I have to reply to Simcha Fischer's "Pants: A Manifesto". Because it's not about morality at all. Really.
1) I live in the Pacific Northwest where anything made of cloth that comes within an inch of the ground turns into a dishcloth 80% of the year. A skirt and decent boots keeps things dry. Skirts.
2) My husband also finds pants neutral, while skirts on women affect him. However, thanks to the hormones I'm taking it's always the good time in the cycle around here. Skirts.
3) I don't have children, however I used to teach elementary school so I know from kids and floors. But I also spent 12 years in a Catholic schoolgirls uniform, where I did everything in a skirt. For me sitting on a floor in a skirt is far more comfortable, modest and natural than trying to get up and down in pants. Skirts.
4) I think most people consider teaching to be a pink collar job. That said, after my Catholic school training I had no problem lunging after little Johnny in a skirt, and never once thought about being graceful or modest. In fact, given that my body shape is the exact opposite of the average American woman, which means that even pants that fit are never cut right, lunging is harder for me in pants. If they aren't heading south they're threatening to split. Skirts
5) My life doesn't have to be hard either. Pants chafe. Skirts
6) My husband also hates shopping, combines with the above comment that most clothing isn't cut right for me. So rather than even bothering to try this utterly, faintingly, femininely"drooling idiot" sews her own. And a crotch seam is a bitch. Skirts.
7) My husband has the same vision problem, he can't see an item until it's on. And he does admire the look of a skirt on a woman. Skirts
8) I agree that it's all about control from the various church types. Which is why I'm doing exactly what I want to do, and if it happens to also be what they want, its a coincidence. Skirts.
9) I agree, anyone who worries about what I think about myself ought to ask me. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by my self-esteem and personal strength. I'll also happily tell you that I think that has a lot more to do with the medication I'm taking than the cloth hanging off my ass. And then I'll tell you what I think about you. Skirts.
10) I agree, fat butts look horrible in too small stretch pants. And I admittedly have a fat butt, so I prefer to dress it in a skirt. That said, you, you hypothetical patriocentric religious type, are still an asshole. Skirts.
Women if you want to wear pants, if they make you comfortable and you think you look good, then I think you ought to go right ahead and wear pants. I even envy you the cool, comfortable, American Country Casual look in jeans, I wish I could pull off the look.
But it's not a moral issue. At all. I utterly agree on that.
Yes, it is a joke. If you believe it then you have been had. But don't take the word of the people at Snopes, which some of you won't given that you believe they are part of the vast liberal conspiracy or some such nonsense. Instead I give you the words of my favorite translator:
This is awesome! Not only did they misspell things in their Arabic, they wrote it backwards. To top it off, that little bit under "Kenya" actually means nothing if you're trying to read it from right to left, but if you read it backwards, like the rest of it, it says, by letter, ha, ah, wa, ah, ee.. Or in words, Hawaii!
Hawaii, which has been a state since 1959. In other words, one of the United States of America.
I was going to knit a pair of child's sized socks for the daughter of my high school roommate who is working on baby #2. (The roommate is working on the baby. The socks were for the soon to be big sister) However the day of the opening ceremonies, before I could even cast on I found out that friend #1 was moving two states away, and had less than a week to completely sort down a 2 bedroom house into a 1 bedroom apartment and pack it in a U-Haul AND my mother is moving back home to live near my older foster sister because I refuse to play along with her bullying games anymore AND another friend has to start chemotherapy AND I finally got on the right meds. So while we got one friend moved, got mother's garage cleaned out, a hat finished and dealt with my first cycle in a year, I never did even start the socks.
I like to think I at least got bronze for surviving it all.
Which reflects something I've been saying for a long time. If God is responsible for everything, if you never get credit for doing good, if in fact you get credit for doing bad and then applying to him for forgiveness, which is always granted, then why do good at all? Why be moral? Why?
Either God is a right bastard, or else this whole system was invented by people who not only wanted to get away with whatever they wanted to get away with. Not only that, but they wanted people to support it and even play along. They wanted the power, sometimes to get others to do something good, mostly to get others to do something bad.
That the business of religion continues to this day, even though we as a culture have grown more moral than the dogma can be explained in one phrase: "Touch not mine annointed." Really, if you had that much power, would you let the business go? Heck, the tax breaks alone are worth trying to flimflam as many people as possible.
I will finish my deconversion series, there are two more parts, but life is busy here this week-end so please be patient.
It wasn’t long before the school districts started hiring again. But I really didn’t bother to apply for any positions. Even though money was tight, we knew that with the husband training to get a job at one of the local hospitals, it wouldn’t last forever. We became followers of the work of Elizabeth Ann Warren and decided that we wanted to stay out of what we called the two-income trap. We were actually managing to save money, which never happened when we were both working, and we were both growing much healthier. And along the way we found the Patriocentric Christian movement, and with it the idea of Homeschooling.
Perhaps I should say it found us. I had finally began dressing and presenting myself in a way that overcompensated for the way I had been treated in the past. I let my curly hair grow long, started wearing wide headbands, hats, and other head coverings to hide the bald spots, found that long skirts and denim jumpers look the best on my large, admittedly masculine frame, and sewed most of what I wore out of calico, to give it that feminine, floral edge. And my husband favors khaki pants, polos, and hats. In other words, we look like the quintessential Patriocentric couple, and so, when out in public, people from the local Patriocentric churches gravitated toward us. I found myself being called “sister”, and asked to watch everything from shopping carts to children, and then being asked to pray with the women once they returned from the rest room. Naturally, I started asking questions.
I also found my way to Ladies Against Feminism. As much as I considered myself a feminist still, it was the only place on the web where I found support for being a stay-at-home-wife without children. For a brief time, we thought we might have found a home.
For a very brief time.
The more we read the less we liked it. Paganisim is a Matriocentric religion, I used to joke that I had to stop calling myself a Pagan when I got to know my husband, and realized I could only consider him my equal. Going all the way from one extreme to the other simply would not work for us, we were what most people would call egalitarian, and that was that. Also, the inherent theonomy and the homophobia and the near rejection of the idea that parents can be abusers offended us. So while we thought it a very pretty thing, with perhaps a good idea or two, we rejected the idea of joining any sort of Patriocentric movement.
We flirted with other Christian churches. I believe we looked at the Presbyterians and the Lutherans, and I know we attended the Episcopalian church a few times. But by then the husband was working at the local Catholic hospital, and he admired the good work and charity care they offered the community. I had been raised Catholic, of course, and his parents had recently converted to the Catholic Church from the formerly Methodist membership. So we tool the path of least resistance and signed my husband up for the RCIA program. He eventually joined the church, with his immensely proud father as his sponsor, and we spent a number of years there as out church home. I joined a social group, he joined the choir, and we began doing volunteer work in the community. I had a number of long discussions with Fr. M, where he reassured me that the Church attitude toward blaming the victim in cases of abuse was long gone, and even the inherent homophobia wasn’t as bad as the press made out. We thought life was good.
But….more and more, I began to feel like there was a problem, with God.
Every time we went to mass we were surrounded by small flocks of children. It tore at my heart every time, because I so wanted to be a Mother, to be able to walk in with a baby or child that was mine. The last straw was this one time we went to mass, the 5pm on Saturday that was usually mostly older adults. This family sat in front of us, a young couple with this perfect, rosy cheeked, and laughing little girl. She couldn’t have been more than a year, all decked out in a white dress with pink roses and ribbons. She was utterly perfect, exactly how I hoped my daughter would be. When my husband looked over and saw the tears running down my cheeks he led me back to the car and asked me what was wrong. I told him it felt like God was taunting me, rubbing my nose in what I couldn’t have. If God wanted me in mass so badly, why couldn’t he at least have one mass that was mostly adults?
Why, God? Why are you making this more painful than it needs to be?
My husband agreed, he had been feeling the same way. When he went to work that night he put in for a switch to the day shift. Within a few weeks he was working during every mass service, and we never went back.
We had been reading more about the Patriocentic movement, learning about the Ezzos and Babywise, about the Pearls, about Gothard and ATI. We were horrified at the thought of some of the tortures they were advocating, locking children in “prayer closets”, beating them with plumber’s line and glue sticks, letting babies scream with hunger to get them on a schedule. Back in our alternative sexuality days we had both allowed ourselves to be beaten with sticks, and we knew how much that had hurt on adult bodies. Who in their right minds would do that to a child? I remember reading Doug Phillip’s blog, and an off hand comment about how they had beaten one of their girls, who turned and screamed through her tears that she was going to “tell Jesus on them.” He proudly recounted how he and his wife laughed about it as they beat her again.
Why, God? Why?
At the same time, the Patriocentrics, and more and more of Christianity as a whole embraced the Quiverfull movement. The idea of the virtue of a stay-at-home wife fell away as Motherhood became the only “normative” goal, and what did you do that God is punishing you with infertility? We sat there and watched these families have baby after baby, eight, ten, twelve, all the while beating and tormenting them in the name of God.
Why God? You know we’d never harm a child, we’d only teach them your love. Why do you keep giving those families children and not us? Why?
For all that Fr. M had reassured me that the Catholic church no longer blamed the victim, under the new Pope that seemed to change. He showed support of the priests and sisters accused and convicted of sexual and physical abuse in the US and Ireland, and chose to excommunicate the people who helped a 9 year old girl in Peru who had been raped, and would not survive bearing twins, while not saying a word against the man who had raped her. Why, God? Where is the mercy and justice here?
I think the FLDS was the last straw for me. Back when I was working three jobs and going to college, one of those jobs was an aid with Child Protective Services. I knew that there was no way any county would pony up the budget money for an operation as big as the raid on the FLDS compound without firm evidence that children were being raped and abused. Finally, I thought, God is using the state to step in and save children. All of the “good Christians” around the net who are screaming that this is nothing but persecution, who are making death threats against the people who are trying to help these girls, will see the truth. I mean, most of the men refused DNA tests, to me a clear sign that they were guilty of something.
A couple of weeks later the children went back, before the few DNA tests they had been able to pull were back from the lab. I was horrified. Why God? Why are you allowing these girls to be raped in your name? Why? Why?
I never did get an answer. Ever.
It was becoming clear to me, that either God was the biggest bastard in the universe, a monster who loved to watch children suffer, who savored the tears of the forsaken, who encouraged the rape of young girls. Or else there was no God.
I still don't think that the missionaries set out to do anything illegal. I think the might have been bamboozled by a real criminal now. But this kind of thing is what happens when you disengage from the real world, and allow religion to narrow your ability to see things for what they really are.
In my opinion they need to stop praying for a miracle, stop assuming a mythic sky god is going to take care of everything, and go out and hire a real lawyer.
Over the next two years a number if things changed. I had a run-in with a couple who taught at my school, a couple of Fundamentalist Christians who were working for a few years to save money before becoming missionaries. Either they were offended by a Pagan teaching their children, or because I criticized some of their classroom management ideas. Either way, they began going from church to church in our area, telling them that I was a transgendered witch freak who was trying to convert the children to alternative sexuality. At the time I was a newlywed, and I had never once discussed my faith with any of the children in my care. By the time they got around to discussing it at the local synagogue, where the Cantor was a good friend, who told me what was going on, the deed was done. Anyone who hadn’t heard it from J and the Italian community was now convinced I was transgendered.
This wouldn’t have mattered so much, as off-work I was part of a number of communities that didn’t care, the military, the local pagan network, and even the alternative sexuality community that ranged as far north as San Francisco, except for one problem. My husband had been discharged early from the military, so we weren’t planning to move anywhere, except for out of the house, and away from my mother.
And I managed to get pregnant.
I remember being so thrilled, so excited. Finally I was as good as anyone. I was part of the in-crowd. Life had finally come together.
Except that I couldn’t find a single doctor in town willing to provide pre-natal care to someone they just knew was transgendered. In the words of one he wasn’t treating *that*.
Two months later I lost the baby. There was no support from any quarter, the church had rejected us, and the Pagans wondered what we did to deserve such karma. We huddled together and kept going the best we could.
Over the next two years I lost four more pregnancies. My husband went to work for an ambulance service for long hours and little pay. I kept teaching, even though it meant commuting an hour each way, and dealing with the rest of the staff that had been so poisoned against me. This was when the housing bubble was starting to inflate, and seems like it started in our area. Rents doubled, and doubled again. Enron and the energy crisis caused our utility bills to go up. And then the worst happened, the economic crisis hit the state, and the schools started to pay the price. I became in imminent danger of losing my job.
My husband was on call 24/7, literally, leaving at all hours of the day and night to transport patients. We kept passing each other, sometimes not seeing each other awake for days on end. I was taking medication for anti-anxiety, and prescription muscle relaxers just to get my back, which was always seriously painful, to unknot so that I could even lay down flat in bed at night. And all the while I was grieving my lost babies. Finally one day I snapped. My principal came in with a group of parents and asked me to justify my position as the school network technician, without giving me any warning. For all I knew, my job literally hung on my ability to do so on fly. I babbled out an answer as best I could, and the next thing I knew I was in my own driveway. I had literally run screaming from the school, and driven 60 miles home, on two major highways, without realizing it.
That was when my husband and I decided, something had to give.
We decided to move to a less expensive area, where I could stay home and rest for the remainder of the school year, and we could live on his salary as an EMT. Then I could work while he went to school for his RN, and then I could retire and we could try again to be parents. We moved to Oregon, just in time for the first gas spike to hit, causing him to lose his job a month after we got here. We survived on food stamps, his GI benefits, and the only job I could get, teaching Sunday School at the Unitarian Universalist church.
It was during this time, through the UU community, that we decided to give up on Paganisim. It held nothing for us, went against what we were finding to be some of our more closely held values, and just felt increasingly wrong. It was time to give God another chance.
During my junior year in college I found out that the money my Grandmother had so carefully set aside for my education was gone. My Mother had used large amounts of it to pay off her credit cards, which she then ran back up to the maximum. My only option was to move out of the too-expensive condo, find full-time work, and change majors to something that was supported by grants from the state. So I moved back to my hometown, into a series of deeply awful apartments, and began studying for my teaching credential. I was temping, working two less than part time jobs, and picking up tutoring gigs on the side, and it still never seemed to be enough. I also was going without health insurance, so I was still living with pain, and still a hormonal mess. And I found when I got home that J had told everyone in town that I was a militant lesbian, and transgendered besides, which all the good Christians found so offensive that they wanted little to do with me.
I should step back and say that Italian families, at the time, were considered large. Three to four children were common; and six to eight were not unknown, which meant that there were a lot of people in their late teens and early twenties around at that time, and they were all starting to get married and have babies. It seemed like every week-end I was attending a shower for something, always invited out of politeness to my Mother, never spoken to once there. And all of these young men were entrepreneurs, starting up their own businesses or going to work for their fathers, so money was always tight and no one had insurance. Still, the babies were coming, and coming, and coming. And Mother was always out there helping, a load of groceries here, a doctor bill paid there, a new outfit or three sent to make sure a little girl had something pretty to wear. All the while privately condemning these young women, most of whom were not yet 21, for becoming dependent on men, and not finishing their educations. For being stay-at-home mothers. And yet there was not a word or dime of support for her own daughter, who was trying to do everything right.
It became clear to me that to join the club of the approved, to prove to everyone that I wasn’t really a freak, I had to have a baby. And not be dependent on a man while doing so. If I could finish my degree, start a career, buy my own house, and then have a baby, I could prove to everyone that I was not a freak. That I was fine. But I was only able to take one or two courses at a time, because I had to work so much, and so I thought it would never happen. I spend much of those years in what I now know to be a clinical depression.
Since I wasn’t finding any support among the Christians, I started attending Pagan worship gatherings, and then took an interest in alternative sexuality. On the one hand, I found myself a “freak” among “freaks”, and made close friends I cherish to this day. On the other hand, they thought my desire to be a stay-at-home mother more than a little odd, so I learned not to speak of it. If you are a part of a fertility cult, who’s guiding principal is “As I will, so it will be”, and you can’t get pregnant, you must be doing something wrong. So, once again, my health problems were all in my head, and entirely my fault. On some spiritual level, there was something wrong with me.
But they were the only friends I had, and so I stuck with them. And life got better. I finished my degree in computer science, with minors in elementary education and biochemistry, became a teacher, and finally bought my Grandfather’s house, when he became a little too frail to live that far from town. I was back in the house where I grew up, and making decent money. All I needed was the baby.
Two months later Mother finally divorced J and moved herself in. It quickly became apparent that a home with a clinical narcissist was not a place for a newborn. My depression was beginning to return when the Pagan community finally gave up its greatest gift. In the form of a young Marine with the happiest green eyes I had ever seen.
Nine months after we met, my husband and I had the first Pagan wedding ever held in an active military chapel. I was the beautiful maiden at last, all decked out in white lace and roses, while some of J’s friends stood outside and gaped in shock. It was one of the happiest days of my life.
