For the confused among us.  Go on, have a laugh on me (and Nathaniel Tapley of course).

They’re on Freshly Pressed this week, so you’ll all have found them by now, but Florence and Millie, have too good an eye to not pass on just in case.

Contrary to popular, mainstream opinion, feminist parenting does not mean ‘raising children to be feminists’.  At its most basic level, feminist parenting means nothing more or less than allowing your children to be who they are.  Allowing them to be as ‘girly’ or ‘boyish’ or ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ as their nature dictates and giving them a bedrock of understanding that these terms are meaningless in so far as they are applied to them.

This of course gives us what ‘feminist parenting’ is not.  It is not about denigrating boys or their stereotyped traits, it is not about denigrating girls or their stereotyped traits.

It is about teaching your children both to be, and to relate to other people as, individuals.  It is about teaching your children to respect themselves and their individuality and, in turn, respecting others and their individuality.

At its core, feminist parenting is about celebration.  Celebrating our own uniqueness and that of others, celebrating both the things that we share as people and the ways in which we differ.

When I put it like that, I’m quite disappointed; it doesn’t sound very radical, does it?

And if, by some minor miracle, you manage to raise your children to understand all of the above, all else will follow.  Trust me, it will.

I was prompted to write this post by this one over at Pigtail Pals about this very idea of celebrating our children for who they are.  It’s the lovely long post I would write if I wasn’t so lazy and Melissa hadn’t already handily written it for me to link to.

genderless partywear

I meant to add something else on the bottom of that last post which is that I also trust my children.  I trust them to come to their own conclusions and I trust them to have the humanity to make those conclusions good ones.

Mainly, I was thinking about this point because of this I read in the Guardian on Saturday in the ‘Gay Dad’ column:

‘On the way home [my son] chats animatedly about the afternoon while digging out the contents of his party bag. He mentions, en passant, that one of their friends turned up to the party wearing a tunic dress. Apparently he often turns up wearing one.

‘Why, I ask. “He just likes them,” Ed replies. Do the other boys tease him? I ask. “Nah, he’s a really good guy… Yay! I got a Transformer!” Ed can’t believe I’m asking so many questions about a subject he obviously considers relatively humdrum.

‘I ponder how much has changed between my generation and his. The other fathers and I don’t quite know what to say to each other because they work in finance and I work in fashion, while our eight-year-old sons will happily run around playing games together barely batting an eyelid that one of their number is wearing a dress.’

Because sometimes, children’s conclusions aren’t just good, they’re way better than what adults come up with.

Mothering: about more than just baby poo

This is the trouble with feminist parenting.

‘I am torn between celebrating [my daughter's] innocence and apparent immunity to the more suffocating features of ‘girl culture’, and worrying about her being rejected soon by school friends for not being sufficiently aware of ‘girl culture’.

‘Mostly I’m all up in the celebration stuff but I won’t lie, there is a bit of me disturbed by all that ‘couldn’t give a fuck-ness’, too.’

I’ve written before about my own feelings on the subject:

‘…how do you raise a girl to be outside the girly-girl, appearance and consumerist-driven culture they’re being spoon-fed from every angle without making her an outsider to her own sex?…how can you teach a girl to not relate to the hyper ‘girly-girl’ model and yet still enable her to relate to, and fit in with, girls who do?

‘Because whilst I fervently want Boogie to step outside the increasingly limited model of femininity she’s presented with, I don’t want her to be, well, weird. Are you feeling me here? I’m trying to teach her to denigrate a model that the vast majority of her peers will believe in whole-heartedly, but I don’t want her to be the sad, lonely kid in the corner, amusing herself by putting her bogies on a passing ant.

‘And, sure, I can explain why her peers (and my peers) fall for all the gender shit that comes their way, but the fact remains that, on some level, the message must contain some implication that her peers are a bit stoopid. I mean, essentially, it boils down to: they may fall for it, Boogie, but we won’t because we know better.

‘And then she has to go to school and relate to these stupid people that mummy has told her about.‘

And I can’t lie, it does worry me.  But, you know, this essential problem isn’t limited to feminist parenting.  This is the problem with any style of parenting which falls outside the scope of ‘normal’, ‘normal’ of course being an ever-changing concept decided upon by the prevailing culture.  Any kind of parenting which falls outside these norms for whatever reason is derided and attacked.  Any kind of parenting which, in essence, teaches your children to be committed to something which isn’t the status quo carries this essential problem right along with it.

And with the status quo being what it is, what kind of parent wants that for their child?  Frankly, that’s just weird.

And there’s the salvation for my worries.  Because whilst I worry about my children being ‘different’, what’s the alternative?  Because I don’t want them to be ‘normal’, that’s for damn sure.  Feminism is my truth.  It’s a way of viewing the world which, having viewed the world in many different ways, is the view that makes the most sense to me, both to explain what has gone before and to change what will come.  I could no more not give this view to my children than I could go get a boob job and do the Cinderella gig at DisneyLand.

And my feminism is about more than a commitment to gender equality, it is about a commitment to equality of all kinds, and as such it goes against all kinds of ‘norms’, like racism and homophobia and able-bodied privilege and, oh, yes, capitalism.  And I will give all those views to my children because it is beyond my ability not to.  I am helpless in the face of what I know to be true.

Ha!  My kids have as much chance of being normal as I have of doing the Cinderella gig naked with ‘passive slave’ tattooed on my liposuctioned arse!

But you know what?  They’ll be fine.  Because there is one thing, one truth, which underpins everything, which is that everybody must find their own truth.  And if I am guilty of teaching my children anything it is of teaching them to look critically at the world around them and to make their own sense of what they see.  And if, at the end, they see it differently to me, then so be it.

Unless of course, they turn into Tories in which case I’m grounding them till they’re pensioners.

But now I have five minutes with a cup of tea, so I am suddenly re-invested in catching the language I seek.

I wanted to describe girls.  I wanted to describe females who are strong, brave, fearless, gutsy and smart.  I wanted a colloquial word or a phrase that encompassed all those traits, a word or phrase that would immediately tell you that these girls were strong, brave, fearless, gutsy and smart without having to spell out out that they were strong, brave, fearless, gutsy and smart all the time.

What I came up with was entirely inapplicable.  I immediately rejected the phrase ‘she’s got it goin’ on’ because of it’s obvious sexual connotations.  I then fell into ‘she’s got balls’, ‘she’s got cojones’, ‘she’s got spunk’ (in the Australian sense).  I think you see my problem, right?  I could go for ‘kick-ass’ I suppose but the girls I want to describe aren’t violent.  Violence is not what these girls are about.  They are better than that.  Whilst they can use violence on occasion, hey are too smart to just be violent.  These girls are not mindless.  So I’m back to testicles again.  Because, bizarrely, we really do understand that testicles confer more than testosterone onto a person, they confer way more than that; to have balls/cojones/a huge, swinging pair is to be strong, brave, fearless, gutsy and smart.  You know, kind of like a man, duh.  It is unfortunate that we do not confer the same qualities on to a fine pair of breasts.  Actually, it’s not that unfortunate – I’m more than happy to leave the biological-things-that-hang references to the men – but I really would like a word or a phrase that brings forth the same connotations.  Like, ‘she’s utterly stramsta’, or ‘she’s got tribblequong like you wouldn’t believe’.

Because as that Wittgenstein dude said: The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

But there is no word or phrase that springs readily to mind to describe a female who is fucking awesome.  Not in my language.  Is there in any language?  Yes, I could just say, ‘these girls are fucking awesome’ (for they are, in many ways), but it’s such a dull and generic way to describe them.  This post could be fucking awesome.  That strawberry Angel Delight you had for pudding last night could be fucking awesome.  A dog that says ‘sausages’ could be fucking awesome.  Now, if anybody who reads this post actually did have strawberry Angel Delight for pudding last night or actually does have a dog who can say ‘sausages’ that really would be fucking awesome.  Not relevant, but I’m just saying.  That would be so awesome – and unlikely – it’d almost make me believe in god (ha ha, only kidding god – I’d need a bit more proof of existence than that.  Like waking up tomorrow to find everybody talking about which of the 90-odd female world leaders had the most tribblequong).

Anyway, enough about the dearth of appropriate language, and more about what we were watching that glorious summer that seems about eleventh billion years ago.

Two films really stood out; and by ‘stood out’ I mean were re-played so often, I started to think the characters were my other children.

The first was ‘Tangled’ which was L’il Boo’s particular fave.  Now, don’t get me started on how the bloody thing couldn’t just be called ‘Rapunzel’ like it’s supposed to be, and how that’s because we can’t have a girl headlining a film even when it’s her fucking film.  I’m starving for some thing to celebrate, so I’m just going to skim over that kind of institutionalised misogynistic shit and go straight for the good stuff.  Oh, and that does mean therefore that I won’t mention her picture-perfect features and Barbie-esque body either, but I do just have to mention her eyes.  Because frankly, they creep me out.  They’re so unnaturally huge I keep thinking they’re going to jump right out and eat her face whole until she’s nothing more than eyes on a neck.  Creepy.

No, I am concentrating on the good stuff.

The lack of mooning for example; step-mammy may be a shit of the highest order, but at least she hasn’t told Rapunzel that happiness depends on ‘trapping’ a man.  Stuck in her tower, Rapunzel occupies herself developing her art, not her artfulness.

The fact that she’s (excuse my language) kick ass, for example.  Rapunzel saves Flynn as many times as he saves her; these kids are a team in the nicest sense.

The fact that her true happiness comes from finding her own destiny, for example.  The end of Rapunzel’s quest is finding out where she’s from and who she is (OK, she’s a princess, but still trying to think positive); marrying Flynn is a happy add on.

I know, I know, there are still a lot of problematic things about this film, but it remains that it’s one of the few mainstream films I’ll allow my children to watch because there are at least some positives.  I’ll take mild satisfaction (or at least un-rage) where I can get it.  And, I’ll be honest, I love the horse.

Film number two will have to wait, despite being my favourite of the two.  My cup of tea is gone and I have actual work to do.

This made me laugh (wryly):

‘People whose wardrobes are so various, jangled and changeable as to engender in the observer a sense of not knowing who they are encountering from one meeting to another are not living easily in their bodies.’

For a large portion of my adolescence and early adulthood, this described my wardrobe perfectly, and whilst I knew even then that I wasn’t ‘living easily in my body’, I never connected my sartorial promiscuity precisely to that fact.  I just imagined I was too damn hip to be tied down to one fashion tribe.

But then I guess I did kind of make the connection eventually.  About ten or so years ago, I came to the quite startling revelation that every single item of clothing I’d ever bought and never really worn had one thing in common: they were perfectly good items of clothing, but only for people who weren’t me.  More precisely, they were for the person I wanted to be.  Even more precisely, they were for the people I wanted to be; because when you want to be anybody other than yourself, there are a lot of choices.  It took a little while to rid myself of inappropriate clothing choices completely, but from then on in, I couldn’t stop myself from asking Is this me?  Or is this the glamourous Soho private club member who is universally considered to be the life and soul of the place and who occasionally crawls across the piano in a sequinned shot-to-the-hip number and croons soft show tune interpretations?  Or is it the stylish Left Bank intellectual who spends her day reading Sartre before donning a YSL mac and spending the evening drinking absinthe at the Zinc bar, later picking up some skinny-hipped youth and orgasming over Simone de Beauvoir?  Or is it… You get the idea, I think.

A lot of choices.

And as I got older I began to find it increasingly ridiculous if I did purchase something which the answer to Is it me? was no, no it really isn’t.  I had fondly thought that I was just growing up, but I realise that I was ‘growing in’, growing into myself.  And in much the same way as women under the age of about 35 almost universally find it impossible to attain the ‘capsule wardrobe’ so beloved of fashion magazines, I could no more have limited my fashion ‘choices’ when I was younger than I could have made sense, in any shorter time than I eventually did, of the events of my childhood and the effect they had on me.  I had to grow into my self – into my actual self – before I could accept my body for what it was and clothe it accordingly.

I think it’s because of my own journey that I have endeavoured to encourage Boogie to be unthinking about her own attire, to view clothes as simply coverings which change according to season and activity.  I want her not to have to walk the same journey I did.  I want her to just ‘be’ in clothes in the same way I want her to just ‘be’ in her body.  I want her to ‘live easily’ in it.  Given the preoccupation we now have with the body and the clothes it wears being projections of our very selves, however, I wonder whether I have done the right thing.  Boogie may not yet judge her own body, or her own clothes, but others will, and indeed already do (apparently, she ‘dresses like a boy’, said with a smile of faux-concern). Am I effectively preventing my daughter from understanding the relationship between how you look and dress, and how you’re treated by others?  Is it possible to teach her to understand these things without making them chains to bind her with? Is it possible to teach her to comprehend others’ perceptions whilst at the same time making her aware that she doesn’t have to accept those perceptions as relevant to her?

I’m honestly not sure, but one thing I do know: if she does end up on the same journey as me, I’ve got way more wrong that giving her the wrong clothes.

‘Some days it seems as if the GOP candidates are competing to be the governor of Alabama, circa 1960, rather than running to be President of the United States in 2013.‘

From Racialicious.

But I very much advocate self-defence.  I love self-defence!

And so much love goes to the Egyptian women featured here.

‘Vigilante gangs of ultra-conservative Salafi men have been harassing shop owners and female customers in rural towns around Egypt for “indecent behavior,” according to reports in the Egyptian news media.

‘But when they burst into a beauty salon in the Nile delta town of Benha this week and ordered the women inside to stop what they were doing or face physical punishment, the women struck back, whipping them with their own canes before kicking them out to the street in front of an astonished crowd of onlookers.’

What can I say?  Kick arse women like these make me feel happy.  Oh, and very cowardly.  But I’m a happy coward today.

formula: evil, evil, EVIL!

Ah, the breastfeeding debate!  No, not that one, which for the record, ends thus: yes, you can whip out a lactating boob anywhere and feed your baby with it; kill anyone who tries to stop you.

I mean the other breastfeeding debate, the humdinger of ‘breast versus bottle’.  The most divisive battle since Oliver Cromwell decided royalty wasn’t all that.  The new ‘civil war’ amongst mothers and others who stick their oars in for fun and/or profit. (Really, it’s a good comparison: Cromwell wasn’t content to just pummel Charlie into the ground militarily and leave it at that; no, he had to chop his head off as well.  Nothing says ‘I think you’re worthless and have no redeeming qualities whatsoever’ like decapitating somebody.)

Here at Boogieville, we have already signed off on all interest in ‘scientific’ studies about the relatives benefits of breast v. bottle unless, and I quote:

”…they suddenly discover that breast milk is actually poisonous, or formula makes people vote Tory...’

Because failing such momentous impact:

‘…these studies are only useful for one thing: being rolled up and used to beat mothers around the head.’

No, ma’am, we do not like breast v. bottle ‘studies’.  Just put them down and back away.

Possibly something we don’t like even more however (though we allow love into our hearts while we’re not liking it), is the way women allow themselves to be sucked into this whole bag of crap that making a single choice about a single aspect of raising a child can somehow define you not only as a mother but as an evil she-whore hell-bag.  Or not.

The Guardian has a small piece every Saturday called ‘What I’m Really Thinking’, featuring a different ‘type’ person every week – you know, ‘the house cleaner’ (I don’t mind cleaning shit-filled toilets but I hate ironing), ‘the dinner party host’ (I have in the past shot guests who cut the nose off the brie), the ‘shy person’ (I’d really like to be less shy but, well, I’m not, really).  That type of thing.  Clearly, you can see it’s a ‘fluff’ piece at best.

This week’s is What I’m Really Thinking: the bottle feeding mother.  I knew I’d regret reading it, but a Saturday bath means The Guardian magazine cover-to-cover (especially after early dinner family Yo! Sushi, when I’m lying in the water so replete with raw fish the ‘beached whale’ analogy is entirely apt), so I read it.  It’s short, so you can read it, too:

‘I see the breastfeeding mothers watching me as I rummage in my changing bag for the ready-made carton of formula. Those looks speak a thousand words, most of which boil down to, “How could you? We’re doing the best for our baby, why aren’t you?”

I feel as if they’re judging me, looking at me as a lesser mother than they are just because I’m giving my baby formula. Do they feel superior to me? Certainly I feel that I have to defend my decision to bottle-feed, justify my choices so they’ll accept me.

They sit…with their beady eyes peeking over their breastfeeding aprons as my son gulps down his 5fl oz. But I can’t help noticing how their looks change – a bit of envy maybe? – when I start to bottle-feed. My guess is they’re thinking,”That looks a lot more efficient than breastfeeding.” You’re right, I want to tell them.

I can almost hear the deafening mental processing in those staid church halls: “She won’t have cracked nipples, mastitis, thrush or leaking milk. And her partner probably helps with the night feeds.”

But I don’t want to fall into the trap of judging them too harshly, either. I’d like to have tried breastfeeding, but medical complications took the choice out of my hands. Now that I bottle-feed, I see the advantages. I’d even choose it again next time. It’s really not so bad, I want to tell them, you should try it some time.’

Now, first off, I’m inclined to be sceptical of the piece because it seems simply to be an example of a person’s own feelings of inadequacy being transferred onto others.  The other mothers are firstly looking saying “How could you? We’re doing the best for our baby, why aren’t you?”, then miraculously, they look envious?  Really?  Wow, these women can really work a look or two, can’t they?  Transference, much?  Not that I judge her for that: what mother is unaware – in this country at least – of the pressure now put on women to breast-feed?  And if you can’t, it can make you feel like shit.

But christ alive, if I had a pound for every time, in those early baby days, when I heard a bottle-feeding mother explain to me or to an assembled throng of breast feeders  (at least half of whom at any given time would have a baby on the boob – I live in middle class North London* where breast feeding is positively viral) why she was bottle feeding I would be in for free flat whites for life.  And I have a serious coffee habit. Anonymous does it here; despite attesting to a high level of satisfaction with bottle feeding, she still feels the need to tell you why she didn’t breast feed.

And to every, single mother who explained to often virtual strangers why she was picking up a bottle rather than exposing a breast I just wanted to say: stop it.  Stop explaining to me why.  You have no obligation to tell me that your milk didn’t come in, that you got mastitis so bad you considered chopping your breast off, that your baby couldn’t latch on, that your boobs were too small, or too big, or too lop-sided, or that you suffer from tubular breasts, that you’re taking medication for mental illness, or your cat died and you were too sad to produce milk.

You do not owe me an explanation.

I’m of the view that, all things being equal, breast milk is probably superior to formula.  Knowing what I know (and trust me, I know more than I’d like to), that’s where I stand on the dividing line.  But when the fuck are all things equal?  When are any of our choices made in a vacuum? This is feminism 101, people, so it shouldn’t really need explaining, but it seems as if it does.

We make all kinds of choices as mothers that represent compromises between what we view as ‘perfect’ and what we recognise as ‘achievable’ and trust me when I say that you will make far more compromised decisions about your children as they grow than whether to feed breast or formula.

Fortunately for the confused amongst you, I can settle the whole Bottle-feeding: does it make you evil? debate with a few simple questions:

1. Do you love your baby?

2. Do you provide your baby with enough nutrition so that the scale needle goes up with time instead of down?

3. Is your feeding method of choice – discounting any feelings of inadequacy you may feel coerced into having – working for you?

If you answer yes to all three, then you have Bingo.  Collect your prize money and go out and celebrate.  Which of course, you can do in far more style if you’re not breast feeding.

Personally?  I breast fed both mine for two equally simple reasons: 1. neither of the little bastards would take a bottle, and 2. breast feeding – which I hadn’t seriously considered doing but was willing to give it a go – really worked for me; being naturally haphazard and a bit forgetful, I found it a real bonus that I could never go out and forget to take my breasts.  Rest assured, however, that if it hadn’t worked for me – for any reason whatsoever – I’d have dropped it like a hot one. I know, I have no shame.

And, so we arrive back at ‘scientific studies’.  Yes, they’ll try and guilt trip a bottle feeder.  They’ll tell you useless stuff like your child will have one less ear infection a year which, sure, is good, but is in no way better for your baby than having a happy mother.  Or they’ll tell you a breast fed baby will perform marginally better on IQ tests than bottlers, which will sound important until you score yourself some Stephen J. Gould, and realise IQ tests are for shit anyway.

And to round it all off (thank christ I hear you mutter), this came along sometime after I’d weaned L’il Boo:

‘Six months of breastmilk alone is too long and could harm babies, scientists now say‘

Six months was the recommended time when L’il Boo was a babba.  I had the what were then new-ish guidelines in mind when I was thinking about weaning him.  Did I worry when the new study came out?  Of course not: I said I had them in mind; I didn’t follow them slavishly.  I responded to my baby according to his needs.  As long as breast milk seemed to satisfy him, I didn’t introduce solids.  When it started to look like he needed something more, I gave him more.

In the event, he actually went 5.5 months before gnashing down on broccoli florets (we followed baby-led weaning principles).  And is he showing signs of food allergies or iron deficiency (both cited by the study as possible effects of delayed introduction of solids)?  Nope, not so far but you know if he does?  I will be satisfied that I did the best I could given what I knew at the time.

What more can you ask for?

*I don’t really, but near enough.