Miss Daisy Driving

OK. Now I'm really pissed off. Women of the World, Unite!

The folks at have Volkswagen rolled out the new Beetle. Gawd. My lovely funky adorable Beetle is now a bubble-lacking, stretched-out, big ol' ordinary car. And DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHYYY? Because the Beetle, the Real Beetle, my Beetle, my only beloved automobile, has been labeled a "Chick Car." Worse than that, a chick car that apparently appeals to "chicks" in their 50s and 60s.

Sigh. Guys have entire lines of macho pick-ups, massive volumes of Muscle Cars, entire lines of Corvettes and Lamborghinis and godknowswhatelse. Why do they need my Beetle? And young chicks, they have tight butts and skin that doesn't flap in the wind and an enviable lack of chin hair. Do they really need my Beetle? (Tho' frankly I think the more discerning of the younger female generation are, in fact, Beetle buyers. Based on copious scientific observation here on the streets of Baton Rouge.)

I was already feeling rather disgruntled jand put upon and discriminated against. Have you heard of Zestra--as in "Zestra Essential Arousal Oils, a blend of botanical oils and extracts that promise to enhance sexual arousal for women"? No, you probably have not, even tho', admit it, now that you have, you're really interested, aren't you? And do you know why you haven't heard about this product in which you have a strong, even passionate interest? Because major media outlets--tv networks, cable and radio stations, Facebook, and even WebMD (!) have refused to run commercials for it. Evidently it's ok for us to be forced to contemplate four-hour erections night after night, it's fine for us to see grey-haired amorous men with a certain twinkle in their eyes smiling at the camera while unbuttoning their Oxford shirts and discussing their new sexual potency, it's just hunky-dory to watch that getting-on-a-bit couple holding hands in their separate outdoor bathtubs while they watch the sunset (what is up with that? no pun intended). But the idea of women wanting, and yes, needing a wee bit of help now and then with, sexual arousal--from this we've got to be sheltered.

So, I've had it. I'm starting a Women United to Save the Old (new) Beetle Campaign and I'm instructing all members to purchase Zestra as their first campaign duty. Because I figure if we're all having really satisfying sex lives, we'll be better campaigners, constantly aroused, so to speak, to fight for justice, to demand satisfaction in all its forms.

What, you say? You don't have a partner right now? No worries. According to the New York Times, "in one online ad for Zestra, a woman says that, “It works so well, when I think about it, it even makes me want to go home and use it now.” There are no men anywhere in the picture."

But I'll bet she's driving home in a Beetle.

Dutch Treat

I.
The setting: last August. Owen is home for a short interlude between his cross-country bike trip and his D.C. internship. (Ah, the glamour of youth.) It's mid-morning. I've been doing errands and am now heading into the office. Must. Write. Damn. Book. Must. Get. Promoted. I pass by Owen, who has just put in a dvd and is now settling down on the sofa.
"Hey, Mom. Where ya goin'?"
"Work."
"Oh, don't do that. Watch Season 2 of Robin Hood with me. We can bond."
"Umm. OK."
I flop onto the sofa. Owen bursts out laughing. "You know, you're the reason I have no work ethic!" He sees the look on my face. "No, no--it's great! All my life, whenever you have to choose between family and work, friends and work, you always choose family and friends. And I think that's great."
So do I. It was one of the nicest things he could have ever said to me.
We settled down on the sofa, two satisfied slackers.

II.
Yesterday, Owen sent me the following link: http://www.slate.com/id/2274736. If you do not want to bother reading the article, the following excerpt pretty much sums it up: "Dutch women . . . take a lackadaisical approach to their careers. They work half days, meet their friends for coffee at 2 p.m., and pity their male colleagues who are stuck in the office all day. . . . 'We look at the world of management—and it is a man's world—and we think, oh I could do that if I wanted,' says Maaike van Lunberg, an editor at De Stentor newspaper. 'But I'd rather enjoy my life.'"
Owen added the message: "I knew you were born in the wrong country."

Damn straight. Plus, if I were Dutch, I could smoke weed to relieve my headaches. And eat really good Gouda and that amazing chewy salty rye bread.

Actually, I'm 100% ethnically Dutch. I could have been genuinely Dutch, right now, had my great-grandparents not been completely selfish and decided to leave all they knew and emigrate in search of a better life for themselves and their descendants. Damn you, you work-ethic-burdened ancestors. Why couldn't you have just have toked up and chilled out?

Playing the Game

It's football season.

Sigh.

Being a non-football fan in south Louisiana during football season is like being a non-gambler in a casino. Basically, you have no point. There is no reason for your existence. Why are you even here?

I should be used to this. Oh hell. I am used to this. The thing is, as used as I am to this, I should be better at this. I should be the world's foremost expert, frankly.

It's not just football. All of my life, I have walked out of step, never fit in, failed to find that common ground. And yet, I'm not weird. Truly. I'm just, I dunno, unfortunate. The first girl in the family, after five boys. An A student in a family of 'why-not-coast-by-with-Ds'. A humanist and pro-unionist surrounded by accountants and small business owners. By the time I was 5, I had embraced feminism (tho' I had no idea that was what it was called) and so guaranteed myself a life on the fringe of my immigrant subculture. By the time I was 14, I realized I was a progressive Democrat in a sea of rightwing Republicans. By the time I was 18, I knew I was a liberal Christian, at odds with the increasingly fundamentalist formulations of family and friends. A Chicagoan in every fiber of my being, I've ended up spending most of my adult life in the suburban Deep South. It's no coincidence, I do believe, that I feel most at home in England, an ipso facto foreign country.

So really, football season should just be same ol' same ol': I'm Here and the Rest of the World is Over There. And yet, it never gets easier: The fact that, come late August, I can no longer participate in or contribute to most general conversations in the supermarket check-out lane or in the church vestibule or in the departmental mailroom. That every time I turn around, the tv channel has been changed to one of a hundred football options (with the sound turned off, mind you--Keith truly makes an effort to respect my non-footballness, and I am grateful). That all the mannequins in the storefront windows suddenly sport purple and gold. That my students cannot be expected to focus in class on Mondays because they're rehashing Saturday's results and of course they can't be expected to show up on Fridays because they're preparing for the next day's game. That I can't even listen to my usual Saturday morning radio rhythm-and-blues buffet without having to endure more talk about "The Game." That I have to coordinate my Saturday shopping to coincide with the traffic patterns induced by said "Game." That even my nail lady can only talk football throughout the fall months.

By mid-October I feel like I'm in one of those old science fiction movies, where the heroine realizes that although everyone around her looks normal, they're actually creatures from another planet. I'm on my own in this town of lunatics, a city-wide insane asylum, yet I'm the one made to feel as if I'm crazy. Case in point: I know a lady, a respectable woman, who cannot pee if the LSU Tigers are playing that day. By late afternoon she's in actual pain but she cannot urinate until the game is over. I kid you not. And yet I'm considered the odd one.

No one else seems to notice that football subverts even the legendary Southern politeness. It's Sunday afternoon. We're sitting on a neighbor's porch, having drinks. "Did you see The Game?" asks my host. "Well, no--" reply I. "Boy, could you believe that pass/drive/tackle/ blahblahblah? I mean, I was saying, no way could they pull that one off, did ya think, and then," he's off and running, utterly oblivious to my muttered, "umm, no, no, didn't see that, didn't actually watch. . ."

Some day, I will snap. Instead of muttering quietly to myself, I will leap out of my seat and I will wrap my hands around my host's neck and I will thump his head against the concrete while shrieking, "NOOOOOO! I DID NOT SEE THE GAME! I do not--ever-- watch The Game! I . DO. NOT. CARE. ABOUT THE FRIGGIN' GAME!!!!" And when I am convicted for murder, folks will say, "Well, I always thought she was strange." "Mmm, hmm, I heard, once, she showed up for tailgating and she was wearing, can y'all believe it, a Chicago Cubs tee-shirt." "'Course, she was, you know, [whisper] from up North. . . "

Football season is such a lonely time.

Grounding and Garbage

Hugh is grounded. Again. "Can't you think of a different punishment for once?" Hugh demanded. Dweeb parents that we are, we can't.

Could be worse, I tell him. My brother J.T. was grounded for his entire senior year of high school--and even into that summer. It didn't initially start out as a year-long grounding. I think first he faced a month-long detention, but just as the month was ending, he snuck out of the house. And got caught. So the month became three months. And then, just as the end of his purgatory was drawing nigh, yes, out he snuck again. And got caught again. Poor J.T. He really really wanted to be a Bad Kid, but he just wasn't very good at it. Anyway, on it went, for his entire senior year.

We kid my mom now, about the endless grounding. It's not really fair as she was generally quite creative in the punishment department. Take the time she found some pornographic magazine--not Playboy, not Penthouse, far beyond that--that J.T. had tucked in amidst the towels in the bathroom. (Like I said, he was really very bad at being bad.) Mom didn't say a word. But that night, when we sat down for dinner, there was no plate at J.T.'s place. "I've made something special just for you," she explained to him. Cheryl and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes; it wasn't out of the ordinary for my mother to cook just for one of the boys. In fact, once there was no longer a boy at home, Mom simply stopped cooking altogether. The fact that Cheryl and I were there, well, that didn't count. But--I digress. Back to the fateful dinner. So daughters roll their eyes, son anticipates a treat, we all say grace. And then my mom gets up, pulls a plate out of the warm oven, and sets it in front of J.T. On it sat a pile of garbage, an oozing glop of gunk from the trash can. And then, very calmly, she said, "If you're going to put garbage in your mind, you'll put it in your body."

I was totally impressed.

I was even more impressed by what she said next: "If you ever show such disrespect to me or your sisters again, you'll eat nothing but garbage at my table." I was 15. I had never thought of myself as someone to be respected. I certainly had never dared to think that any one of my five older brothers was supposed to respect me. I rather liked the idea.

Hugh hasn't a clue how lucky he is that I failed Creative Punishments.

Sitting on Eggs

I attend a church that is very careful to use gender-neutral language in all hymns, prayers, and liturgical forms. Honestly, I don't see the point. God is clearly a guy. Only a Guy God would have created, or allowed the evolutionary process to create, something as poorly designed as the female body. Particularly down there.

So yes, I have spent the last several days dealing with "female problems." As in, I'm trying very hard to understand the nuances of a rather complicated argument in a book of essays on Victorian constructions of Englishness vs Britishness, but actually all I'm really thinking is, damn, my crotch really burns.

It's quite amazing, given the structural flaws of the female body design, that women ever achieve anything of intellectual note. So often I feel like nothing more than a host for various infections, a bacterial breeding ground, a playyard for little squiggly viral bodies. If it was just me, I'd figure, well ok. It's me. Insomniac, headache-prone, neurotic, allergic, nutty me. But it's every woman with whom I am intimate enough to be familiar with the state of her vagina and vulva. So, I figure it's probably every woman, tho' I haven't yet accosted my regular supermarket check-out girl or the department secretary to see if my theory is correct. But my sister Cheryl is constantly having to insert yogurt up there to get the proper bacterial balance and my good friend Karen regularly sits on a warm hardboiled egg for relief. Yes, she sits on an egg. When I get really down, I think of Karen on her egg and feel bizarrely comforted.

Except the thing is, if God were female, if God at least embraced femaleness, we wouldn't have to sit on eggs. I have few religious beliefs of which I am absolutely certain, but this one, this one, is indubitable. Like Luther, "Here I stand, God help me, I cannot do otherwise." Except I'm not really standing; it's more of a crouch, really, because fuckkkk, it hurts down there.

Sex Cat

I had my first real haircut--as in, I wanted it and I chose what happened--when I was about 12. Given that I'm almost 50, that means 38 years of hair cuts, and let's see, sometimes I went three, even four months without a cut, but sometimes I've had quite short hair that needed cutting every four weeks, hmm, let's say 6 cuts per year on average-- I come up with 228. Let's round up to 230.

230 haircuts in my life.

Why, then, did I believe Current Haircutting Guy when he assured me that the new cut would have a "tousled, playful" effect, and that it would be a style with "lots of action, lots of movement"? I hadn't realized hair was supposed to be active; guess I've always just assumed my hair was supposed to be a couch potato. But hey, movement sounded good, so did the whole tousled, playful thing. I'd like to think I'm playful and, well, tousled. In a good way. A feminist sort of tousled.

Turns out "tousled and playful" translates, in non-Haircutting Guy-speak, as "frizzy." And "action" and "movement"? It means "straggly." It means "mad menopausal woman with bad hair."

Awhile back, ok, a long while back, when I was in my early-to-mid-30s, I went to a new Haircutter Guy, and he studied me and my hair for awhile with a kind of sad and concerned look, then sat down on his stool, and declared, "What you have here is a Schoolmarm Look. But I, I think we should go for something more like a Sex Kitten."

Absolutely. I stuck with him for years. All we ever achieved was Poofy Southern Lady hair, but hey, the promise of Sex Kittenhood was so enticing, I kept coming back.

I want to be a Sex Kitten. All right, all right, all right. Facing 50, I'll settle for Sex Cat. I want to be a Sex Cat.

And even after 230 haircuts, I refuse to give up hope. I have faith. After all, I'm a Chicago Cubs fan. And a Christian. And even a firm supporter of single-payer universal health care for all Americans. We shall overcome some day. And on that day, I will be sporting playful, tousled hair. I will be a Sex Cat.

Out of the Mouth of a Babe

Although the historians' universe remains largely male, in over 20 years of professional life, I've never actually experienced any direct discrimination and very little overt or intentional harassment. Historians are, on the whole, fairly decent folks. Not the best dressers, mind you, and hopeless at parties, but well-intentioned all the same. No, I have no complaints to make, no grievances to file against any individuals or offices. My frustrations focus rather on the systemic maleness of academia, the way the molds all seem to be designed for male bodies, attitudes, and ambitions.

Whenever my frustrations begin to boil over, I turn to the words of wisdom uttered by my niece Hannah in McDonald's when she was about four--

We were in McDonald's on my lunch break. During the summers throughout college and graduate school when I worked as a teller in my local community bank, my sister-in-law Nancy and her kids would often meet me for lunch. On this particular day, we were talking about how great the kids were doing in their music lessons. Pointing a French fry at each kid, Nancy said, "Alex, you can be a cellist in a symphony some day. Anne, you can be a violinist. And Hannah, you can be a concert pianist." At that point, Hannah, a deceptively sylph-like little blonde, gasped in horror, scrambled up so that she was standing on top of her plastic chair, and bellowed, "BUT I DON'T WANT TO BE A PENIS!"

Precisely.

God Bless Mrs. Postma

I remember exactly when I became a feminist. OK, maybe not exactly. I don't have the exact date, but take it from a professional historian, exact dates rarely matter. I do know the year: 1965. Back in the Glory Days of kindergarten, long before assessment targets and standardized tests and curriculum reviews. Mostly we played. Yes, we learned to count to 50 and to sing the alphabet song. We planted seeds in cups and collected pussy willows. We made Mother's Day cards and pressed our hands into plaster-of-Paris and glued macaroni onto soup cans and and tried to jump-rope (DeeDee was the best, but that was because she had gone to nursery school, which was a totally unfair advantage). We ate our mother's cookies and drank whole-fat milk from little glass bottles and took naps on rectangular rag rugs. But mostly we played.

It was a glorious place to play. The second floor of the Western Springs Christian Reformed Church housed our kindergarten. On Sunday it served as the home of the Sunday School but on weekdays, it was ours: a large central room for our circle discussions and our singing and our nap times, and six small rooms, three on each side, that opened onto the central room. These small rooms could be closed off with sliding panels--which is what happened on Sundays--but during kindergarten, they remained open to the central hall, under the keen eyes of our teacher, Mrs. Postma. In each of the small rooms was a different play area: Room 1 was set up as a play school room, Room 2 as a play kitchen, 3 contained the large pressboard building blocks, 4 held many sets of Lincoln Logs, 5 housed a racetrack and cars, and 6, ah, in Room 6 stood a fantastic Wild West fort, complete with soldiers and horses and stagecoaches and attacking Indians.

Already at age 5 I knew that the best place in which to spend my time was the Past. And I wanted, desperately wanted, to play with that fort. But our little play rooms were sex-segregated, or as we say in academia these days, "gendered." At play time, the boys played in Rooms 4 thru 6, girls played in Rooms 1 and 2. Room 3 was a bit more ambiguous. Some of the rougher girls played in Room 3. I was not a rough girl. But I longed for that fort. Cowboys and Indians. The Wild West. All the romance and glamor of the Past.

Finally, after weeks and weeks of pining, one memorable day in 1965 in a quiet suburb of Chicago, at kindergarten play time, I girded my loins (so to speak) and entered Room 6.

Oh my.

The boys first jeered and then, when I would not leave, pelted me with plastic Indians and frontiersmen, while the other girls cheered them on. And Mrs. Postma? She marched over, grabbed my arm, and informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I belonged in Room 2. Geez. Not even Room 1.

I looked up at her, and I saw Power. And Injustice. And just plain Stupidity. I trudged over to Room 1. I cried. I sulked. And I became angry. Very Angry.

God bless Mrs. Postma.