It’s no secret that many Ob-Gyns and hospitals push pain medication and C-sections. When I was pregnant with my first child not so long ago, and went to an orientation at the hospital for expecting parents who planned to deliver there, the head nurse told me upon hearing that I hoped for an unmedicated birth, “Listen, sweetie, either you’re going to be on drugs, or I am.” The national C-section rate is at an astronomical 32%, and when asked what a hospital could have provided in the Virginia case that the midwife could not, several medical experts replied to ABC News that a hospital could have delivered the baby via C-section (the precise thing the mother was trying to avoid by having a home birth). And of course, as anybody familiar with the work of Ina May Gaskin and her companions can tell you, there are midwifery techniques for dealing with birth complications – including breech presentations – which most ObGyns either do not know or don’t have the time/flexibility to provide in a hospital setting.

And in the case of Ms. Carr, while she was unlicensed, she wasn’t untrained (from the Washington Post article):

Carr earned certification as a midwife in 1997 through the North American Registry of Midwives. The certification — certified professional midwife, or CPM — is recognized in some states and not others. It doesn’t have minimum education requirements, but the process includes apprenticeships and exams.

The confusing part for parents, Macones said, is that there are several types of midwives and they have similar titles, so it might not be clear what level of education and training a practitioner has. CPMs learn through an apprenticeship model, while certified nurse midwives have years of academic study and clinical internships.

In Maryland and the District, there is no license for CPMs, only for nurse midwives. In Virginia, CPMs can practice if they get a license; according to state records, the state has 55 licensed CPMs.

To get a license in Virginia, however, a midwife has to agree she will not administer medications (including, say, anti-hemorrhaging medications). You almost have to wonder, what’s the point, then?

In between prosecuting the midwife and finger-pointing at the mother, is anybody looking at the actual reasons that this happened? No, of course not – this is a story which replicates myth, about an “arrogant” midwife and a “dumbass” mother, both too arrogant and caught up in lofty romantic ideals to pay attention to hard (throbbing) science. This is yet another reminder how the medical community and society as a whole responds to women’s bodies (especially when there may be a baby involved).

Women, particularly when it comes to reproduction, are seen as stubborn and emotional self-centereds who need to be managed. This crops up in people asking whether midwifery is “merely unreflective defiance”, it crops up in the repeated comments regarding Karen Carr’s “arrogance,” and in the repeated characterization of women who have home births as selfish creatures more interested in an “experience” than in the health of their infant. Women die while receiving breast implants, people struggling with cancer refuse chemotherapy, we make ourselves sick on birth control and most people shrug and say, “Hey, informed consent.”

Add a fetus and that goes out the window.

Birthing at home can be dangerous. Birthing in a hospital can be dangerous, especially if you’re having a C-section. Birthing, in general, can be dangerous. Women die regularly from childbirth all over the world, but the differences in those rates are not based on whether they’re “at home” or “in the hospital” – it’s because of their age, it’s because of their stress levels, it’s because of their health going into the pregnancy and during the pregnancy, and it’s because regardless of whether they’re at home or in the hospital in some places there aren’t enough qualified birth assistants at all. A low-risk home birth in the United States is not much more dangerous, if at all than giving birth in a US hospital (it’s certainly much safer than giving birth in a hospital in many countries), and home birth midwives are utilized successfully in other “developed” nations.

But the dismay and even vitriol towards midwives and women who’ve had home births is really about “protecting” the fetus at the expense of the mother. The mother, being an imperfect container, is seen as the biggest threat to her baby and therefore must be managed and controlled. Any significance or enjoyment the mother may get out of the birth experience is, at best, a happy side benefit – what’s really important is the product.

And that’s assuming we consider the baby all that important. There’s been a chart going around the past few years about the “tragic death toll of home births” – check out the bottom, though, to see that it only covers white women. You can go to the website for the Center of Disease Control and run the numbers yourselves (they don’t list all the death rates per 1000, but they give you the data so you can figure it out yourself). I looked at the data for 2005. Turns out the data for women in Asian/Pacific Islander and Black/African-American populations shows a lower infant death rate for births attended by certified midwives out of the hospital than the death rate for births attended by doctors inside the hospital.

Is that getting published? No, of course not. Because the concern about midwives isn’t about making sure women can make educated decisions, or about giving them the best possible care – it’s about using fear to control and manage women. Karen Carr now gets to be the scapegoat – a well-publicized case to remind the public that our bodies are terrifying, dangerous things, and the best thing for everyone is if we listen to the nice men in the white coats.

I don’t think that radical feminism is terribly complex at all. It’s quite simple, and here it is:

“Man and wife”

Now, stop thinking. Seriously. Because those of you who didn’t get the “a man is a rape supporter if” post are probably not going to get this, either. Do you speak another language – one that has a fundamentally different place of reference than English? You need to access the part of your brain that lets you do that, that way of listening. You need to stop trying to translate into the language you’re most comfortable speaking. Just put whatever you’re carrying in your mind right down, drop it, listen. I am not circling anything.

Man is the “I”, the eye and the center through which everything else is seen. That makes an anthropologist write, “The men pushed their boats into the river and left, living the women and children behind in the empty village.” A man, and the man’s wife. The man is in two places.

To be a man, is to be. To be anything else, is to be naught. Anything not-man, we call woman. Anything not-man is empty, and has to be filled. Dandelion fluff, or clouds, or dark craziness from being empty. It has no fixed point, no place, no clear observation, because the eye is a man’s “I”.

So women have two eyes. Their own eye is clouded, covered over, because to walk through a man’s world you need to borrow man’s eye. We educate women to use man’s eyes, to speak from his “I”, to be a strong woman is to use man’s “I”.

Simple, right? Fractal it.

Race, class, heterosexism, the concept of nation-states, military hierarchies, television, map-making, the reasonable person standard, and airplane seats.

There is one “I”, one eye. The perspective may recognize conflicting values, even fight within its own nature, but that’s what it is. What are Left and Right to me? A two-headed beast snarling at itself.

The same pattern for control, for “I”, for center, repeat them selves into our selves. A person from the Cherokee nation tries to talk cosmology to an Anglo Christian, and hears, “Oh, yes, I see how that’s similar to my own beliefs on God”; he can dress in a suit and run a plantation and go to Washington, D.C., and it’s still not enough to avoid Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, because a “fair” fight is on their terms, their rules, their boundaries, their booby-and-booty traps, and that’s losing before the game started.

There you go. I’ve explained patriarchal society. You’re welcome.

She’s interesting to me in part because her life has so easily interwoven the understood consensus in the US (particularly during the time she lived) about mothers, psychological illness, sexual molestation, and gifted women. She could easily have appeared as a character in a novel. How do we create the lives we lead based on the stories we’re told?

Here are a few of her works. For what it’s worth, she allegedly had an “alternate personality” named Elizabeth, but I don’t know if that Elizabeth is the one being referenced in the first poem. Enjoy.

Elizabeth Gone

1.

You lay in the nest of your real death,
Beyond the print of my nervous fingers
Where they touched your moving head;
Your old skin puckering, your lungs’ breath
Grown baby short as you looked up last
At my face swinging over the human bed,
And somewhere you cried, let me go let me go.

You lay in the crate of your last death,
But were not you, not finally you.
They have stuffed her cheeks, I said;
This clay hand, this mask of Elizabeth
Are not true. From within the satin
And the suede of this inhuman bed,
Something cried, let me go let me go.

2.

They gave me your ash and bony shells,
Rattling like gourds in the cardboard urn,
Rattling like stones that their oven had blest.
I waited you in the cathedral of spells
And I waited you in the country of the living,
Still with the urn crooned to my breast,
When something cried, let me go let me go.

So I threw out your last bony shells
And heard me scream for the look of you,
Your apple face, the simple creche
Of your arms, the August smells
Of your skin. Then I sorted your clothes
And the loves you had left, Elizabeth,
Elizabeth, until you were gone.

Her Kind

have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Buying the Whore

You are the roast beef I have purchased
and I stuff you with my very own onion.

You are a boat I have rented by the hour
and I steer you with my rage until you run aground.

You are a glass that I have paid to shatter
and I swallow the pieces down with my spit.

You are the grate I warm my trembling hands on,
searing the flesh until it’s nice and juicy.

You stink like my Mama under your bra
and I vomit into your hand like a jackpot
its cold hard quarters.

The Child Bearers

Jean, death comes close to us all,
flapping its awful wings at us
and the gluey wings crawl up our nose.
Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs,
whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle,
mine pushed into gnawing a stilbestrol cancer
I passed on like hemophilia,
or yours in the seventh grade, with her spleen
smacked in by the balance beam.
And we, mothers, crumpled, and flyspotted
with bringing them this far
can do nothing now but pray.

Let us put your three children
and my two children,
ages ranging from eleven to twenty-one,
and send them in a large air net up to God,
with many stamps, real air mail,
and huge signs attached:
SPECIAL HANDLING.
DO NOT STAPLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE!
And perhaps He will notice
and pass a psalm over them
for keeping safe for a whole,
for a whole God-damned life-span.

And not even a muddled angel will
peek down at us in our foxhole.
And He will not have time
to send down an eyedropper of prayer for us,
the mothering thing of us,
as we drip into the soup
and drown
in the worry festering inside us,
lest our children
go so fast
they go.

I would like to specifically thank the posters of 4chan.org, the Men’s Rights reddit section, and innumerable Facebook users.

Do I get to be a meme now?

EDIT x2: I don’t think it’s too much to ask that, if you want to make a substantive comment on this post, please first read through the comments below. I’m spamming a lot of comments which are asking some of the same exact questions I previously answered. If you don’t think my answer is sufficient, or you have a point you’d like to add that hasn’t been raised, then that’s fine, but I’m seeing a lot of “point by point refutations showing that these do not make a man a rapist,” which makes it obvious that they have not read any of the comments, since I’m not even discussing rapists and that becomes very clear in the comments. Save your time, save my time, read the comments first.

—–

This is a handy guide for women who involve themselves with men. I’ve recently received a bunch of comments from men who say that they aren’t rape supporters because they (1) have never “raped” a woman and/or (2) are gay. If you are around a man who claims to be anti-rape, see how he stacks up.

A man is a rape-supporter if…

• He has ever sexually engaged with any woman while she was underage, drunk, high, physically restrained, unconscious, or subjected to psychological, physical, economic, or emotional coercion.
• He defends the current legal definition of rape and/or opposes making consent a defense.
• He has accused a rape victim of having “buyer’s remorse” or wanting to get money from the man.
• He has blamed a woman for “putting herself in a situation” where she “could be” attacked.
• He has procured a prostitute.
• He characterizes prostitution as a “legitimate” “job” “choice” or defends men who purchase prostitutes.
• He has ever revealed he conceives of sex as fundamentally transactional.
• He has gone to a strip club.
• He is anti-abortion.
• He is pro-”choice” because he believes abortion access will make women more sexually available.
• He frames discussions of pornography in terms of “freedom of speech.”
• He watches pornography in which women are depicted.
• He watches any pornography in which sexual acts are depicted as a struggle for power or domination, regardless of whether women are present.
• He characterizes the self-sexualizing behavior of some women, such as wearing make-up or high heels, as evidence of women’s desire to “get” a man.
• He tells or laughs at jokes involving women being attacked, sexually “hoodwinked,” or sexually harassed.
• He expresses enjoyment of movies/musicals/TV shows/plays in which women are sexually demeaned or presented as sexual objects
• He mocks women who complain about sexual attacks, sexual harassment, street cat-calls, media depictions of women, or other forms of sexual objectification.
• He supports sexual “liberation” and claims women would have more sex with (more) men if society did not “inhibit” them.
• He states or implies that women who do not want to have sex with men are “inhibited,” “prudes,” “stuck-up,” “man-haters,” or psychologically ill.
• He argues that certain male behaviors towards women are “cultural” and therefore not legitimate subjects of feminist attention.
• He ever subordinates the interests of women in a given population to the interests of the men in that population, or proceeds in discussions as if the interests of the women are the same as the interests of the men.
• He promotes religious or philosophical views in which a woman’s physical/psychological/emotional/sexual well-being is subordinated to a man’s.
• He describes female anatomy in terms of penetration, or uses terms referencing the supposed “emptiness” of female anatomy when describing women.
• He defends the physical abuse of women on the grounds of “consent.”
• He defends the sexualization or sexual abuse of minor females on the grounds of “consent” or “willingness.”
• He promotes the idea that women as a class are happier or more fulfilled if they have children, or that they “should” have children.
• He argues that people (or just “men”) have sexual “needs.”
• He discusses the “types” of women he finds sexually appealing and/or attempts to demean women by telling them he does not find them sexually appealing.
• He sexually objectifies lesbians or lesbian sexual activity.
• He defends these actions by saying that some women also engage in them.

So, let’s see how many women reading this know at least one male over the age of 18 who does not fit this list. Anybody?

A happy little post inspired by, you guessed it, another comment on Feministe. I found the whole thread pretty problematic – it’s chock full of people mocking animal ethicists in what is, ultimately, self-parody. Orwell wrote that one of the greatest indictators of an intelligent mind is the ability to wholly believe two contradictory ideas at the same time; if Orwell was alive today, he would no doubt be a fun-fem.

Sophia: I’m a feminist vegetarian who USED to be an avid reader of Feministe. Now I’ve seen your true colors. As a feminist, I stand against ALL systems that cause harm. How on earth can you, as advocates of the rights of females, ignore the suffering of female dogs in puppy mills who are repeatedly raped and have their pups taken from them? Or cows who are stuffed full of hormones and have their udders hooked up to machines?

Esti: Because a lot of feminists are not advocates for the rights of “females”. They’re advocates for the rights of HUMAN BEINGS.

I’ve posited in other contexts that the idea of ownership over female reproduction probably originated in the domestication of “livestock.” Historically, there has been very little difference in how we’ve been treated in most patriarchal societies and how society conceived of non-human female mammals. Though there’s a lot of emphasis in modern feminism on our use as sex objects, I’m not by any stretch convinced that has the universal significance it has sometimes been given (Spartan and Western Puebloan societies come to mind as societies which downplay females as sex objects, though I’m not an anthropologist and my reading in this area is pretty limited). However, male control of reproduction, either directly or indirectly – which means control of females – does appear universal.

In a sense, if you believe that humans can direct other animals’ reproduction for our convenience, then it’s not a far leap of logic to suggest human female reproduction can also be “managed.” People have spent thousands of years and countless reams of paper trying to tease out why we’re “different” than other mammals, but at the end of the day the reasons are pretty much, “Because we say/think we are.” I’ve heard mother cows cry for their calves when the calves are taken away (as occurs both in meat and dairy farming) – they cry for days. As a child, I felt a great deal of empathy for them, and during those times would occasionally dream I, too, had been taken away from my mother. If we accept that we can impregnate, breed, and slaughter cattle at will, then what is the rationale for excluding humans (or at least “other” humans, and we’re all “other” to somebody, and many groups of women have been that “other”)? Is there one? We are taught in schools since we are young children that humans are different from other animals, but that smacks of an attempt to hide the man behind the curtain.

Is it a coincidence that many of the terms used in English to refer to females – whether positively or negatively – are other mammals who are domesticated or live with/around human habitation? “I feel like a cow today,” “You ugly sow,” “Bitch!”, “Hey, foxy lady,” “Ugh, what a heifer,” “Horse-face,” and so on and so forth. I also don’t think it’s any coincidence that the tactics commenters in the Feministe thread were using to mock the animal ethicists were, in large part, the exact same tactics used to attack feminism and women in general.

I’m by no means the first woman to posit any of this. Much of the premise of eco-feminism is that females will always be associated with other animals and “the natural world” because of our capacity for reproduction, and that our attitudes towards other creatures are strongly tied up with patriarchal control over women. I haven’t read Carol Adam’s The Sexual Politics of Meat yet (it’s on my list), so I can’t speak to it, but from what I’ve read she seems to explore this idea more in her book.

In short, advocating for “females” in general is advocating for the rights of female human beings. What that means for feminism – whether we should advocate vegetarianism or veganism, what that means about the futures of “domesticated” species, how that should inform things like whether to spay your cat – are more complicated questions for which I don’t claim to have an answer. But are they valid and important topics for discussion? Absolutely.

Fear not – there is a solution!

You can inject botulism into your skin and the problem will disappear like magic! Or at least it will for six months, then you have to get a repeat “treatment.”

Within the past week I’ve had two different female co-workers tell me their doctors recommended they receive botox in order to prevent sweating. Both said they sweat “a lot,” but when I asked for clarification they described amounts of sweat which sound to be perfectly normal (“I’m sweaty when I wake up”; “I sweat in the winter”; “I sweat under my suit jacket”). I’ve never noticed either co-worker to be particularly odiforous or sporting sweat stains on their clothes.

“What?” I thought. “Botox for sweating?”

Yes, that’s right, ladies! (Apparently women on Corporette have known about this since 2009 – I’m out of the loop!)

Approximately 2-3% of people in the US are estimated to have hyperhidrosis, or “excessive sweating.” In women, hyperhidrosis is one of the few early onset symptoms of Fabry disease in females, which can become fatal. Hyperhidrosis can also be caused by a number of other problems including auto-immune disorders, thyroid disorders, diabetes, and certain cancers. In most people, though, if it onset during puberty then it’s probably just genetic, and there’s nothing “wrong” with them.

Because of social factors, women seek treatment for hyperhidrosis at a rate twice that of men. And for profitability’s sake, many doctors are willing to prescribe whatever bizarre FDA-approved “treatment” the pharmaceutical corporations can manage. Hyperhidrosis, of course, is one of those “disorders” which is diagnosed by comparing people to some arbitrary “average.” Anybody falling on the upper range of the bell curve is, by definition, going to suffer the “disorder.” Since we’re shown from the time we’re little girls that we’re not supposed to sweat (unless we’re in some guy’s bed, anyway, and then it’s a glistening sheen, right?) I suspect most women have a perception that they sweat “a lot.” We’re a ready made market.

At the Botox website on “severe underarm sweating”, of course, they don’t mention any possibility that somebody who is sweating might have diabetes and perhaps should get that looked at. (And of course if you take their “self-assessment” and put in that you never have any problems and sweating never interferes with your life in any way, they diagnose you with “minor hyperhidrosis” and suggest you talk to a dermatologist to Find Out If Botox Treatment Is Right For You!)

Here, from the Botox website, is About Botox Safety:

BOTOX® and BOTOX® Cosmetic may cause serious side effects that can be life threatening. Call your doctor or get medical help right away if you have any of these problems after treatment with BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic:

•Problems swallowing, speaking, or breathing. These problems can happen hours to weeks after an injection of BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic usually because the muscles that you use to breathe and swallow can become weak after the injection. Death can happen as a complication if you have severe problems with swallowing or breathing after treatment with BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic.
•People with certain breathing problems may need to use muscles in their neck to help them breathe. These patients may be at greater risk for serious breathing problems with BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic.
•Swallowing problems may last for several months. People who cannot swallow well may need a feeding tube to receive food and water. If swallowing problems are severe, food or liquids may go into your lungs. People who already have swallowing or breathing problems before receiving BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic have the highest risk of getting these problems.
•Spread of toxin effects. In some cases, the effect of botulinum toxin may affect areas of the body away from the injection site and cause symptoms of a serious condition called botulism. The symptoms of botulism include:

• loss of strength and muscle weakness all over the body

• double vision
• blurred vision and drooping eyelids
• hoarseness or change or loss of voice (dysphonia)
• trouble saying words clearly (dysarthria)
• loss of bladder control
• trouble breathing
• trouble swallowing

These symptoms can happen hours to weeks after you receive an injection of BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic.

These problems could make it unsafe for you to drive a car or do other dangerous activities. See “What should I avoid while receiving BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic”.

There has not been a confirmed serious case of spread of toxin effect away from the injection site when BOTOX® has been used at the recommended dose to treat severe underarm sweating, blepharospasm, or strabismus, or when BOTOX® Cosmetic has been used at the recommended dose to treat frown lines.

•plans to have surgery
•had surgery on your face
•weakness of your forehead muscles, such as trouble raising your eyebrows
•drooping eyelids
•any other change in the way your face normally looks
•are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic can harm your unborn baby.
•are breast-feeding or plan to breastfeed. It is not known if BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic passes into breast milk.
Tell your doctor about all the medicines you take, including prescription and nonprescription medicines, vitamins and herbal products. Using BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic with certain other medicines may cause serious side effects. Do not start any new medicines until you have told your doctor that you have received BOTOX® or BOTOX® Cosmetic in the past.

Hmm…. Sweaty underarms, or a possibility of asphyxiation because I can’t breathe. Decisions, decisions. Or should I say, choices choices.

I dreamt that I was working in a house with many people (female and male). At one point I went down into the basement, and heard two co-workers having an argument. One was a middle-aged woman who I knew to have many children, and the other was a man who was dismissing each point that she had brought up; she told him that he would never completely understand what it is to feel because he has never known a woman’s grief. She pointed at me and said, “You know, right? We all cry. It’s okay. Just cry.”

And I started bawling. Not about anything in particular. I just dropped to the floor and sobbed.

When I was done, she rubbed my back, and looked at him and said, “Every woman contains in her an ocean of grief.” He left then, and I turned to her in surprise and said, “That’s similar to something Germaine Greer said. You’ve read The Whole Woman?”

“Who’s that?” she asked, and left the room.

We began walking together through the house, with her making comments about women’s experiences and me asking if she’d read the author who had written something similar. She had never heard of them. “Dis-memberment, yes! You’ve read Daly!” “Who? No, what I’m saying is….”

Finally I asked her, “So you’re a feminist?”

And she said, “What’s that?”

Radical feminism is by and for women. Because it arises out of our experiences, to a large extent it is self-evident. It is simple. It is easily understood. QED. It gives us words to say what we already know to be true, it reminds us that we are not alone, and at its best it showcases how other women have found their way out of the maze and helps us recognize the background.

I’ve found that if I don’t call it “feminism” – if I don’t act the way that The Academy attempts to push women to act like men (to use convoluted terms, to “explain,” to direct the conversation) – then many women will agree with nearly all the principles of radical feminism, will relate their own experiences, and have great insights.

We need consciousness raising groups again. I wonder if one of the worst things that ever happened to feminism was that it became rooted in academia; that is not where it belongs, and this is not an academic discipline.

Saw the new proposed DSM rules for gender dysphoria children on GenderTrender’s recent post, APA Releases Proposed Revisions to Diagnostic Criteria for “Transgender Children”.

I’m going to bold the ones I fit as a child, around ages 4 through 8 inclusive.

Gender Dysphoria (in Children)** [1]

A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months duration, as manifested by at least 6* of the following indicators (including A1): [2, 3, 4]

1. a strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that he or she is the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender) [5]

2. in boys, a strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire; in girls, a strong preference for wearing only typical masculine clothing and a strong resistance to the wearing of typical feminine clothing [6]

3. a strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe or fantasy play [7]

4. a strong preference for the toys, games, or activities typical of the other gender [8]

5. a strong preference for playmates of the other gender [9]

6. in boys, a strong rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play; in girls, a strong rejection of typically feminine toys, games, and activities [10]

7. a strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy [11]

8. a strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender [12]

As a child, I wasn’t uncomfortable with my physical body – only my assigned gender role. And I did experience a significant amount of discomfort over it; I can remember crying because I didn’t want to go to school. I don’t recall going into a dress without a serious fight until about the age of 10.

So, what do you know – I hit six. Apparently I was secretly a “boy” and never knew!

Kono Taeko wrote a great short story, “Toddler Hunting,” about a woman, Akiko, who cannot stand little girls but has a near obsession with little boys. (I don’t have a copy handy, so this is from memory – I may get a few points incorrect.) In the story, Akiko describes how she was a happy child until she began to feel a deep dissatisfaction about herself, like a cloying putescence which wouldn’t leave. She recalled once disecting a pupa in elementary school and, seeing the larva inside, recognized it as a reflection of herself. When she began to reach puberty, that feeling left, but from then on she could never look at girls of that age without a deep sense of revulsion. But, she began to become increasingly obsessed with little boys because they had a sense of “purity” about them. In the meantime, Akiko is involved in a “sado-masochistic” relationship with a younger man – she nearly ends up in the hospital at one point.

When I first read “Toddler Hunting” in college, I felt the same way that Akiko felt when she saw the larva. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “I’m a lot more normal than I thought I was!”

Apparently I’m not – according to the proposed changes to the DSM, I was suffering from a disorder. It isn’t because in an unconscious way I saw my assigned gender as oppressive and tried to rebel against it, it’s because I had a problem. These psychologists/psychiatrists are idiots – my five-year-old daughter can identify when young females are being “treated like dolls” instead of children, but grown men will not accept that there’s a huge difference between a girl wearing a frilly tulle dress with sequins and a boy wearing pants and a button-down.