“Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.”

 The passage itself, and in the context of the protaganist grappling with her own personal history, conveys a concept I struggle with a lot:  How do we juxtapose our personal identity and worldview with the Job of Mom?   

For me, becoming a mother was like putting on a robotic helmet – envision Iron Man or Terminator.  I see the world as I normally would, but now with extras: facts and information  in digital red lettering springing  up in my peripheral vision  “DANGER” “UNSAFE” “OFFENSIVE”.

I used to see bare midriffs in music videos and covet the stars’ flat abs.  Now, I still covet,  but I also see flashing margin notes: terrible message for girls.  Or, while reminiscing about my own youth in facebook (as is today’s fashion) I think “what fun” and “no regrets” at the same time “Note to self re: teenage years: Not as innocent as she may appear,” gets bookmarked with a tab at the top of my mask.  Lofty ideas for gender equity and free choice hit me one way as a person and differently as a mother.   How’s it all playing out for you?

My best friend Julie and I were riding some amusement ride that whisked us high above the Fairgrounds and then stopped for loading and unloading.  We were swinging away, chatting it up about the cute boys on the ground below, when a crisp Montana gust came along and caused the fine blonde hairs on my leg to stand on end.

“Holy Cow,” remarked Julie, honest and amused, but not intentionally unkind, ”you look like an albino gorilla.”

That was the end of my youthful ignorance and the beginning of my hair removal life.

I bring this up only because, much to my disbelief and dismay, my 5 year-old daughter has recently started talking about her non-existent leg hair and lamenting that she doesn’t want her legs to someday be ”all hairy like Daddy’s.” 

I told her that all kids have hairy legs, and that when she’s a grown up she can choose whether to keep the hair or remove it..  I sensed her frustration with me immediately, “Oh, I’ll get rid of it,” she promised. 

So, tell me, was I the exception, or are our daughters growing up way, way, faster than we did?

In my blogging life at least, I have tried to avoid this trend. But, lately, I’ve been thinking – if you can’t beat ‘em, why not join ‘em. Instead of trying to have a civil and gender-inclusive discourse about parenting, I decided what we moms really need is quick and easy way to figure out who’s in which battle camp. After all, if you’re watching the Today Show, you know there are no in betweens, we all belong in various parenting camps, each sitting in judgment on the other. But how can we recognize each other? How can we figure out who’s on our team? I came up with a couple ideas.

Last week at 6’s soccer practice, I talked to the coach about borrowing some of those red vests the kids wear when they scrimmage. I thought I could start asking moms questions like: work or stay home? Then, I’d hand out the red vests to one side and we’d have a way to quickly recognize our teammates. Unfortunately, the coach said they didn’t have any to spare.

Then, when I was taking a “computer procrastination” test on Facebook (it should come as no surprise I didn’t fare well), a solution occurred to me. Why not a quiz or a meme? After all, if we’re at war, we should be able to easily develop some quick questions, tally up our comparison percentage points and know who our friends should be. To that end, I give you: The Mommy War Meme.

Part 1. C-Sections and Elective Induction

A) Control freak psycho – You’re willing to risk your life, the life of your child, and probably the life of your third-cousin-once-removed just so you can plan the birth of your children around the schedule for Oprah.
OR
B) Laid back pregnant martyr – This is simply the first in a lifelong series of selfless sacrifices you will make for the apple of your eye. Even if the kid wants to take up residence in your womb until he reaches Heavy Weight Boxing Championship proportions you should never, EVER interfere with nature.

2. Pain Relievers During Labor

A) Epidural-addicted weenie – You are again risking the life of your beloved, this time with your desperately selfish need for relief. You are proving early and unequivocally that since you don’t have the physical stamina to ‘breathe’ your way through 50 hours of squeezing a nine pound human out your vagina, you will be a complete and total failure as a mother.
OR
B) Drug free and proud - Well, damn you, aren’t you just drug free and proud. VERY, VERY, VERY PROUD.

3. The appropriate place for birthing

A) Paranoid Hypochondriac – Apparently you don’t appreciate that birth has been happening since the beginning of time without assistance. You’ll be attached to wires at the hospital, confined to your bed like a prisoner.
OR
B) Housebound Hippy – So convinced you are in the power of nature that you’ll risk your child’s life by birthing at home in the tub while combing your underarm hair.

4. Circumcision or No

A) Evil Personified – You sliced away at that poor little boy’s penis you evil, inhumane witch of a woman.
OR
B) Evil Personified – Despite your husband’s protests, you chose not to snip, but you’re ready to send out for a mail order bride and pay for therapy when the many years of locker room taunting finally push him into a deep depression all.because.of.you

5. Breastmilk or Formula

A) Cold Rubber Nipple- You fed your baby formula out of a plastic bottle with a cold rubber nipple, and now, not only is an Ivy League scholarship totally out of the question, your child will never be able to connect emotionally with anyone. He’ll be an emotionally cold rubber nipple of a person – just like you.
OR
B) Warm Mommy’s Milk – Your belief that breast is best carries you through undaunted. Your baby will ween himself when he’s ready to give it up. So what if you have to interrupt recess so the kid can have a nip. Sleepovers, no problem, you can pump and send it along in his Superman Thermos. Your child will never leave your side, but life should be interesting for you when you’re taking classes at Harvard.

6. Breastfeeding in Public

A) Repressed Conservative Matriarch – You’ll starve your baby before enduring the shame of baring the slightest of nipple ever-so-briefly during dinner at TGIFriday’s
OR
B) Nurse-In Lactivist – You pretend to care about feeding your hungry newborn, but actually you just thrive on flopping your boob out so you can make repressed conservative men squirm during dinner at TGIFridays.

7. Working or Staying Home

A) Materialistic Shrew- Hiring someone else to raise the children you never should have had so you can return to work just to eat fancy, expensive lunches and buy those cute Jimmy Choos
OR
B) Domestic Goddess – Singlehandedly responsible for the reversal of decades worth of feminist advancement because you stay home, watch soaps and eat bon bons all day while that degree you never should have bothered to get gathers dust in the bottom drawer.

8. Cocktail Playdates

A) Drunk- Obviously you’re a lush, stuck in college and downing tequila poppers on the playground
OR
B) Humorless – Not only don’t you ever indulge in the devil’s drink you really believe beer labels should simply read “Women who are [or have ever been] pregnant should never drink alcohol… again – EVIR.”

9. Television

A) Pro-TV – Raising the next generation of mass murdering psychopaths
OR
B) Anti TV – Raising the next generation of Scripps Howard Spelling Bee Winners.

So how’d you come out? Who’d I miss?

It seemed many perceived the word ‘feminist’ as the calling card of the bra-less, the hairy, the angry, the man-hating, the Birkenstock-clad. (Most of the time, depending on how many times I’d hit the snooze button that morning and whether non-committal musician boyfriend had been returning my calls, I only fit two of those categories at a time, so I felt conflicted about the appropriateness of adopting the title for myself.)

But it’s been awhile since I was in college, and I assumed that the debate had progressed. I’ve been busy, though, wading through piles of laundry, coordinating calendars, balancing dinners, working toward making partner, dreaming of writing a book, trying to raise healthy children who are true to themselves and accepting of diversity, staying (getting) thin and wrinkle free, and imagining the end of world violence, all while keeping my partner turned on and my eyebrows waxed.

Still, I presumed, I hoped, that in the 15 years that passed since I started college the feminism conversation had progressed beyond what it looked like in my youth. I kind of figured we had advanced past discussing gender roles and equality with such an “us vs. them” mentality.

As usual, I may have been mistaken.

Friend and commenter Tara, sent me a link to the recent study from Rutgers proffering this edge-of-your-seat scientific data – the man-hating feminist persona isn’t accurate. It’s just a stereotype.

“Feminists” according to the study, are happy people, too. Many of them (gasp!) actually manage to find mates and get married. Unfortunately, those who did the study felt it was needed:

Both men and women are prone to holding negative views of feminists, the authors say. Along with the sexually unattractive stereotype, some women also view feminism as a movement for victims, or for women who aren’t competent enough to achieve success on their own merit, according to the Rutgers University researchers.

In an effort to figure out if the researchers were right – if the popular feminist visual construct is still the smelly, hairy, sexless, radical, underachieving chick of my collegiate years, I did some clicking around the blogosphere. I’ll share:

Even semifamous former Spice Girls tend to think of feminism in that package. Shameless Blog reports that Geri Halliwell doesn’t like feminism’s branding. “It’s about labeling. For me feminism is bra-burning lesbianism. It’s very unglamourous.”

Halliwell’s not alone, it appears, as the blogosphere is full of intelligent, articulate women still proclaiming that they are certainly not feminists, or that they don’t “identify with modern feminism”.

After hearing this proclamation from one too many young women, and to try to combat this issue, the bloggers at Leigh’s Blitherings wisely suggest that maybe feminism needs a makeover:

Kate and I think that we need to re-brand feminism. And in a way that it can’t be turned into something dark and ominous. So we’ll need a new name. We need to get rid of hard consonant like IST and replace them with a word that has more “o”s in it.

That made me smile, and, of course, there are some people still plugging away at trying to define and simplify feminism like Feminism 101.

So, after my detailed review I decided this debate hadn’t made much forward progress since the last time I looked. We’re still spending an awful lot of time talking about what feminism looks like instead of what she believes. But, I thought, we haven’t regressed, and at least we have moved the conversation to the Internet. That’s something, right?

Then, I found this awesome clip from the Today Show on “The Rise of the Fembots.” Apparently, a “Fembot” is an emotionally unavailable, confident, career-focused woman who doesn’t want to have babies, and, frankly, doesn’t even like them. (If you think I am exaggerating, watch the clip. I dare you.) But don’t worry, if you think you might BE a Fembot, they have a checklist so you can make sure you’re not!

Leave it to the Today Show to really advance gender stereotyping.

Just for the record, I actually was going to buy the book, but when I put “Read a Book With an Inflammatory Title Whose Basic Premise I Already Support” on my Google To-Do List I stuck a ‘low priority’ tag on it.  You already know what happens to those tasks. 

Edited to Add:  This just in… I might have been right the first time.  Lot o’ people not real happy with Rich for writing off the Bennetts book as a non-seller. 

I think maybe I liked the old feminism better – you know, the good old days, when we attacked men instead of each other.

Bennetts’ titling of the book is simulataneously a clever invocation of Friedan feminism and genius marketing, and I’m admittedly jealous. You tap a nerve, you sell a book.  Still - in every article I read - Bennetts, a savvy journalist by trade, defensively insists she had ”no idea” the book would cause such a “backlash”.   

Sure, Leslie, you put right on the cover of your book: “Hey, Mom, Your Choice Was WRONG,”  and you didn’t have the slightest inkling it would disturb mothers and cause buzz?  The suggestion is disingenuous at best and preposterous at worst. 

Unfortunately, the combination of the savvy title, her defensive response, and the current status of reporting feeds the One-Right-Answer myth and sells news.  We’re back to arguing about who’s best instead of discussing the more important questions … How can we abolish gender and family discrimination in the workplace?    Why do we accept the high cost of childcare while also accepting such low standards of care?  And what action can people take to  care for their children and protect their financial future?

Unfortunately, the real and important questions implicated by Bennetts’ work have been lost in a sea of provocative news headlines and biased blogging.  Too bad.