For a Friend
Few topics are as sensitive or as fraught with hidden meaning, as those dealing with relationships between women and men. My own perspective on issues of power and control is itself informed largely by private experience, and thus takes shape as bias on behalf of women. I rationalize this as being but a small drop of water surging against a giant tide of bias on behalf of men, but like all rationalizations, it ultimately fails the test of fairness.
There are several points of clarification I should make. The most important is to place some distance between the generalizations I state, and the men I know. Not all men, perhaps not even the majority, buy into the idea that men should be the dominant partner in male/female relationships. The very best men, those who are confident in their strength and masculinity, believe in equality and mutual respect. They view their girlfriends/ wives/ significant others as full partners in their life journeys, and consider conflict to represent the need for negotiation, not a power struggle.
A second point is that the idea that relationships must ultimately be authoritarian in nature is destructive, whether the man or woman seeks to take control. There are many methods by which humans seek to manipulate one another, and women can be as accomplished in their use as men. Men historically use physical strength, isolation and economic leverage as their primary means of asserting control; women are more apt to use emotional blackmail and the manipulation of children to gain the upper hand. Both genders are unfortunately superb in using verbal abuse, threats, and humiliation. However, no one tactic is the exclusive preserve of a single sex.
A society which buys into the myths that one gender is superior to another, and that all relationships are battlegrounds for dominance (i.e., “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “The War of the Roses,” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,”) hurts all of us, men and women. For me personally, the result was a refusal to fully invest emotionally in my own relationships, thinking the results could not be worth the risks. This has hurt not just me, but the men who have loved me. For others, the result has been physical violence and family abandonment (by either sex), which harms not just the participants, but society as a whole.
As satisfying as it might be to wish for a society in which the tables were turned for a while, and that women were in charge, the gratification of such a wish would be as wrong as the current situation in which men are supposed to be dominant. The result would be the same stress, confusion and poor communication that we have now.
The better hope lies in encouraging the many men and women seeking new and just relationships, in which all parties feel valued and conflict is resolved through communication, compromise and cooperation. We should idolize the men who seek to cherish women, not the Hugh Hefner/ Kobe Bryant/ movie action hero types who seek only to use them. By honoring the men who have the strength and courage to go beyond culturally imposed norms, straight into their own hearts, we validate the women who have struggled to find their best selves as well.
I personally vow to do a better job of honoring the men who have taught me that the greatest strength lies in tenderness, and empathy and compassion are the wellsprings of love for women and men alike.
The More Things Change
I was fortunate enough to grow up in close proximity to my grandmother, a fount of wisdom in many aspects of life. Most of what she passed down to me was extremely valuable, including her tale of being the first woman to work in an Atlanta bank, and her pride in my intelligence. She made it clear that women should be independent and self-reliant, and that I had the capacity to make a difference in the world.
However, one of her lessons, often repeated and used to reinforce the need for self-efficiency, may not have been quite as benign. When it came to matters of the heart, she was adamant that women needed to be very careful. "For men, love is a thing apart," she would quote. "For a woman, 'tis her whole existence."
From the vantage point of middle age, I think now that what she was trying to convey is that the choice of a mate was even more important to women than to men, and to be very careful in who I selected for that position. But at the time, all I ever heard was that there was a strong power differential in male/female relationships, and men held all the cards. Women were not as valued by men as men were valued by women, and this could not be good.
The culture of my childhood and adolescence, ranging from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, certainly reinforced my interpretation. The teen magazines were dedicated to exploring the best ways to attract boyfriends. The women's magazines were focused solely on promoting ways for women to please men. Television sitcoms depicted these pleasing women as having no identity beyond their roles as wives and mothers. On the other hand, men's magazines were focused on politics, current events, mechanics and science. Those that mentioned women had brown paper wrapped around the cover, and depicted women as objects to be used, not cherished. The chatter from teenage girls certainly made it very clear that boys were the primary reason for existence. I attended an all-girls school where extreme wealth was the norm, and my lack thereof cause for social ostracism. However, I could reverse my social position, at least temporarily, merely by attending school dances and parties with cute guys.
I was not the only young woman to view this lopsided balance of power with alarm. In keeping with many emerging feminists, I chose to place my focus on my education and career goals. I spent my college years reporting and editing the daily paper for my university, and as a stringer for
Newsweek magazine. I spent summers interning for the
Atlanta Constitution, and had a job lined up there a year prior to college graduation. In my personal relationships, I placed my greatest trust in my girlfriends, and while I always had a boyfriend, I was always in control of the relationship. I made sure that, although I enjoyed being in love, I kept my relationships as a "thing apart." Perversely, this seemed to make me very attractive to men, and reinforced my conclusion that not investing too highly in them was sound strategy.
In the years following college, I married, put my husband through medical school, attended law school, and started a family. To my great surprise, I found that while I might be able to resist centering my life around a man, I was totally incapable of resisting the overwhelming joy that comes with having a baby. Suddenly, making sure that my children were loved, nurtured and prepared for a productive life took priority over all else, and I launched into an 18-year maternity leave without a qualm. I figured I had the skills to resume a career whenever I so chose, which not coincidentally occurred when my oldest went off to college herself.
During those 18 years, I spent a lot of time with young girls through the Girl Scouts, Odyssey of the Mind and teaching math and reading skills both to students who were well ahead of their class and those who were behind. I stressed the excitement of intellectual achievement and self-reliance, and filled our time together with travel, camping trips, music and art. I don't recall discussing make-up and hairdos and boys with anyone, either my own children or the girls in my sphere of influence. I do recall having a wonderful time, and thinking that the world was moving toward gender equality and respect for women.
But then, I went back to work, and started seeing the larger world beyond my family and neighborhood. It was an unsettling experience. Tiny girls were being dressed as sexual toys by their parents, and teenage girls were dressing themselves in the same fashion. Boys were spending hours and hours with video games that made killing men and raping women an interactive experience. I worked with victims of domestic violence who stayed with abusive men because they saw their only other option as poverty and homelessness, and all too often they were correct. Law enforcement officers and teachers were reporting that girls are moving toward one marker of gender equality, in that they are becoming increasingly violent. However, the violence is directed at other girls, and the reason given is generally because they each want the same boy. It's as though boys are so important, and in such short supply, that female competition through dress and flirtation is no longer adequate. Girls will still cancel plans with their girlfriends at a moment's notice, if a guy, even a relative stranger, asks them to do so.
What truly disturbs me is not just that women still tend to value men more than men value women, they also value men more highly than they do each other. It appalls me how often I hear women boast that they have no girlfriends, and that they spend all their time with men. Women slice their own gender apart, telling anyone and everyone that women are catty and bitchy and superficial, and that men are intelligent and forceful and substantial. I have never heard a man run down his gender, and certainly I have never heard of a man who would be proud to do so.
Since I do not believe for one second that women are in general weak, shallow or catty, I can only see this belief set as being a reaction to the fact that men still hold the balance of power in our world and in our personal lives. Forty years of a feminist movement, and of women moving steadily into higher education and the workforce, and the women's magazines still tell us how to please men and the men's magazines still tell men how to use women. Even the high percentages of women who are self-reliant do not reflect so much a drive to be independent, but the reality that many women are abandoned and many others have found that it isn't enough to keep a house clean in order to keep a man; you have to furnish it as well.
Ten years of working with victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, of trying to alleviate poverty and strengthen self-esteem among young women has driven me to the edge of a cynicism that is frightening and destructive. Regarding men as an oppressive and hostile force is totally incompatible with achieving the outcomes of mutual respect and equality that are the only true hope of generations to come.
And so, because hope is all that keeps us getting out of bed in the morning, I look for ways to keep it alive. Amazingly, I find that hope springs eternal through that love I once viewed with such distrust. My daughters are loved, valued and cherished in ways that are truly transformative. My son, although still quite young, assumes his relationships are and will always be based on mutual respect and support. I have bonds of love with my family and friends, both male and female, that start with the assumption that we all need each other, and that it is very lonely to be completely self-reliant.
The world is not in a good place right now, but love and hope exist. It is enough.
An earlier post mentioned that January is a difficult month, one poorly equipped to sustain the promises of the holidays and the December hope of light. We are moving to February now, and the world is starting to seem manageable again. I have never given a lot of thought or attention to Valentine's Day, thinking it an artificial commemoration of an inequitable society, but maybe there is, in fact, something to it. For love is strong, nuanced, far-reaching, and very worthy of celebration. I might even cut out a few paper hearts for my grandson, maybe inscribed with a new epigram taken not from my grandmother, but from the Beatles: "Love is all there is."
Learning Curves
Around ten years ago, I began to worry over the fact that reading was not coming as naturally to my son as it had to my daughters. I quickly found I was not alone in my concerns. Educators, librarians, booksellers and other parents were all discussing boys’ relative lack of reading skill proficiency. The neighborhood wisdom was that boys could read as easily as girls if they so chose, but they just didn’t find reading that interesting when compared to sports and video games. Parents professed to be unconcerned, while educators expressed alarm.
I was not convinced that the problem lay merely in a lack of interest. Not all books were targeted for girls; many could quite successfully capture the imagination of a young boy even to the point of luring him away from video games and computers on the occasional rainy day. I felt reasonably certain that if my son could read easily, he would. Meanwhile, because he wasn’t, he was not getting the full benefit from his academic environment.
As Tom grew older, my personal concerns began to subside. By 5th grade, the combination of an excellent teacher, steady encouragement at home, and the release of the first Harry Potter book resulted in a quantum leap in academic skills. He is now having outstanding success in the International Baccalaureate program, which is the most demanding course of study offered in high schools across the country. But unfortunately his academic success is a rarity among his male peers. Of the 40 students in his IB class, 34 are girls; the same ratio which held true for my youngest daughter’s class five years ago. Increasingly, girls are taking over the science fair awards, the valedictory slots, the academic teams. And, as has been well documented, they will soon represent 60% of all college undergraduates. Female enrollment surpassed male enrollment in law schools years ago; it is now overtaking male enrollment in the last male professions such as medicine and accounting. Only engineering remains overwhelmingly male in composition, and inroads are being made there as well.
Statistical analysis and personal observations have been increasingly bolstered by scientific research. Richard Whitmire in the New Republic writes:
“Combine [Ken] Hilton's local research [that women read more proficiently than men] with national neuroscience research, and you arrive at this: The brains of men and women are very different. Last spring, Scientific American summed up the best gender and brain research, including a study demonstrating that women have greater neuron density in the temporal lobe cortex, the region of the brain associated with verbal skills. Now we've reached the heart of the mystery. Girls have genetic advantages that make them better readers, especially early in life. And, now, society is favoring verbal skills. Even in math, the emphasis has shifted away from guy-friendly problems involving quick calculations to word and logic problems.
“....Ninth grade is where boys' verbal deficit becomes an albatross that stymies further male academic achievement… where every student now gets a verbally drenched curriculum that is supposed to better prepare them for college. Good goal, but it's leaving boys in the dust.”
For some reason, the greatest outcry in the media has been: “But who will the girls marry? If men marry down, and women marry up, then won’t large percentages of women be left behind?” By this reasoning, large percentages of men are also going to remain single, but perhaps they are not perceived as minding so much (although I would beg to disagree with that premise). I have some concerns in this area myself, since I think it important that married couples be able to talk together on topics of interest, but it’s not my primary source of stress.
Of all the various frightening trends in American culture today – attacks on civil liberty, concentration of power into the executive branch of government, religious fundamentalism, control of the election process by right-wing idealogues – what worries me most is the lack of value placed on quality education. As men find the scholastic world more challenging, many respond by devaluing its validity. When scientific and historical research becomes inaccessible to many, it is dismissed as being irrelevant anyway. And thus American universities begin to recede in importance, and American jobs move overseas.
There are many forms of intelligence, most of which can be channeled into the creation of a well-educated population. We need to shake loose from the rigid structures common in most schools, and look beyond our assumptions of learning as confined to visual, auditory and kinetic modes. We need a learning environment that produces an appreciation of research, analysis, logic models and communication skills, and it needs to start in the colleges of education. It’s a challenge. I hope someone is up to it.
Policy Perspectives
This past week I've logged more miles than a trucker, primarily by criss-crossing the state to meet with funders of homeless programs. The results were disheartening, to say the least. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is once again tightening the definition of homelessness, and eliminating more classes of people who formerly received housing and supportive services. The latest version defines those persons eligible for permanent supportive housing as being restricted to "single, unaccompanied individuals with disabilities who have been living on the streets or using emergency shelter, either continuously for a year or for four distinct periods within the last three years." The disabilities are pretty much limited to mental health and substance abuse disorders.
Put into practice, this is terrible policy, as it excludes the chronically homeless families who currently make up 50% of my agency's supportive housing population, and from 40-50% of our overall homeless population in the community. The new regulations, if executed to the letter, would result in 24 children being put out on the streets this week. We will not, of course, be anything like that callous. But already we have started denying services to new families, including a single pregnant woman. According to what we were told in Jacksonville, she stops being unaccompanied the moment she gives birth, and therefore we cannot accept her now. Some of the HUD reps even went so far as to tell us we had to avoid this possibility by only accepting men.
It would be easy to go on a rant about the evils of George Bush and the Republican administration, and they deserve a lot of blame. One of the motivations for this change of policy is to demonstrate that Bush has upheld his campaign pledge of reducing homelessness. Since his economic policies have contributed to a rise in the number of homeless persons, this would be difficult for the average straight-line thinker to do. However, in typical fashion, the administration is simply redefining terms to get the desired result. If you keep refining the definition of homelessness to omit ever increasing classes of people who do, in fact, live on the streets, then you can say you have met your goals despite not housing so much as a single homeless person. Also, the data on which this policy was based has shifted due to surging home and transportation costs and lagging wages, and this shift has not led to essential policy adjustments.
But the truth is, the Bush administration is only one institution failing our homeless men, women and children. Indeed, if state and local governments, in partnership with foundations and faith-based organizations, had done their part, the HUD emphasis could have been beneficial.
Starting in 1995, several studies indicated that a small slice, approximately 10%, of homeless persons, consumed 85% of the resources committed to fighting homelessness. These chronically homeless people were typically male substance abusers, often with mental disease, who lived on the streets on a full-time basis. These individuals remain the stereotype we associate with homelessness. They frighten the rest of us, while their disabilities stress law enforcement agencies to the point that too many officers become bullies and thugs.
HUD decided that it would focus on these chronically homeless persons whom everyone else wished would just dematerialize into some other universe. HUD would pour resources into assisting this group to get off the streets, and thus free up state and local resources for combatting homelessness among families, women and runaway children. In addition, HUD's efforts would relieve burdens on law enforcement, courts and the jails which have become the primary shelter for the mentally ill in virtually all communities. This had the added virtue of allowing state and local agencies to campaign for the homeless populations that pull heart-strings, as opposed to those which engender fear and revulsion among large segments of the voting citizenry.
The fallacy was that state and local agencies would welcome the opportunity to help any homeless persons at all. The state of Florida allots $2.8 million to assist communities in alleviating homelessness, which works out to anywhere from $65,000 to $150,000 for 20 of the 30+ homeless coalitions. Further restricting the usefulness of these funds, they must be spent between January and June. While some of the metropolitan areas fill in the gaps, smaller communities give nothing at all. Okaloosa and Walton Counties do not allocate a dime to homeless mitigation, nor do any of their constiuent municipalities. A few churches provide cold night shelter. Other than that, there is nothing. Women and children, persons without disabilities, and young adults aging out of foster care, get no services at all - not even a blanket and a roof over their heads for the night.
As a result, the homeless population served by HUD is often the only population to receive any help at all. Washington is not happy, because not even the federal government has the resources to tackle this entire problem by itself. Indeed, under the current administration, resources to serve the one population claimed by the feds are stretched ever tighter, resulting in increasingly restrictive definitions of who may be served.
The current situation as regards relief for homelessness is a scandal, but it is not exclusively limited to the Bush administration. Indeed, there is merit in the administration approach of selecting out the most costly and challenging of the homeless populations to serve, and thus theoretically enabling others to focus their resources on homeless persons most likely to have successful outcomes using only a relatively few services. It would have been optimal had the administration recognized that no one was, in fact, chiming in with help, and given local coalitions the flexibility to put resources where they were most needed in individual communities. It would have been even more optimal if state and local agencies had risen to the challenge.
As it is, I am frustrated. But far worse, children will be sleeping in cars, in woods, in abandoned buildings tonight because everyone who mattered was only interested in passing the buck.
Season of Hope
Each year, it seems harder to buckle down to work after the holidays. There is, of course, a certain amount of exhaustion that follows the holiday whirl, but that’s just a small part of it. The primary factor has to do with the coming of the new year, and the compulsion to take stock of what has come before and what lies ahead. It’s quite daunting.
The societal problems I address are intractable, and the resources I personally bring to the effort are inadequate. The temptation I face is to dismiss any idea that I could actually bring long-term change as arrogant, and to retreat into my own garden. After all, Voltaire described it as a good plan, and who am I to argue with one of the greatest minds of western civilization? Naturally, I can also dismiss the idea that Voltaire hardly took his own advice, and as a result accounted for seismic changes in thought that still reverberate today. I am not Voltaire, and it is ludicrous to assume I have anything near the consequence necessary to effect societal-changing reform.
None of this angst was evident yesterday, however, when I met with a bright young woman attending a Florida college, and seeking a career in social work. I fell into my career through some weird compulsion never fully understood. She is going into it with purpose, enthusiasm, and intelligence. She wants to make an informed choice as to where to best put her energies, and she was open to a root-cause analysis that made it very clear that problems are complex, interconnected, and overwhelming. Spending time with her was encouraging and helpful to me in multiple respects, and I spent a more productive afternoon than has been my norm this week. However, it didn’t get to the root cause of my annual trial of doubt.
One of the books I’ve been reading lately is David Shipler’s “The Working Poor.” He poignantly describes a young, single, working mother whose substandard housing contributes to a child’s asthma attacks. This in turn leads to days absent from work, which leads to reduced income, which means she can’t afford a car, which means she needs to call an ambulance when her child becomes desperately short of oxygen. She can’t pay the ambulance bill, her credit rating falls, which affects her ability to get a better job. Her family falls into homelessness, and despair.
Mr. Shipler does an excellent job of describing all kinds of inter-relating calamities that collectively condemn this woman and her children into a shadow existence. What I find most distressing, however, is that I could add so many more. Those who are on the edges of society are not only prey to employers that cheat their employees, and check-cashing companies that serve as the usurious banks for the poor, and furniture-rental stores that collect fees that far exceed the value of goods rented. They are also prey to crime, to rape, to trauma of all kinds that sap the energy and will to prevail. Parents who were children themselves when they first gave birth have limited literacy skills, and lack the resources with which to prepare their children for a better life. Those who struggle with mental illness are caught in a nightmare in which drug costs exceed potential income, and make any employment virtually impossible. Jails have become our mental health institutions, with damaging effects on eventual recovery.
So where to start? Finding shelter and jobs is certainly a worthwhile goal, but without education, trauma recovery, financial counseling, life skills coaching, and various forms of advocacy, such efforts are stop-gap at best. We need better foster care systems, and victim advocates, and accessible mental health and substance abuse recovery facilities. We need to stop jailing seven out of every 1,000 members of our society (the highest rate in the world, bar none) and concentrate on dealing with the mental illness and substance abuse disorders that create overcrowded jail and prison conditions. How do we achieve these things, and more importantly, how do we execute our solutions to make them effective? It’s January. I have no idea.
By this time next month, I will be immersed in the day-to-day details of my life, and will have abandoned the reflection that can lead to paralysis. But the questions will remain in the back of my mind: Is this enough? Is this the best I can do? Is there hope of a better and brighter society?
I wait for spring, and a new season of hope.
