The coming out post

Things just fall apart sometimes. Things also fall in to place. Occasionally at the same moment.

Earlier in the year I had Martha Wainwright’s ‘Bloody Motherfucking Asshole’ on frequent rotation in my head. (I was angry, okay?) But my anger was not only directed outward. In that iconic song, Wainwright says

you say my time here has been some sort of joke
that I’ve been messing around
some sort of incubating period
before I really come around

I had been waiting for someone else to say this to me to save me from having to deliver the news to myself. Waiting wasn’t working for me. I sent myself a memo.

The end of a marriage is a public event. People who’d never reached out in support of the couple before suddenly wield opinions. Strangers, Centrelink workers, small-town acquaintances, parents of your child’s friends, your hairdresser, your online connections; any and all of these people might judge you, question you, probe you for weaknesses and blame. Any of them could (and some of them will) ask you, but what about the kid/s? Any or all of them could make it about them; their own pain, their own parents’ failings, their own investment in your coupledom as a kind of talisman for monogamy.

Some people, the ones who always treated you as one part of a boxed set when you were married, will struggle the most.

(Caring about their struggle whilst you’re in the middle of your own pain will register lower on the list of priorities than belting out Martha Wainwright in the shower, by the way.)

There are many reasons I’m not with Bean’s dad anymore and I’m not going to list any of them here.

But I will say what one of them isn’t.

I did not leave my marriage because I’m queer; nor am I queer because I left my marriage. There are a lot of explanations for why I didn’t take the step of talking about the ways in which I do not fit straight until now but, sure, living the Heterosexual Marriage Lifestyle often seemed like such a powerful imperative that there wasn’t much point in finding space for anything else. Wearing a wedding ring was a shibboleth, mentioning my husband when people asked about my pregnancy or later my child, a ticket to social approval. I benefited from heteronormativity even as it erased me, erases me, and people that I love.

That’s painful.

In traditional narratives of coming out, people always ask, when did you know? And the answer is, for me, that I didn’t know and I always knew. I wasn’t able to express and I was always expressing. I was hiding in plain sight and I was never hiding. Perhaps I was never in plain sight.

Critiquing our culture’s narrow way of conceptualising sexuality and gender — and love — has been one of the themes of my parenting and of my writing about parenting. And, not unhappily, it is becoming one of the themes of my life. Because queerness is not a hat I’m trying on. It’s not even about a relationship I’m trying on.

The confessional part is this: I have always been queer. I do not remember a time, from when I began to have romantic and sexual inclinations, that those were exclusively directed at boys and men. But I also do not remember a time during my childhood or teen years where I even had the words and concepts to articulate the ways that I experienced desire and love. Knowing that I liked boys was enough, given the scripts from which I had to choose, to tell me I was not a lesbian. So I wrote my story in straight lines. I’m re-imagining it now, embracing the apocryphal entries, in a mostly positive process. And I want to write the next chapter boldly, even though it’s a little embarrassing for a thirty-something feminist to be only just learning how to express her queerness.

Embarrassment is one thing. Sadness over lost time and estrangement from self is another.

I am here, writing so personally, not only because speaking soothes me, but also because I am angry. I’m angry at the motherfucking assholes who perpetuate violence – both physical and mental – against queer youth. I am angry about the lack of visibility of bisexuality which leads to the relegation of people like me to a footnote, or a punch line.

Most of all I am writing because of this: someone said to me recently that at least Bean will find it easier to come out to her parents if it turns out that she is not heterosexual.

The best we can hope for for our children is not that there will merely be safe ports in the storm for them to reveal their true selves when they have reached a certain age. We can do better than that. We can allow them to express and explore their developing gender identities and sexualities in safety from the very beginning. We can create a world where children don’t ever ‘come out’ to their parents because their parents are witness to unabashed expressions of queer orientation from whenever they emerge. Children can, quite simply, be permitted to be who they actually are. No coercion, no erasure, no shaming.

The ritual of coming out is only a product of the lucrative heteronormative trade in closets. So however Bean comes to express her sexuality in the future, I only hope she uses her wit and loving heart to undermine the closet business that trapped her mother for so long. The rest of the story is up to her.

You should really know about…

Scarleteen!

Scarleteen is an amazing resource for young people (and not-so-young-people, actually) about sex and sexuality. In their words:

Scarleteen is an independent, grassroots sexuality education and support organization and website. Founded in 1998, Scarleteen.com is visited by around three-quarters of a million diverse people each month worldwide, most between the ages of 15 and 25. It is the highest-ranked website for sex education and sexuality advice online and has held that rank through most of its tenure.

In my words: Scarleteen is a brilliant, inclusive, comprehensive, sometimes humorous, sometimes deadly serious, socially responsible, and sorely needed resource. The site promotes positive body image and acceptance of diversity. It also teaches, very carefully and thoughtfully, about the core issues so often left out of sex education in schools: consent, boundaries, and negotiating the emotional side of sexual relationships. As an inclusive and comprehensive resource, it naturally caters to people of all genders and sexual orientations and for some people. It also helps to refer teens at risk to other services.

A lot of my readers are parents — if you didn’t know about this resource before, I urge you to go check it out and make it known to your kids. And, because of the comprehensive nature of the site (ie: it’s not abstinence only education) it doesn’t receive funding from government programmes in the US. As an independent organisation, Scarleteen relies heavily on donations. Help out if you can.

And, because this should be on every sex-ed programme in every school: Scarleteen, Consent is Sexy

Sexing the breast

Breasts, or boobs as I quite like to call them, are pretty sexy (to a lot of people). Let’s be frank: I identify as straight but I find them quite appealing in some contexts. I’ve been socialised that way, I suppose: everything is sold to us with cleavage shots. Breasts (or should I say, certain types of breasts) are beyond fetishised. They’re valorised. They’re the heroines of the piece in practically every ad slot. And hey, aside from media bombardment and fashion trends and ‘sex sells’, breasts are quite nice in and of themselves aren’t they? Soft globes of flesh, sensuous, evocative, erogenous. There’s no point denying it.

Breasts are also, of course, for feeding babies. Many of the objections to public breastfeeding or breastfeeding toddlers or, for some people, breastfeeding at all, spring from our cultural obsession with the sexy breast. We are bombarded daily with images of barely-clad breasts in a sexual context and so it is little wonder that for some people, revealing a breast is always something that is sexual, something that should be done in private. It’s no wonder that for some people, the thought of a woman’s nipple being suckled in public by anyone, even if that person is her baby or child, is squeamish-making.

This is a problem. It’s a problem because for breastfeeding rates to improve, public breastfeeding needs to be normalised. Breastfeeding beyond baby-hood needs to be normalised. We need to see more images of breasts performing their role as nurturing, nourishing organs to counteract the plethora of images of breasts as sexually alluring.

That’s why, when Kim Kardashian recently commented negatively on public breastfeeding, many lactivists were outraged. That’s why lactivists (me included) have been pointing out inconsistencies in Facebook’s ‘obscenity’ rules as applied to breastfeeding images and sexualised images. And that’s why a recent baby magazine editorial which called breastfeeding ‘creepy’ has outraged breastfeeding advocates.

All of these things are frustrating, and lactivists are right to take the offenders to task.

But there is a danger here. As I wrote here, I am a multidimensional woman. I am sexual as well as maternal. So is my body. I am not either/or. A breast that feeds a child can also excite a lover. It is also part of a body; part of its owner’s body; part of her sexual response system.

One of my favourite novels is Leaning Towards Infinity by Sue Woolfe. Among other things, it is a feminist examination of the bonds between mothers and daughters and of the ambivalence many mothers feel as they face tensions between their maternal selves and their academic and career aspirations and their sexual expression. Many years before I became a mother myself, I read this book and was fascinated by Woolfe’s descriptions of breastfeeding: the character Hypatia says When my baby sucks, my vagina contracts. It’s like sneaking an orgasm. I had never known, before, that breastfeeding could be arousing for some women: but it makes sense, perfect sense, when you learn that the hormone oxytocin is at work in milk ejection as well as orgasm. Just because we are performing maternity with our bodies doesn’t make them any less our bodies, doesn’t make them any less sexual. Perhaps, when we consider how sex and reproduction entwine and interact in bodily ways, it makes us more so.

My experience of breastfeeding was not like Hypatia’s. I didn’t find it remotely sexy or arousing. I imagine that if I had have, it would be hard to write about it here. People would, quite frankly, find it ‘creepy’ if I did (I may well have found it creepy myself). We are all far more comfortable with a big red line being drawn between maternity and sexuality (hello Madonna/whore complex!) and I’m afraid that many breastfeeding advocates aren’t much different.

We have to move past this. We have to, because a woman doesn’t cease to have a sexual side once she gives birth. Because women (like Kim Kardashian) who present their breasts as sexually alluring don’t deserve to be slut-shamed for playing to cultural expectations. Because some women do find breastfeeding ‘creepy’ – or difficult – and those women mustn’t be silenced. Because if lactivists wish to claim that breastfeeding is normal and natural, it’s laughable for us to also suggest, even unwittingly, that sex and the sensuality of breasts is unnatural and abnormal. Because some women struggle to breastfeed because it triggers memories of sexual abuse or assault, and when we talk about breastfeeding as if a breast is never sexualised we erase those women. Because the ways in which parenting is a sensual experience, the (non-sexual but nevertheless sensual) pleasures of skin-skin contact and intimacy with our children, shouldn’t be minimised or denied, least of all by breastfeeding advocates. And because we’re all individuals here: our relationships with our bodies, our children, our sexuality are complex and multifaceted and changeable. Feminism is about fighting against simplifying those relationships, against reducing them to stereotypes and simple binaries.

It’s also about fighting for bodily autonomy. My breasts, they are mine – not my child’s or my partner’s – they are not either/or, and what I do with them and how I feel about that is personal, individual, and completely up to me.

***

A number of great pieces have been written about these very issues lately. Arwyn at Raising My Boychick posted this excellent piece which, I wish to acknowledge, has informed and inspired my own post. Go read it and the comments too.

PhD in Parenting has an excellent break-down of the problems with that ‘creepy’ editorial.

Her Bad Mother wrote this great piece about the responses to Kim Kardashian’s offending tweet, and the slippery-slope to slut-shaming.

Quick hit: vulva chic

I wrote this post a while back about labiaplasty and the pressure to for perfection to extend even to one’s nether regions. Well, here’s a fascinating article which pretty much confirms what I’d suspected: the men promoting and performing this surgery don’t care a wit about women’s pleasure. (via Melinda Tankard Reist)

Nevermind though, because if surgery’s not your thing, you can still have a genital makeover! There’s waxing, bleaching, dyeing (pink bits have never been pinker!), ‘facials’ to help you face the day down there… and now, vajazzling. Way to put some sparkle in your day!

Shouting out loud

I don’t want my kid to grow up in a culture so pornified that tweens are buying adult-style lingerie and wearing it as outer wear. I’m angry that when I went to buy my two year old daughter jeans at Target, the only ones I could find were ‘skinny jeans’, so I bought her a boy pair instead (let’s not get started on why there must be gendered jeans for two year olds in the first place). I’m sad that my pre-pubescent sister-in-law obsesses about her waist and whether she looks fashionable enough and fashionably thin enough. It enrages me that everything from brazillian waxing to Playboy branded pencil cases is being marketed to children as desirable. Being desirable themselves is the ultimate goal that we’re peddling to our tweens and teenagers. Magazines and other media, clothes and cosmetic sellers are teaching girls as young as eight to pursue sexual attractiveness as a life choice. And if girls are the tantalisers, the bait, the holders of only Pussy Power, then where does that leave boys? The inevitable role is predator. Be sucked into the vortex of body image fears and feel obligated to spend on cosmetics and other external image enhancers, like girls, or heap scorn on all that by playing Grand Theft Auto and learning how to be violent instead. It’s not a great choice. In online games, in advertising – in the cultural script – girls are speaking the lines of prostitutes and boys are swaggering like pimps.

You think I’m exaggerating and overreacting? I wish it were so. Welcome to The Rape Culture, now showing on screens inside children’s bedrooms next door to you.

I’m not a wowser, I’m not a prude. I’m not a moraliser. I’m not even particularly interested in being sentimental about ‘natural’ or ‘simple’ childhood. But negotiating gender roles and boundaries and learning to adhere to these or in fact to blur and change them; developing awareness of sexuality, consent, attraction, pleasure, orientation; exploring the edges of the adult world in a to-and-fro dance between the sandpit and the grown-up sphere — these are all things which take time. These are things which children should be free to do on their own terms and within the safe boundaries of their family and community values.

Sexual commerce has no place in childhood. Objectification of women and the promotion of sexual violence as titillating is bad enough without adding younger and younger girls into the mix. When we remove the boundaries of child/adult, when an eight year old wears a padded bra and a t-shirt that says I put out for shoes, we have a problem. Fuckability should never be sold to kids because kids aren’t available to be fucked. End of.

So what are we going to do about it?

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a meeting about this issue, organised by Barefoot Magazine. It was inspiring as well as depressing: Melinda Tankard Reist and Julie Gale of KidsFree2BKids have both made great progress in battling retailers and advertisers. But there is more work to be done, and I couldn’t help but notice the hundred or so people sitting around me were not exactly a diverse bunch. Most of us were mothers (a good portion came with breastfeeding or homebirthing parenting groups) and presumably, most of us were feminists or sympathetic to feminist causes. Most of us were white. And the number of men who came along? Exactly two.

The attendees of last night’s function are probably not a an accurate reflection of the people in the community who are concerned – or could potentially be concerned – about the sexualisation of children and young girls in particular. (Being a Barefoot magazine event held in a relatively affluent suburb is obviously heavily self-selecting). But even so, it is clear that when academics and social justice advocates (and feminist bloggers) address this issue they/we are largely preaching to the choir.

So we’ve got to make the choir bigger, and a whole lot louder. One way to do that is to support organisations like Collective Shout, who are

a new grassroots campaigns movement mobilising and equipping individuals and groups to target corporations, advertisers, marketers and media which objectify women and sexualise girls to sell products and services.

Collective Shout exposes corporations, advertisers, marketers and media engaging in practices which are offensive and harmful especially to women and girls, but also to men and boys.

Collective Shout is for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture and the way its messages have become entrenched in mainstream society, presenting distorted and dishonest ideas about women and girls, sexuality and relationships.

I urge you to sign up – they will help you be an activist from your own keyboard.

And the other thing we can do is simply that – shout. I’m using my voice quite literally here (and figuratively at home when I am choosing what I buy for my daughter and what media she sees). How will you use your voice?

Get your hands off my daughter Tony Abbot (or what I will tell my child about virginity)

Thanks to our opposition leader Tony Abbott, the topic of virginity (specifically, women’s virginity) has been a media talking point lately.  Those unfamiliar with the Tony Abbott ‘virginitygate’ might want to click here to read A Shiny New Coin’s awesome Abbott-smackdown. She writes

The fact is, we don’t want politicians to moralise while they tax us. We don’t want politicians who don’t trust us to do the right thing by our own selves. We want politicians who make sure the garbage is collected and the trains run on time and there is health care, education and safety provided to every person in this country regardless of gender, age, race, ability and class.  The smart, capable women in his own family, in fact, are among the several million others in the country who don’t give a shit what he thinks. Perhaps it’s time he started listening to them?

Well, this smart, capable woman would have a thing or two to say to Tony Abbott if I ever had the displeasure of his company. But right now, this issue has got me thinking and talking about what this concept of female-virginty-as-gift means to me as the mother of a daughter.

My little Bean barely even knows that her body is her own – but soon she will know that there are people, many people, a majority of people even, who would like to tell her what she is and isn’t allowed to do with it. Sometimes, those people might be me or her father although we will both try not to be those people, at least not too often.

Frequently, those people will be men who don’t have a body like hers. Sometimes, these men will be influential and persuasive. Sometimes they will be doctors or preachers or television personalities - or politicians.

And so I tell her this now, and will repeat it in different ways as she grows and understands more about the world:

Your body is your own, and you get to decide what you want to do with it. Even – no, especially – when it comes to sex.

One day we will talk about safety and consent and privacy and health and relationships and social ramifications and ethics and family expectations and ideology and emotions. All of these things (and more) will influence what you do with your body, as they influence what I do with mine. But the deciding vote lies with someone and that someone is you. Just you.

Your body and its ability to experience and give sexual pleasure is a precious gift, just as some people say. A gift for you. I hope you enjoy it and make the most of it in your own way on your own terms in your own good time, and safely. But I won’t tell you to save it up to give to someone special because it cannot be regifted. It’s yours, all yours. When you’re older you’ll probably want to share it and that’s wonderful – and optional – and either way it won’t define you.

Some of the people who want to tell you what you can do with your body also want to define what sex is. They want to say that the real kind of sex, the kind that counts, is penis-in-vagina (PIV). They want to say that there is something especially significant about PIV, because it involves a woman ‘giving herself’ to a man, and because it is the kind of sex that can lead to pregnancy. They want to say that until you have PIV sex, you’ve not had sex at all, and that the first person you have PIV sex with is the person who ‘takes’ your virginity and should only be someone you are married to.

Well,  Bean, you don’t have to believe what they say because those people are at best simplistic thinkers and at worst, offensive bigots who wish to deny all expressions of sexual love that do not fit into their boxes marked ‘hetero, cis, married.’

Sex can be with another person of your own gender, or a person of a different gender.  Sex can involve no penetration at all. So the first time you have sex might not be the first time you have PIV (if, indeed, you ever have PIV sex, or sex at all.) And the first time you have sex will probably not happen with the person you marry, if you marry. And there won’t be fanfare: no public holiday will be declared, no parallel universe will be revealed, no one will be able to tell that this has happened just by looking at you.

And all of that is okay, and it is private; it is not the business of any person who would wish to control your body and what it does, especially if that person is a politician.Your body is your own. Love it, care for it, enjoy it, own it.

Boys have a penis and girls have a?

Little Bean can’t talk yet (unless you count enthusiastic “dadda dadda dad!” as talking, and I don’t, because she can’t say “mum”. Until then I have selective deafness). She does understand quite a lot of words though and it’s only a matter of time before she starts that delightful process of wanting to name everything in her environment.

Eyes and ears and mouth and nose will be pretty easy words to teach her. And bellybutton and knees.

It gets a little tricker in between there though.

I strongly believe that all children need to know how to speak about their bodies using the proper words, for self-protection, as well as creating a healthy self-image free of shame and the need to point and giggle at art galleries. And clearly we can’t rely on schools to take over the work of teaching young folk what’s what and what shouldn’t go where at the moment and why. Today’s Sunday Age headline Sex Ed For 10 Year Olds is meant to be provocative I suppose but personally I think at a time when the sexualisation of children starts earlier and earlier and adolescent cases of chlamydia are at epidemic proportions, starting at 10 months is more sensible. Ten year olds can probably learn more about sex from their Bratz dolls than they would in sex ed classes.

So education begins at home. But there is the problem of language. If Bean was a boy, we’d have the very simple and respectable word penis to rely on. And at times that seemed too clinical, there’d be the innocuous willy. And older boys have the luxury of great choice: the widely used and utilitarian dick or the proudly masculine cock being two of the more popular options.  Instead, I have a daughter, and so I must choose between the anatomically correct (since we’d be referring to her external genitalia) vulva or the more widely used and recognised vagina. For more irreverent moments, we’re left with the archaic and confusing fanny, the asexual and misleading front-bottom or even one anti-sexual and horrifying suggestion I heard: no-no parts. When she’s grown, it’s porn terms like pussy or the misppropriated, negatively-weighted cunt. (Hey, if James McAvoy can say it in Atonement I can say it here. And at home. And I do.)

I did toy with the idea of reclaiming the c-word in the most vital way by giving it to my daughter.

But I live in the real world where little Isabella returning home from a playdate at our house saying ‘mummy, guess what word I learned today…’ wouldn’t only spell the end of playdates at our house but lead to a lifetime of being whispered about in the local supermarket queue. And not just because I have more than 12 items in my basket.

So, vagina it is. Unless the three of you can think of a better alternative.