This One is For The Indiana People

My mind has been all over the place this week. I’ve had a lot of work to do, which has sapped me of any interest in deep thinking (if that’s what anyone credits me with doing) and makes my mind ping-pong through topics and ideas. So consider this another grab bag and in general just assume that my whole brain is just a grab bag.

One of my earliest posts was about avoiding climate despair, and this summer really tested that effort. This year was the hottest September on record. I had sort of lost track of my goal to stay focused on the positive when there was so little good climate news to be found. But last week, I met a woman who works for The Climate Reality Project, which was founded by Al Gore, and she said that Gore’s mantra is, “Climate despair is the new climate denial.” I don’t have any deep thoughts to add to that; I just wanted to share a nice story I read about how conservationists were able to buy land outside Yellowstone that was otherwise going to be turned into gold mines. Fighting climate change is a real bird by bird effort; that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.

Last week, a reader commented on my lack of guidance on parenting teens:

at the same time that we need more help and it isn't just about nap schedules or whatever, the community support dries up. Other parents become, maybe not so much the enemy but, if their kid was the one your kid smoked pot with (or whatever), it might be hard to enlist them as an ally. Lastly, I want to say that whilst there are seemingly a million books written about raising girls, I find much less about boys. I know a lot about girls already, having been one. And let's set the bar low, shall we? I'd like to raise someone who isn't a rapist. Who is writing about that?? I am being polemic here but seriously, no idea how to talk to my kid about rape culture and misogyny and not really willing to just leave it up to Dad, who is a good egg but you know, maybe also a bit touched by the ole patriarchy himself. Thanks for giving voice to this! Keep writing!

I feel this BIG TIME.

First of all, in fairness to my sons’ father, he was a regular attendee at the Womyn’s Unions meetings in college and NOT just because that was a great place to meet women. He also marched at the back of the Women’s Day March in 1997 behind the Men for Feminism sign, pulling a red wagon with a boombox on it, while the other dude carried a baby in an Ergo on his chest. Truly, my baby daddy tries. That said, his own mom struggled with this question, and I am sure my daughter-in-laws, should I have them, will struggle with this question as well.

Sticking with the premise that parenting advice comes from books, there are a couple about raising boys that are interesting. There’s Raising Boys by Steve Biddulph, which is more helpful when your kids are younger, as is Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. But the book that hit the hardest - so hard I couldn’t finish it - was Peggy Orenstein’s Boys and Sex. This book is so honest that it’s painful. The subtitle is “Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, and Navigating the New Masculinity,” and indeed, the young men she interviews are all aware of the difficult shoals they are navigating between the feminism their mothers and female peers want for them and the reality they confront on an hourly basis.

I tested some of the stories with my older son, and he readily admitted that the locker room talk with the rowing team was mostly sexualizing young women and bragging about drinking or drugs. As a freshman, he didn’t really participate but he didn’t feel like he could stand up to it. My younger son spoke up (when he was a sophomore) to an assistant coach who said “Girls lie,” in response to a rape allegation, and the guy threatened to kick his ass. In that instance, enough other kids videotaped the interaction that the coach was fired but this was just a random discussion on a random day on the way back from an away JV baseball game. It’s fucking bleak out there for boys, folks.

My only advice is to bring it up constantly. Talk about sex when you see it depicted on TV, hear about it in songs, ask if they know what would happen if they got a girl pregnant - i.e. “Would she get an abortion? would you support her in doing that?” - and generally make the topic so common and boring that they’d rather do the right thing than talk to you about it anymore.

The one area where boys (at least in the Bay Area) have leapfrogged over my peers is in the area of accepting LGBTQ+ kids. My baseball player has snapped at me for “deadnaming” a friend; a jock from Gen X would have threatened to kick that kid’s ass. I was afraid to tell anyone my dad was gay until I was in high school and even then I only whispered it to one friend. My kids have no problem at all accepting kids’ names, pronouns, who they love, what they wear, or how they identify. It’s not a big deal and it outright angers them and confuses them that adults don’t comply. My son was at a weeklong flight school summer camp before 7th grade. The conversation in the car on the way home:

L: There’s a kid at camp who is going to my school this year.

Me: What’s their name?

L: I don’t know.

Me: Boy? Girl?

L: (shrugs)

I left the conversation stunned at his lack of attention to detail. Come August, I found out the child is gender fluid and has decided to use the name Xolo. All Liam cared about was that the kid was also into flying airplanes. So, bird by bird, these kids are getting better than us.

I keep ideas for stuff to write about in the Notes app on my phone. In this week’s list is the cryptic note: “People from Indiana.” I don’t know what I intended to write about in the larger sense but I lived in Indiana for a while (1978-1983) and Shawn Fain, the UAW President leading the autoworkers’ strike, is from Indiana. At the moment, Fain is the more interesting of the two of us, at least in terms of influencing our economy and culture. Eugene Debs was from Indiana too. So were a lot of people, including Adam Driver, Janet Jackson, and Jim Davis, the guy who drew Garfield. Mike Pence, of course, and his brother Greg Pence, who could be heard reliably voting for Jim Jordan for Speaker of the House today. What I’m saying is, I cannot figure out what throughline I imagined existed among the People From Indiana. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe I lived in Indiana and then I remember that I must be trying to forget a difficult time in my life if I’m trying to gloss over Indiana, which brings me to something else you need to read (after you read the Shawn Fain profile).

Taffy Brodesser-Akner has a story about Taylor Swift which I highly recommend. I’m not a huge Swiftie; I like some of her songs and also think a lot of them sound the same and those don’t move me too much. I like Swift a lot personally, particularly how she’s taken back her catalog from Scooter Braun and won a lawsuit against a jerk for sexual assault. She’s smart; people try to treat her like shit and she just keeps rising above them. But I don’t LOVE her music. But Taffy does, and Taffy attributes it to the way that Taylor lets girls be girls and women be girls and that she gives her listeners permission to sing in front of the mirror and let loose.

I love that for them, I really do. But mostly, I didn’t like being a little girl very much. I can remember two instances in my childhood of singing in front of the mirror: my sister and I would perform The Commitments soundtrack in the mirror on my mom’s closet door, and I sang the songs on the A side of the New Edition cassette (1984 - New Edition album) in the basement in the reflection of the TV screen. I am sure my sister and cousins remember other performances, but that’s all I can recall.

My girlhood was all about praying to grow up so I didn’t have to be a kid anymore. Kids didn’t get any information unless we eavesdropped. We didn’t have our own money or ways of getting places. We had to learn what people wanted us to learn, dress the way we were told, and not understand most of the world around us. And then just when we were getting a clue, we got our periods, boobs, unwelcome sexual attention, growing pains, wisdom teeth. Ugh. I’m glad other people are finding joy in their nostalgia but that is not an era I want to return to.