Category Archives: pregnancy

Feminism and Judgement

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Recently The Frisky did an article called “The Soapbox: On Feminism & Judging Other Women.” It was in response to another article that (duh) judged women and their decision to stay at home. I’ve been very open about how I feel regarding stay at home moms. Guys, these women are home with children all day… that’s who they talk to, that’s who has control over the TV, that’s it. My seven year old nephew came to visit me for a week and within 4 hours I wanted to rip my hair out because I had watched Pokemon, Great Adventure, and Kung Fu Panda 2 and not one episode of SVU on a Saturday. It takes strength to stay at home with kids and to be judged for it.

But I digress. The point of this article is not about stay at home, it’s about judging. I’ve been told I’m very judgmental and frankly, I don’t see it that way. I’m very opinionated and I also don’t really care what people want to hear so I tell the truth. I don’t play nice and therefore I am called judgmental. If someone asks for my opinion and I give it honestly does that mean I’m judging them? Does it make my opinion any more right than theirs? I don’t think so. I guess that’s the beauty of “opinion.”

Feminism needs to get over it. Yes, I said it. Feminism is about equality and equal human rights – it’s not about man-bashing or man-hating, about working or not working, about getting married or staying single. It has nothing to do with personal decisions. Feminism is the fight for equality when you make those decisions. If I decide to work. I should be paid the same dollar amount that a man would be paid if we are doing the same job and have equal experience and qualifications. I don’t understand how that is still not common knowledge and practice. My vagina does not mean I should make less money or that my education and experience periodically leaks from my body because I have a different hole than a man. It’s ludicrous to think that because a person has a dangly body part instead of …

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Feminists For Attachment Parenting

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photo of time magazine attachment parenting pics In the journal “Sex Roles,” a study was done regarding “attachment parenting.” Apparently, feminists are more likely to defend “attachment parenting” than people who identify as “non-feminists.” And you know what I have to say about that? Hogwash … I call hogwash on all of this. I do not think that feminists are definitively for “attachment parenting” all across the board, and I’m going to keep using quotes because I find that title for that behavior ridiculous.

Personally, I’m pretty sure this is just a pack mentality situation. Feminists are so used to fighting and protecting women doing what they feel they need to do that they’ve lost sight of some of the actual issues. Attachment parenting will never be okay with me. Seeing a 5-year-old boy with his mouth on his mother’s breast will never be okay to me. Buy organic, people! Or frequent a farmers market if you are so concerned about the nutrition your kids are receiving.

“Attachment parenting” is causing a whole bunch of mental issues that no one seems to want to discuss or own up to. I’m in a baby book under what not to do because my mother rocked me to sleep. She said I was her last baby and she was going to rock me no matter what anyone said. Doctors and friends told her that if she didn’t let me gain independence I would have a hard time leaving her and they were right. I had horrible separation anxiety from my mother and my home. There were several times in my life from ages 6-22 that I couldn’t leave my house because my anxiety was so bad it was the only place I ever felt safe. It took a lot of work to get over that and sometimes I still feel the need to get on a plane and hole up in my mother’s house, and yes, I blame a lot of that on the rocking to sleep and the coddling that my mother defended so vehemently. So what exactly would breast feeding ’til age 7 done to me?

Feminists just want to protect women and that is a noble fight, but sometimes you have to choose your battles. Just because a woman does it, it doesn’t mean it’s right or it’s defendable. Everyone has a right to parent their child the way they see fit and society doesn’t need to be sticking their nose in people’s homes unless the child is in danger, but when you put it on the cover of Time magazine, you make it society’s business and that’s where the feminists come to protect. They’re like the cavalry. But feminists! Please stop and reconsider, or maybe I should just say “consider.” Consider the issue and the repercussions before you jump in and fight the good fight … some fights just aren’t worth having, and frankly, that’s because whatever you’re doing in your personal life may not be suitable for someone else. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander? Well. Not necessarily.



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Bubba Carpenter’s Mississippi Abortion Law: “Let ‘Em Use Coat-Hangers”

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At first, I thought this was just a journalist poking fun. I thought it was a cheeky explanation of the video I was about to watch. Surely no one would really say “But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do,” as a response to critics saying your new law to “literally [stopping] abortion in the state of Mississippi.” Because you do realize what’ll eventually happen, right? That it would bring the return of coat hanger abortions? And no one in their right mind would consider something like that, yes? Especially not a State Representative! … Right?

Wrong! That is exactly what Mississippi Republican State Representative Bubba Carpenter said. That was his actual response! All of this was caught on video and posted on YouTube, but if you try to view the video now it, of course, has been taken down by request. Me, I’m virtually speechless. I have no words to express how idiotic, loathsome, and just downright unfathomable this behavior is. Even those words don’t feel like enough.

His exact speech was:

“We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital. … It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to [deal with]  Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.’ That’s what we’ve heard over and over and over. But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … your values do not have to be everyone else’s values, because, quite frankly, that is not part of the government’s job. If we’re speaking in generalizations, then I’m sorry, Mississippi, but you have no values and no morals. The only thing you have is an agenda and it’s a poor one, at that.



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Time Magazine Depicts Woman Breastfeeding Three-Year-Old

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Time magazine is the topic du jour because of their controversial cover of a woman breastfeeding a three-year-old boy. Is it over-mothering? Is it offensive? Is it inappropriate? Did you not care enough because you didn’t breastfeed until your child could stop, pop your breast out of their mouth and say, “Thank you, Mommy, I’ve had enough now”?

Breastfeeding has always been a hot button issue from the healthy benefits of it and ‘how dare you deny your child something like that’ to ‘don’t do that in public, that’s atrocious’. But this, for me, crosses a line. It’s partially Time’s fault, as they purposefully posed the picture this way. They were the ones who wanted people to be uncomfortable and angry and start talking about them. It was marketing. I get it. But that doesn’t take away the fact that it does happen. In my opinion, women are breastfeeding for far too long, the new trend is called “attachment parenting.”

There is a triad of attachment parenting: breastfeeding into the toddler stage and beyond, co-sleeping, and “baby wearing,” meaning the infant is forever attached to the mother in one of those baby slings. All of this was introduced in a book called “The Baby Book” by Dr. Sears. Dr. Sears says, ” … the more time babies spend in their mothers’ arms, the better the chances they will turn out to be well-adjusted children,” and that “every baby’s whimper is a plea for help and that no infant should ever be left to cry.”

That does make some sense. But dude, babies cry … and they cry because they don’t know how to communicate so sighs and moans and screams is how they talk, too. It is not a “plea for help” all the time … that’s a bit much.

I’m going to get a little personal here: when I was younger, my mother rocked me to sleep and her best friend told her “don’t do that, trust me—that baby will have issues leaving you,” to which my mother replied “this is my last baby and I’ll do what I want.” That best friend was Nancy Sayles Kaneshiro, who went on to write a baby book called Baby: An Owner’s Manual and sure enough, I’m in a chapter. I did grow up to have severe separation anxiety from my mother, and I also much preferred sleeping in her bed instead of mine. When my parents divorced, I moved into my mother’s room, where I stayed for months. Even now, in my late 20’s, I am ridiculously attached to my mother. If I have a bad day, I call and yell to her because she’s the closest thing to me. I often find myself worried at the thought that one day she won’t be just a phone call away. Now, I don’t know if that’s because she rocked me, or if she …

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