Well, I have learned a few things about blogging since beginning this last week. First, I learned that I say too much in a single blog. I am blogging like an essayist, not like a blogger. I apologize for that. It's kind of funny though because I began my life as a professional writer with the Frederick Leader newspaper in my hometown of Frederick, Oklahoma. The name of the column I wrote was "Mommy Tracks." At that time I had a GED and had never attended college, and I don't know where I got the cojones to think I had something to say about being a mom that I thought everybody else in that corner of Oklahoma ought to read. But I did, and yes, there is something full circle about talking about a mom with cojones and now having a graduate degree in gender studies, so I guess at least I am consistent.
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/02/22/men_must_speak_up_on_abortion_debate
Here's an article from salon.com I discovered via my good friend Teri McGrath, another Oklahoma mother, this one my office mate from grad school, my best friend from undergraduatedom. The article is well-written, though I can't say I don't have any arguments with it. But because I have decided to have a blog about gender, because I am asking my professional writing students to also have blogs this semester, and they cannot be "diary" blogs, but something academic, professional, related to being a writer, and so I should do the assignment as well in order to grade it, I picked gender as my topic.
It reminds me of a beautiful essay by Thomas Lynch called "Wombs" which my composition students will be reading in April. In that essay, Lynch states that if his daughters have the legal right to an abortion, that his sons should have that legal right as well. That if a man impregnates a woman, at some point in the first trimester when a woman may legally absolve herself of responsibility for the life of the child, a man may also do likewise and declare he will take no economic, medical, emotional, any responsibility for the unborn child.
Legally, this sounds like a good argument. Biologically, there can never be equality between males and females. There is a quote I remember from literature that goes something like: What is wrong in women's lives cannot be right in men's. How can we have women's issues that do not intersect with men's lives? Here is what really got my goat, so to speak. I was trying to find out the exact quote, so I googled it. Google kept saying: did you mean: what is wrong in men's lives cannot be right in men's? Like there could not be the word women in that sentence. Is that a language issue, a man's issue, a woman's, or a technology issue? Where do those lines get drawn?
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