, both interpersonally and professionally. By minimizing the problem, we magnify what we perceive to be our failure to overcome it.  

In short, this shit's hard, and that's okay.

---

[1] Hoffnung, M. (1989). Motherhood: Contemporary conflict for women. In J Freeman (Ed.) Women: A Feminist Perspective (4th ed., pp 157-175) Mountain View, CA: Mayfield

[2] Chrisler, J.C. & Johnston-Robledo, I. (2002) Raging hormones? Feminist perspectives on premenstrual syndrome and post-partum depression. In M. Ballou & L.S. Brown (Eds.) Rethinking mental health and disorder (pp. 174-197). New York: Guilford.

[3] Chrisler & Johnson (2002)

[4]Molina, C., Johnston-Robledo, I., & Babler, A., (2000) Images of women in Parenting magazine. In J.C. Christer (Chair) Sociocultural images of women and their possible effects of life goals, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. Symposium presented at the meeting of the Association for Women in Psychology, Salt Lake City, UT.  Following description taken wholesale from Chrisler, J.C. 207 Presidential Address: Fear of losing control: power, perfectionism, and the psychology of women. In Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32 (2008) (pp. 1-12) Blackwell Publishing.

War of the Worlds

Here's a fun little project for any of the skeptics out there. You know who you are, those who think the world can't possibly be as gendered as we present here, or that gendered experiences and reactions simply aren't as "real" as we (I) think. Go to Google and type "lawyer in office." Then go to Images.

What do you see? 

NARY A WOMAN TO BE FOUND. Striking, isn't it?

You see pictures like this:

And this:

This:

And this:

(what was he thinking?)

In fact, you have to sort through forty-two images of lawyers, including this guy before you get to an image of a female lawyer:

(hilarious, but not a lawyer)

The image one finds (finally) is a stock image from Google of a model posing as a lawyer. I don't know the algorithms associated with Google content, nor the inner workings of the interwebs. I do know that Google is so ubiquitous that its name has become a verb (thank you Dane Cook).  As such, it is a quick, albeit superficial, indicator of the modern zeitgeist with regard to a given topic.

Why is it that the collective consciousness resists so tenaciously the idea of a powerful, educated woman?

I did the above Google search yesterday when two of my worlds came crashing together, with predictably messy results. Sprout got sick around noon, and couldn't go back to school. I had client meetings all afternoon, it was too late to cancel. Husband was mostly free, but had a mandatory meeting at 1400, expected to last an hour. I rearranged my schedule so that I had between 1400 and 1500[1] free. Sounds like clockwork, right?

Except it wasn't.