A long day

I don't think I've had a meal since I heard the news. I've definitely eaten, but I don't have the organisational skills to buy takeaways right now, let alone cook.

I've spent far too much of my life at the house you've seen being broken into time after time. I know some of those arrested. I love and care for some, and actively dislike others.

There's so much I want to write about. I am so angry at the police right now. They set up their check point across the confiscation line and then searched a school bus.

I'm prevented from writing by exhaustion and suppression orders. It has upset me how quick to judge some are, repeating the outright lies of the media (the Slum Post* headline).

So just snippets of what I remember:

We appeared, after seeing it in the media, or getting a text message. By 2pm there were dozens of us waiting at the district court. We listened as names were read out over the indistinct loud-speaker, traded rumours and tried to avoid the media.

When we finally heard the names we were waiting for everyone rushed to get into court. I'd left my bag (with my precious knitting) so was at the end and helped bring the Frog (a baby I know and love) into the court. To encourage him to come I told him we could go see Thomas (a pseudonym for one of the defendants).

It was such a relief to see them all. I listened to hard while I was trying to figure out what was going on.

"Hi, Thomas" - the Frog had chosen a very quiet moment to make himself heard. The judge looked over his glasses, scanning the courtroom, as if it was a very long time since he'd heard a child.

"Remove that child."

Later when we all waved simultaneously as the defendants left, he called what we did an unseemly display and threatened to clear the court.

********

Someone was reading from Stuff: "Activists from all around the country represented a diverse group of causes, but they were going to co-ordinate one day where they all took action."

"They don't know us very well do they?"

*******

I listened to Checkpoint while driving:

In other news a man has been granted bail after being charged of serially raping prostitutes**********

I sort through a pile of books to take to jail, trying to figure out what to give to who. "Do you think sending a copy of Making Peoples will amuse anyone but me?"

**********

I've just learned that the person in Auckland who had been granted bail had had it revoked. I want them to let my friends go.

* Just writing that makes me sad. The person I know who uses the phrase "slum post" most regularly is in Arohata right now.

Marches are supposed to be our thing

I'm a bit put out that people are organising a march in Wellington that I disagree with. Occasionally other people organise demos (or people I know organise demos for causes I don't support - like Animal Rights. But I've been a Wellington activist for almost ten years, and I can only think of two marches that I didn't attend for political reasons (the police association march for higher pay, and destiny's creepy 'enough is enough' rally - I attended coutner-demos in both cases)

Although one of the Frog's parents wants to come. She'd take the frog and use him as a prop. She marched round the kitchen holding him by the ankles, hitting him rhythmically on his (nappy-clad) butt, while chanting:

2, 4, 6, 8
Beat the baby before it's too late

1, 2, 3, 4
I want to beat him more

The Frog is very into this plan; it's one of the funnest things he's done for a while (although he got ridiculously into the game and went up to the nearest grown-up and said 'beat, beat, beat').

Unless...

I was babysitting for the Frog (my friend's toddler) tonight and one of the stories I read him was the Lorax. The last page goes like this:

UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It´s not. SO...
Catch! calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall.
It´s a Truffula Seed. It´s the last one of all!
You´re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds.
And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care.
Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.
Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.

It seemed like so much responsibility to put on such a little baby, I got upset and teary reading it to him.* The world felt like a heavy weight today, and I didn't want to give it to him.

* Just to clarify I haven't completely changed my politics - I don't think the unless... is one boy and one Truffula seed (lots of children is a different matter), but it was close enough to upset me.

Extreme silliness alert

I haven't written about the frog (my friends' baby - he used to live across the road, but now he doesn't - it's very sad for me) much since I got such stupid comments on my post about him.*

But I thought I'd share my most recent fear, which is that he was going to grow up to be an animal rights activist. He had words for cat, dog, cow, fish, tiger/lion/thing that growls, dinosaurs and probably some animals that I've forgotten. But he didn't have any words for people. That seemed a dangerous way to beging your communication in this world.

So I was greatly relieved to discover that the song 'Step by Step'** has an almost miraculous ability to calm him down when he's sick. He may turn out to value animals more than people, but at least he'll see the importance of collective action.

* What gets me is that the very same men who will tell a woman has been rape that she should treat every man like a rapist ('what were you doing going to his bedroom if you didn't want to have sex with him'?) are up in arms if women actually do treat every man like a potential rapist.

** For those that don't know the words:
Step by step the longest march can be won, can be won
Many stones may form an arch singly none, singly none
And by union what we will can be accomplished still
Drops of water turn a mill singly none, singly none

I'd estimate that I've sung it over 50 times in the last two days.

The Frog

I thought it was time my friend's baby had an official nickname - so in the future I am going to call him the frog.

I told the frog that men all over the internet were feeling sorry for him and he laughed hysterically. Although that probably had more to do the fact that he was playing with a cellphone than anything I said (he loves playing with cellphones and computers - I think he wants to be a grown-up).

My post about the frog got a lot of attention, Span has summarised it so I don't have to. I thought about ignoring the furore, but there are two ideas, that almost every right-wing male blogger who wrote about this made, that I thought it might be useful to clarify.

There have been a lot of men who have implied that my worries about what will happen to the frog are my primary, or first thoughts about him, or change the way I look at him. I suspect most of those men haven't spent that much time around 11 month old babies. Here are some of the most frequent thoughts I have about the frog:

'You're just the most cleverest baby that ever was.'
'You've established that the gravity works, so do all the frozen peas need to go on the floor?'
'You want to read 'the very hungry caterpillar' again?'
'Shit I need to tie my hair back.'
'oh no horrid o'clock, what will we do?'

The ridiculousness of the way they overplayed my worries for the frog in an attempt to discredit what I said isn't that a big deal. What is more worrying is that the men who have written about my post have implied that rape is a rare crime. They have compared being afraid that a boy will grow up and rape to being afraid that a woman will commit infanticide.

It should be no surprise that right-wing men have no idea how many men rape women. It's not a tiny percentage, and it's many order of magnitude larger than women who kill their babies. For example 4.5% of American men going to college admitted forcing a woman to have sex with them when that woman didn't want to have sex. That's one in twenty men at university who will admit to having already raped a woman. Then there are the men who don't admit it, or who don't count what they did as force, or think that silence means consent, or that if she's passed out it's fine. Studies show that somewhere between 20% of 60% of men say that they would force a woman to have sex with them, if they knew that there wouldn't be any consequences (the variation depends on how the questions are phrased).

I don't want the frog to be part of that group. I want him to only have sex with people who don't just consent to sex, but actively want sex. I know that if we lived in a world where women were valued, and our desires were considered to be important as men, I wouldn't need to worry about that. I know that if the only influences on the frog were the people around him now then he would always respect the desires of the women who he is having sex with (if he's having sex with women). I'm worried about how the rest of the world will change that.

In the comments thread it was clear that I wasn't the only woman who had this fear. Flea has already written about it, much more eloquently than I ever could. I recommend you read her post.

Beautiful Boy

My friend has an 11 month old baby boy. When she was pregnant someone she knew was raped and we talked about the not-yet-child inside her. She didn't know whether the Frog was going to be a boy or a girl and we didn't know whether it was worse to raise a girl and be afraid that when she grew up she'd be raped, or a boy and be afriad that when he grew up he might rape someone.

Well he is a boy, and I still think about that conversation. I still want to protect him from what I'm afraid he'll grow up to be. Right now he's amazing and beautiful. He bangs on everything and anything. He snuggles into you for comfort. He made me read A Very Hungry Catepillar 3 and half times in a row once. He's a crazy, loving baby.

I'm so scared of what this world will turn him into. That's one of the things that the US soldeirs who have raped Iraqi women makes me think about. How our world in general, and the army more than anything, makes men into monsters.

At the moment we can protect him from all that. I can sing him songs of hopes and struggle and there ain't nothing can harm him. But that only works so long.

Down with Practically Everything

Today is Blog against Hetronormativity Day. I was going to join in, but I just discovered that Hetronormativity doesn't mean quite what I think it does. It almost means what I think it did, but it's different enough that I'm just not sure what I think of it as analysis. I have some things I'd have to think through before I could agree that I thought that Hetronormativity exists, at least in the sense of that being a useful way of grouping together a set of phenomena. It seems a little silly to blog against something if you're not even convinced that it existed.

I decided to post the post I'd already written anyway. I'm writing about female friendships, and even if I'm not convinced I'm talking about heteronormativity, I think it's an interesting topic of discussion.

I have two female friends who are raising a baby together. They've never slept together. They were friends and flatmates before the baby was born, and now they're looking after him together. It's not easy, for many reasons (not least of which is the general lack of sleep and stress that comes from looking after an 8 month old), but part it is our very limited idea of the roles involved in raising a child.

A few years ago my best friend had a double hip replacement, it didn't go well. She was allergic to various pain-killers. One hip got infected. She was in hospital for five weeks, when they'd originally said she'd be in for a week to ten days. I visited her almost every day, and it's so draining to see someone you love that sick.

But a lot of people just didn't get it. She was 'just' a friend. If I'd slept with her, even if I'd only known her for a few months, my reaction would have made more sense to them. Instead I was being nice and kind.

Under the Holidays Act you get 3 days' paid bereavement leave on the death of a set of named people, parents, children, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, spouse and spouses parents. For a friend you can get one day's paid leave if your employer accepts a bereavement.

Our society does not value, or even really recognise friendships, particularly friendships between women.

It hasn't always been like this. People have critiqued Carroll Smith-Rosenburg's 'The Female World of Love and Ritual' quite throughly since it came out, but it does show places where it was socially acceptable to value relationships with your female friendships as much as your relationship with your husband.

I don't have any solutions to this, at least not right now. While forming strong relationships with women is a fantastic thing to do, it'll make your life better, and you'll feel stronger, having them doesn't change the fact that society doesn't value them. My friends' relationship challenges ideas about what relationships can be, but it isn't easy for them.

But what I want to try and look at is why female friendships are devalued, in what context the priviledging of certain sorts of relationships happens, and who benefits.

A couple of days ago I was talking about Homosociality:

Now, homosociality is one of them 10-cent words that can take an awful long time to explain (I took something like 5 pages in my dissertation), and it's roughly the idea that men's relationships with women are secondary to men's relationships with other men, and that women are used as currency of exchange in male relationships, that women are used by men in various ways in order to negotiate their relationships with other men, etc.

I agree with this analysis. Men are supposed to put other men over women. But even with men, this isn't about valuing those friendships and relationships as individual people, but valuing men over women, becuase they are men.

Women are also supposed to put men first over other women, which means putting sexual relationships with men, over frienships with women.* I actually think most of the privilidgeing of sexual relationships in our society is about reinforcing male power. But I'd been interested in other explanations. Anyone got any.

*Obviously lesbians do subvert the underlying idea of valuing men over women. But this doesn't mean that they stop valuing sexual relationships over other relationships, this norm is particularly pervasive.