Tag Archives: feminism

The Bad

Sex-ism

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I’m not a great feminist like I’m not a great father.

But I try.

I don’t like the word ally, even though I understand it and want to be what it implies.

What I am is male. A white male, in fact, living at the height of my species’ dominance and the pinnacle of my sexs’ power.

Entitlement isn’t a concept or a designation you either fall into or you don’t, if you’re white, male and living in America, you’re entitled.

Here I am, writing about myself. When what I intended to write about was women. Continue reading Sex-ism →

History

Your ancestors were great women warriors and other stories I’ve told my daughter

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My grandmother, Pearl (top center) at the end of one journey. The beginning of another
My grandmother, Pearl, at the end of one journey. The beginning of another

My grandmother, Pearl, walked halfway across the world, from the Soviet-Ukraine of her birth, to the Ural Mountains of her youth. She came of age traveling across what was then Turkestan, the tattered remnents of the Golden Horde and into Uighur-controlled Northwest China, where she fell in love, married and began her own family.

Sixteen years later, she walked across parts of Mao Zedong’s China with my infant father and his brother to Shanghai, where she and her family sought religious asylum in the Phillipines. After four years in a refugee camp, she made her way to America with three children on her lap aboard a U.S. Navy vessel.  Continue reading Your ancestors were great women warriors and other stories I’ve told my daughter →

Pop Culture

What my daughter sees in fairy tales

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Screen Shot 2014-11-08 at 1.58.02 PMMy wife and I watched Maleficent last night, and I found myself overly annoyed at the lack of redeemable male characters. Not heroes, mind you, but just decent human beings in the form of men.

And that got me thinking about what my daughter will see when I watch it with the kids tonight for Saturday Dinner and a Movie.

I’ve been reading princes stories to my daughter for the last year or so. We started with George MacDonald’s princess stories, The Light Princess, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie and we went through all the traditional princess from the Brothers Grimm to Disney.

It’s partly because she’s eight, and she loves princess stories. It’s partly because I want to understand the message these stories are portraying so I can help her process them in our current age. I did not grow up hearing princess stories, so it’s a discovery process for both of us.

And it’s partly because the world is obsessed with fairy tales right now. Or perhaps it always has been.

Continue reading What my daughter sees in fairy tales →

Literature

I don’t know how to raise a daughter, so I read her princess books

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http://chiacheese.deviantart.com/art/The-Princess-and-the-Goblin-368593298
The Princess and the Goblin

We started in on the princess books with gusto.

I read them in an exuberant voice, hoping she would ignore the deliciously difficult words so characteristic of late 19th century British literature.

She most certainly did not ignore those words.

“What does being cross with his wife mean?” she said, after I finished the first page of George MacDonald’s The Light Princess.

“It means he wanted to be angry with his wife,” I replied and tried to trudge through the difficult text.

Why on earth would I read Phantastes, The Light Princess and The Princess and the Goblin to my seven-going-on-eight-year-old daughter?

Continue reading I don’t know how to raise a daughter, so I read her princess books →

Parenting

In defense of beards and manliness

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Beard

Today I watched a video about the dangers of over masculine-izing our boys. 

It said the three most dangerous words you can tell a boy today are: “Be a man!”

The video is full of images of young boys and older men as backdrops for all the things we tell our boys.

“Grow a pair, man up, stop crying, grow some balls,” etc., etc.

It was emotional, and it got me going a little, but probably not in the way the makers of the video intended.

Continue reading In defense of beards and manliness →