Mansplaining Feminism

Hopefully not. Either way, some thoughts on my feminism.

I am a feminist. 

I don’t know which wave of feminism I align with and I’m not up to speed on the debates within the feminist movement, except to know that they exist and can get burly.

My feminism is best described as pedestrian. I believe in the legal equality of the sexes, that basic human rights necessarily apply to women and men alike. I believe we live in a patriarchy that is oppressive to women in myriad ways and I believe we should be working to dismantle that patriarchy so that women are not oppressed in said myriad ways. No marxism necessary and all rather obvious to anyone who’s paying attention.

And yet, when I’m confronted by how commonplace misogyny seems to be, it’s clear a lot of people are not paying attention. Disconcertingly, my notions of equality can seem quite radical. And what’s perhaps most radical about my feminism is how innate it feels to me. What do I mean by that?

What I mean is that, despite the pervasive misogyny in our society, it’s never tainted my thinking. I don’t hold negative preconceptions about women based solely on the fact that they are women. 

[Sidenote #1: Necessary caveat before I blow too much smoke up my own ass – I will admit to being a man which can at times be off putting to women. I can be loud. I can be overbearing. I can mansplain. I can problem solve when the situation merely calls for listening. But I am self-aware and I try to tone down some of my more testerone-y impulses.]

It’s hard to know how I escaped holding the typically sexist views of many men, but I think I have an inkling: My mom and also my dad. 

My mother is a badass

My mother raised two boys and she inculcated in us not just a healthy respect for women, but a fierce feminist worldview. She did this verbally, of course, teaching us the basic tenets of gender/sex equality. But, perhaps more importantly, she actively embodied it. 

Trained as a teacher, she taught high school history in Novato for a few years. But once my brother and I came along, she looked for job opportunities that gave her a little more flexibility with her schedule. First, she opened a fine print poster shop with her sister. And, just in case anyone reading this doubts the patriarchy, they were the first women in San Francisco to receive a business loan without being required to have a husband as a cosigner. That’s right, it wasn’t until 1974 that a bank in San Francisco (liberal bastion that it is) deigned to lend money for a business to a woman without requiring a man to be involved. I’m not sure why she and my aunt closed the shop, but a few years later my mom ended up at a non-profit called School Volunteers whose mandate was, you guessed it, to get people to volunteer in the San Francisco Unified School District. 

But then, when I was about ten or so, she made a seismic career change. She got hired by Merrill Lynch as a stockbroker. She did not have an MBA or any experience in finance outside the small stock portfolio she and my dad had started with their savings. I’m not entirely sure how she pulled it off and she’s admitted that she was terrified. But I never saw that fear as a kid. As a kid, it made perfect sense to me that my mom could do anything she put her mind to. She was just an extremely capable person. I never doubted her.

She was one of only three women working as brokers in the San Francisco office and it was, as you would expect, a highly competitive, finance bro atmosphere. We’re talking Wall Street in the 1980s – the Reaganomics, “Greed is Good”, Michael Miliken junk bond era. Despite being a fish out of water (or a woman out of the kitchen - see what I did there?) my mom found a niche by finding an underrepresented population that she could serve: Women. Instead of looking for wealthy men looking to get wealthier, my mom concentrated on women and couples who were saving up for their kids’ college tuition and/or for retirement. Middle class folk hoping to strengthen their financial position so they could provide for their families. And she fucking killed it. 

So, yeah, my mom is awesome. Smart, courageous, hard working and hard headed. She raised her boys to believe that women were capable of anything and she lived that belief and proved its validity…everyday.

My father is an ally

But my mom had something many women in our society don’t have. She had a husband who believed in her and supported her and who was a feminist himself. Which is to say, my father took the nurturing aspect of parenthood very seriously. He didn’t stay late at the office, he came home for dinner every night. He cooked (not as much as mom to be clear), he did dishes, he read books to my brother and I, came to our events and teacher conferences, and, most importantly, he exemplified belief in his wife.

What makes all this more remarkable is that my folks were making it all up as they went along. They were born during WWII so were the spear tip of the Boomer generation. Their parents, all born in the teens of the 1900s, were adherents to “traditional” gender norms. 

[Sidenote #2: It’s a little more complicated than that (as it always is). Both of grandmothers had college degrees and worked outside the home and both were wildly capable women with strong convictions and stronger wills. Thinking about it now, I’d argue they also taught me to be a feminist, but that’s a story for another essay.]

So while my mom and dad were both raised with strong female role models, they were also raised in a world where, for instance, women couldn’t get business loans without a male’s signature. Which is to say that the ideals they had about the equality of the sexes in the late 60s and 70s were something of a test run. There were bumps along the road. But the end result was two male children who are staunch feminists and supporters of women.

Life lessons

Besides writing this in honor of my mother and father and as an acknowledgement of their loveliness, I have a few clear lessons to share:

It’s important that father’s show up as nurturers and supportive spouses and that they instill their boys with a respect and reverence for women. Parents should instill in their daughters the idea that women should, as much as possible, ignore society’s impulse to devalue them. And, when the time comes, they should hold their partners to high standards of support and participation in both the rudimentary and the emotional tasks of child rearing and running a household. The most basic goals of feminism are only possible with male support. As with every calamitous catastrophe we’ve infected our society with, the solutions to patriarchy and misogyny can only be achieved if we actively raise our children to be better than we are. Especially our boys. The girls generally figure it out on their own. 

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Internet of the day

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good

– Gearhead: So it turns out that the two gears on manual reel push mowers are designed to go on a particular side. In fact, one of the gears was stamped with a little “L” which turns out to mean “left.” Anyway, I’ve swapped the gears and my mower now mows forward like it should and not backwards like it shouldn’t. I gotta sharpen the blades and we can call my mower restoration a success. Woot woot!

– Soup: My mother once said, “If everyone made a pot of soup once a week, the world would be a better place.” I couldn’t agree more. Last week, I made a lovely fish stew – Cioppino style – that was hearty and bursting with umami. Last night, I made a white bean and kale soup with Impossible meat sausage. Again, so damned good. I know it’s summertime so perhaps not exactly soup weather for most of you. But here in San Francisco, it’s always soup weather and that couldn’t make me happier because soup is the best!

– Soccer: I hope some of you got to enjoy the utter abundance of international futbol we were just privy to with the Euros and Copa America tournaments over the last three weeks. There’s something so lovely about the celebratory nationalism of sports (especially in contrast to political nationalism). Just fans in their colors singing in unison and rooting on their teams, expressing pride of place and pride of identity with an insatiable joyfulness.

Also, while not everybody finds the game interesting or entertaining – 22 people often haplessly knocking a ball about a big rectangle lawn – the beauty of the game when all that haplessness comes together in brief moments of pure clarity of purpose is, in my opinion, just sublime. The game is hard, so when it’s played well, it truly becomes the “beautiful game.” Congrats to Spain and Argentina and their fans. Congrats to Germany for running what everyone is saying was a lovely tournament (although it sounds like your train system is a bit, . I think that was broadly true of the US until the final game when all hell broke loose at the Miami stadium.  

The Bad:

– VP Hopeful: JD Vance scares me. He’s got the odor of staying power (dude’s only 39) and the direction of his politics over time have been entirely in the wrong direction. 

The Ugly:

– Political Violence: I can’t say that political violence is never necessary. For instance, I think the US Civil War was a righteous endeavor by the North. The Union could have simply allowed the South to secede. And that would have been calamitous for the people being enslaved in the South. There are times when fighting is necessary.

That said, I also believe that violence rarely, if ever, inspires the outcomes the perpetrators believe it will. The repercussions of violence are far too stochastic for it to be an effective method for change. The average person abhors violence, flinches away from it rather than being drawn to it. This is one reason why non-violent political action is so often effective, because it can force the “powers that be” to be the perpetrators of the violence which causes revulsion in the general populace and thus sparks political action away from the status quo.

All of this is to say, while we currently know next to nothing about the dipshit manchild who tried to murder Donald J. Trump, I’m quite certain the repercussions of his choice will not be what he intended, whatever it is that he intended. That said, I couldn’t be more relieved that he was a white male who appears to have had right of center political beliefs. That fact alone could save some lives.

Also, don’t fucking shoot people. 

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Finally: