Month: March 2014

I’ve pondered posting the two papers I’ve written this week for my pscyh classes. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t been writing, I just haven’t been writing anything bloggish. I finished up a final paper on Karen Horney (Horn-EYE people, not horn-ee), widely regarded as the mother of Feminine Psychology. Turns out that about 50 years lapsed between the time she took old Freud to task on his penis envy nonsense and women making any inroads into psychology. I found a fascinating video on women in the field as there just wasn’t much out there on Karen H. herself, but quite a lot about on feminine or feminist psychology.  The Changing Face of Feminist Psychology was an excellent historical document.

At one point in this video, one of the women mentions the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the manual on women’s health published by the Boston Women’s Health Collective in 1974 and how that single publication dramatically changed things for women. I remember my best friend (and first ever girlfriend) in high school had that book and how scandalized and tantalized I was by it at the time. I’ve since given it as a gift to many young women in my life, my daughters included. It’s really hard to believe sometimes how huge the strides are that have been made in my lifetime. And then not. As Jane Yoder points out in this video, she watched as her 22 year old daughter graduated from college and went to work in a world where not much had changed at all for women in the past 30 years. And how the university for which she works still has a bare bones maternity policy. Steps forward. Steps backward. We stand still sometimes.

I finished this paper thankful for women like Karen Horney, women who stuck their necks out and challenged the status quo, spoke up when things seemed weird and one-sided, like penis envy. Really? Was it such a stretch that the good old boys couldn’t figure out that it wasn’t the penis women envied but the power conferred upon those who had one? I mean, really, guys.

I then tackled a shorter assignment on the 5 Personality Traits. The assignment was to do a report on our “favorite trait.” Well, that seemed a little odd, given that we all have these traits, allegedly. Hard to choose a favorite. Not like ice cream or a sports team, exactly. Here are the traits, the five traits that modern personality theorists claim we all have (and upon which we each claim a place on the spectrum, more or less): Extraversion, Neuroticism, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness.

In hindsight, I probably should have chosen Neuroticism (that, along with Feminine Psychology) is the thing Karen Horney is known for, after all (and, you know, it takes one to know one), but instead I decided to focus on Introversion (yeah, it’s not on the list, right?). Because as an introvert I was so insulted by the way the theorists demeaned us introverts–monotonous they said, boring, passive, meek, not open to new experiences. Come on! Just because I don’t like to make small talk at a cocktail party doesn’t mean I don’t value new experiences, don’t like a thrill, don’t like to leave the house fer chrissake.

A few months ago, maybe a year ago, I read Susan Cain’s excellent book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Just Can’t Stop Talking. She also has an excellent TED talk, The Power of Introverts in which she takes our culture to task on the devaluation of quiet, of solitude, and the space and time to dream. She’s so right in her assessment of schools and businesses focusing on the group at the expense of the individual. We are sacrificing the thinkers and the dreamers and turning our future over to the people who talk the loudest.

As Cain points out, there is ZERO correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas. She says that we have given in to a new group think—that all creativity comes from a gregarious place. But, she says, quite correctly, most creative people have a serious streak of introversion because creativity needs long flights of fancy. Kids in school don’t get any time to pursue individual thoughts as they are all involved in group work, even when it comes to creative writing, and if you’ve been in a modern office building lately, you’ll see that the open concept is all the rage. No one gets an office where they can close the door on the noise–now they sit together so they can share ideas. I don’t even know how anything gets accomplished. The Little Woman works in such a space–and frankly I don’t know how she does it. But, she’s an extravert. I’m an introvert.

Hey look–I had a blog post after all. Feminists. Introverts. My people.

I’ve got nothing. I am tapped out. Studying for finals. Getting ready to go on a short vacation. Have orientation for grad school on Wednesday. Running. Working on my shit.

Hopefully I’ll have something useful to say tomorrow, but I figure it’s better not to say much at all than to blather on about nonsense.

Happy St. Paddy’s Day.

xo

P

I was a pretty good baseball player when I was a kid. I could hit and catch and run. For my 9^th birthday, I got a genuine leather mitt, one like the big league players used. My dad and I rubbed that mitt with oil and wrapped it up with a ball in the pocket. I sat in my bedroom, in my lime green beanbag chair and spent hours tossing the regulation hardball into the mitt’s pocket. I loved the solid thwap it made when it hit the webbing.

We lived in the boondocks, so there wasn’t really anyone to play catch with, but I threw that ball in the air as high as I could so I could catch it. I tried valiantly and in vain to teach my little brother how to throw. Poor kid—he was only five when he had to endure my berating his terrible arm and aim. Somehow the two of us and the occasional neighbor kid (I use the term neighbor loosely as no one lived within a mile of us) spent hours in the field behind the house playing the best version of the game we could muster amongst ourselves. Mostly our time consisted of shagging overthrown or underthrown balls or wild pitches.

I don’t know where I even learned about the game—we didn’t have television when I was growing up and neither of my parents was much for sports. I have vague recollections of watching the occasional baseball game on tv when I’d visit my grandparents, but the overarching memory there is one of sheer boredom. Nothing seemed to move more slowly than a baseball game on tv. I don’t remember anyone schooling me on the fine points of the game until I was well into my 20s, but somehow I knew the rules.

We played during recess at school. Once our 7^th grade teacher let us all out to play on a beautiful spring day. I remember because  I made a miraculous diving catch, snagging a rocketed line drive and my teacher Ms. Allen lavished me with praise, a moment that crystallized in my memory and probably contributed to my lifelong affinity for the game. I adored Ms. Allen and would have gone to the ends of the earth to recreate that moment in time (this proclivity has created all sorts of issues for me, but that’s another blog).

I only tried out once for a baseball team though, in spite of my deep desire to play. Back in the day (way back, people, before Title IX), we had only Little League, and everyone knew that only boys got to play Little League baseball. But I had no alternatives. There were no other places to play, at least not in our little logging town—no girls’ softball through parks and rec and certainly no girls’ sports at the local junior high school I attended.

I didn’t know of any other girls who wanted to try out for Little League, but Billie Jean King had recently defeated Bobby Riggs in The Battle of the Sexes and obviously a seed had been planted in me. Remember try-outs? Remember the days when not everyone who showed up got a ribbon and a place on the team? I showed up for Little League try-outs in Sultan, Washington in 1975. I ran bases with the boys. I fielded grounders and caught fly balls. And I hit line drives out of the infield.

I still remember the ping of the ball flying off the bat the first time I took a swing in the batter’s box, but more than the ping, I remember the collective intake of breath from the onlookers. The shock that a girl could actually hit a pitch, a hard ball, a boys’ baseball, not some looping fat softball pitch (not to disparage my lesbian sisters who played softball). I made it to first.

I made it to first, but I didn’t make the team because an obstacle larger and more unbeatable than Bobby Riggs stood between me and my baseball dreams: Larry Stucker.  Larry Stucker was the stuff of legends in our little town, known to all of the kids anyway as Stucker the Trucker, the Mean Old Fucker.  He drove his own logging truck and his wife was the nicest, meekest woman who taught Sunday school at our church. I was in class with his kid, Shawn, a scrawny, big-nosed, big-eared kid who looked just like his old man and couldn’t play baseball worth a damn. Larry Stucker coached the Little League team I would have been on had he taken me on my merits but Stucker the Trucker wasn’t about to have any girls on his team.

I still have my mitt—and I still use it when I have occasion to play catch or a pick up game of softball. When Taylor was in elementary school, she had a great sense for the game, and we played often in the back yard. I bought her a mitt, and a bat, and a ball, but sports never really interested her the way that they pulled at me when I was that age. Sometimes I wonder if we just always want most the things that we can’t have.