Engender Truth

17 Comments

• 
  Female
  November 28, 2007 at 1:53 pm

  Current psychiatric thinking on how to lessen the the grief and loss for children with divorced parents is to lessen as much as possible the absence of the absent parent to the extent that parents are advised to still maintain living in the same residence where feasible to do so. Feasibility basically means you have a spare bedroom. If you don’t have the room, it is suggested that visits are organised so that children still get to see the absent parent at least every second day. Hard on the parents and hard on the children when you consider this means sleeping in different residences 3 times a week. It will become interesting in the future if courts decide that if parents aren’t willing to go to these lengths, then they won’t be granted a divorce. Watch this space. I’m sure it’s coming.

• 
  Joel Falconer
  December 3, 2007 at 3:50 pm

  “I don’t fault those parents who choose to divorce, there are often understandable reasons why that had to be the best course of action.” I agree with you, but I’d have to venture and say that more often than not, that’s not the case in this era. It’s our selfish materialist Crapitalist society at work, changing the very values in which we find stability and happiness, all being trashed for purely greed-driven motives.

  In a marriage with true equity (not equality, the greatest misnomer of the gender wars) I doubt that a divorce would ever become an issue. Every great marriage counselor with a proven track record has said: “It’s not that you fall out of love with the person you married, you just stopped meeting each other’s needs.” That’s the crux of all marriage breakdowns.

  Is it any surprise that in this era partners are avoiding their responsibilities to each other’s needs in order to satisfy their own?

  Of course, all of this assumes you were in love when you got married…

• 
  zogmama
  December 5, 2007 at 7:05 pm

  @Female: I can see a whole lotta trouble with the spare bedroom scenario, so I’ll leave that alone. For a time during our separation, we maintained a situation where it was basically not “Whose home are we sleeping in tonight?” but rather, “Who’s coming to our house tonight?” The children stayed in the house, my ex split time between there and his new love’s apartment, and I was back and forth to Baltimore four days per week.

  Any real sacrifice was borne by the adults, and that’s as it should be. I was quite accustomed to living in two places and packing up all the time, so it was nothing to me. It worked well for us until the next phase of transition happened.

• 
  Emmah
  December 8, 2007 at 2:21 am

  @female - Like Zogmama, I do see a lot of issues with respect to the ’spare bedroom’ idea.
  I think children are far more observant than we give them credit for, they will pick up on the atmosphere and if the break-up was nasty (as they are sometimes) a couple staying under the same roof could be just as damaging. I like that you are thinking along the lines of solutions, though. I wish I could think up a more viable alternative. I guess if it were a simple issue, someone would have come up with an alternative already!

  @Joel Falconer - Good to see you! I agree with you for the most part. I think for a majority of cases couples can save their marriage if they worked at it. Also, interesting observation on the difference on “equity” and “equality” - I would really like to hear more of your thoughts on that, if you could spare the time for another post - I always keen to pick brains! (Yummy brains for lunch!)

  @Zogmama - Could you ever imagine living with your ex-husband under the same roof with the same living arrangements as Female described? What do you suspect would happen? (Just curious)

• 
  Emmah
  December 8, 2007 at 2:22 am

  Arrrgh! It looks like the emoticons from hell have invaded the above blog post!!

• 
  NDK Creative Artist
  December 9, 2007 at 11:37 am

  As I understand it the post-world war generations in the Western World had the idea that marriage was for life. Women were little more than chattel, and often assets to secure, jobs as they made a man appear to be stable (”stable family man” meant easy to tie to a job for a lifetime).

  Those generations had also suffered tremendous losses of manpower. In New Zealand for example, approximately half the manpower was wiped out leaving a huge gap in the labor force that took years to recover.

  I haven’t seen any studies on this but I know it is logical to assume it had an effect on relationships that needed to replenish the population and stability of relationship would be important to that effort. So, the idea that marriage/relationships are for life was and to some extent still lingers on as an ideal. This was bolstered by the religious idea of marriage as being “eternal in the eyes of God” as well.

  Imagine men being scarce and how women would feel about finding one who is healthy and available and how this may then influence one’s thinking about relationships and marriage and so on.

  Medical science has enabled life extension and that is argued that this is a reason for relationships having less stability, and the idea that relationships don’t need to be “for life” or “eternal” is a notion that is apparently taking on less permanence.
  But relationships are often less stable because of the ideas of consumerism that create a “replaceable” notion about human beings. Add this into the increasing lack of economic security and the fact that people now change careers every 7 years and you have a lot of factors pushing and pulling on the very idea of a stable, long-lasting, relationship with any fidelity.

  Then there is the constant stimulation of sexual desire through advertising, the tempting nature of female fashion that is, let’s face facts, designed to attract attention and which the entire industry of fashion and cosmetics is devoted to helping women achieve so they can attract, claim and continue to keep a mate.

  Oprah stated on one of her shows that there are now more women living in single (but sometimes partnered) relationships than ever in history.

  The rise of strong economically independent women, who can work and earn and own property is still a relatively young and new idea. It is not so long ago that women did not own property.

  The Buy-a-Bride industry has also become huge and has a large range of attendant problems and issues. And then we have the continued sex slave market to further compounds the full range of human relationships and the broad range of potential. The transactional nature of relationships these days has exacerbated the tensions and pressures in a world where “money’s everything” to people, and it’s become a complex mix to make sense of, and few manage to make any sense of it, but struggle endlessly with it. And that simply points up the fact that we are confused about what to do, and which way we are going. Perhaps what we need to do is accept change and instability to a greater degree than we have tolerated, and embrace the fact that stable relationships in a civilization and culture such as we have is just not going to work, because constant stability is an anachronism in such a world.

  Of course this takes us straight into the ideas of living in a consumptive culture again. And these ideas surely do have to change if mankind is to survive the catastrophe of climate change, and that may even mean a shift in the relationship paradigm yet again. Fractured and fragmented families have become a norm because of the nature of the culture and civilization in which we live.

  We haven’t even begun to consider the other ideas of polygamy, but which are often being reported in the US media.

  All these factors are in a state of flux since women’s rights became a part of life. I welcome that flux, but the confusions that are flying about within society, the tension between the genders, and the social pressures have created an imbalance.

  In the New Zealand Herald this week, an article Women want ‘no-strings sex’ was published that reminds me of a conversation Emmah and I had a few years back where she complained bitterly about the socio-cultural (inequitable) notion that women who are promiscuous are considered to be “sluts” and men engaged in the same behavior are tolerated, smiled upon and favored as “sowing their wild oats” and beamed upon with pride. I agreed with her then and I agree now, that this inequitable and unbalanced notion is what should be characterized as slutty and a damnable indictment of the perpetuation of inequality between men and women. But, to be fair, it’s changing. So perhaps promiscuity means we should identify male sluts and female sluts. Alternatively could we do away with the notion altogether and just accept it as natural that sexually mature men and women need to satisfy each other and it’s none of anybody else’s business what they do so long as it is consensual.

  So long as a couple are prepared to take responsibility for any unintended consequences then this should be fine as far as society is concerned, and if they don’t then society must provide for this circumstance in order to (1) preserve human life, and (2) ensure that the couple that produced human life (if that’s the case) are not just permitted to “walk away” without taking responsibility for their offspring. Most of the measures I’ve seen in place in society seem to have a great deal of stress associated with them and the viewpoints get very tangled and so on with the anti-abortion lobby, right-wing religious views, etc.

  I am also aware that whenever men were being promiscuous and having affairs with women, well it was with women (not always, I know, but let’s not muddle the issue here), and this other Victorian idea that women are some sort of asexual being is complete rubbish.

  Our cultural programming is remiss, it creates these inequities, and it starts early with “boys - blue” and “girls - pink.” Why the should we ever color code gender anyway? What’s the purpose and intent here other than to point up differences in gender and treatment, or to demonstrate to people who don’t know if a baby is a boy or a girl simply by looking when the newborn is fully clothed and being unable thereby to tell without getting personal. Color-coding for gender ID would seem to be useful in this context, but wouldn’t a simple question suffice? Is it really that embarrassing to ask what sex the newborn is?

  Boys, trucks and blocks. Girls, dolls and frocks. Why not mix it up? Surely that would promote harmony and understanding and respect at an early age. Must little children be programmed for babyhood at such a young age?

  Understanding sexual desire as a biological imperative and not just as a pleasure imperative, is a part of becoming an adult.

  Just because I’m a man does not mean I have only one thing on my mind. Actually I have many things on my mind at any one time and none of them are ever far away from demanding my whole attention, unless I am engaged in giving my attention to my lover, and then they should not be present.

  Hmm…man-to-have-babies-with meets woman-who-wants-to-have -babies. Man-who-wants-healthy-sexual-relationship, meets woman-who-wants-healthy-sexual-relationship.

  All of these things and more besides, exist in our world today. It’s just that the paradigm is changing and becoming increasingly freed of the old restraints and we need to re-think how we’re dealing with the situations. For those of us whose relationships have wrecked and foundered on the still revolting sexual revolution, it’s not much of a consolation prize to know that we ended up

  All these ideas are thrown into question in the modern age, but all are still a part of the mix that is our culture and we’re still not even looking at the wide variance of other types of relationship that exist in parts of the world that are still foreign to us.

  It’s a lot to think about.

  But still, I’m glad that Engender Truth is looking at this and I think we need to because we have, each of us, a need for human companionship to one degree and another, and having people you can count on and turn to when you need them is incredibly precious.

• 
  NDK Creative Artist
  December 9, 2007 at 11:45 am

  ….er meant to complete that thought…not much of a consolation prize that we ended up being victims of social change and upheaval that was on reflection badly managed.

• 
  Female
  December 10, 2007 at 2:09 pm

  Wow. What a comment, was great to read your post, Joel.

  I also need to qualify my original post. It was based on current thinking for how to manage contact when children are under three years of age. The level of contact of course depends on the child’s age as they have different developmental needs at different ages. The child’s individual temperament also needs to be taken into account.

  I’m going to go on a bit about why parental contact with young children is so important but my basic point is that the non-custodial parent should not have more contact with the child than a custodial parent who is the child’s primary attachment figure.

  My view here is based on the fact that basic trust is developed within the first 6 months of life. During this time, children develop a bond primarily to one parent and secondarily to another parent (typically dad). Forget psychoanalysis, even neurobiology now can show that the primary bond is critical to brain development and thus for all future aspects of development. It is considered to be the most important factor to consider for children under the age of one whose parents are involved in a custody dispute. The parent that the child has developed the primary bond with is the one that must be awarded primary custody. Any family court bias towards women (who are typically the primary care-giver) is warranted. It is in the best interests of the child. I won’t listen to any MRA who wants to argue against me on this point unless he is the parent who the child established the primary attachment bond to, and the court ignored this.

  Young children removed from their parents and placed in foster care typically indiscriminately attach to anyone and appear as the world’s most trusting and friendly children (assuming no physical or sexual abuse took place). This is a facade and an evolutionary instinct to seek attention from any adult in the interests of survival, but these children actually have no concept of what trust is even though they appear as if they trust everyone. And anyone. These children must therefore be watched more than other children as they are more vulnerable and at risk from predators. In adolescence, these children are the promiscuous ones.

  I’m not saying that insecurely attached children cannot change, but it can take years and a Herculean effort to establish trust with children who were not able to establish it within the first six months, or who did establish it, but who lost the parent to whom they were primarily attached, whether through divorce or death.

  Between 6 - 18 months, the most important thing for a child is predictability. Separation anxiety also occurs around 12 months. So overnight visitations are generally not recommended because the anxiety this produces can be too much for a young child. If the non-custodial parent insists, then it is preferable if the non-custodial parent moves in for the overnight stay rather than remove the child away from their primary care-giver to another residence for the night.

• 
  Sam
  December 11, 2007 at 7:51 am

  “Boys, trucks and blocks. Girls, dolls and frocks. Why not mix it up? Surely that would promote harmony and understanding and respect at an early age. Must little children be programmed for babyhood at such a young age?”

  They already tried to mix it up. Back in the 70s, society did away with gender boundries. Boys were free to play dolls and house while girls were given oppertunities to do physical stuff like sports and roll toy trucks around. It didn’t work because it, ironically, negated and denounced free will. Some boys didn’t want to play with dolls and such because they just didn’t find the attraction in it. Nothing to do with them being ‘girly’ activites as stereotypes claimed. The same happened to girls where they just didn’t see anything exciting about stuff usually reserved for the male gender.

  The thing I hate about these kinds of debates when it comes to “cultural programming” is just how much actually resonates with people as individuals. How many people actually follow the programming? How many are just trying to raise their kids without concern for what other people think? There are numerous nuances that debates like this forget. To claim there’s brainwashing going on across the board is kind of an insult to the fact that human beings have free will.

• 
  Joel Falconer
  December 11, 2007 at 4:59 pm

  @Sam, yes, in the seventies they tried this, and 30 years later those kids started a show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Just kidding, someone’s gotta enforce the stereotypes, right?

  @Emm, more about equity and equality, eh? Sure, why not. A dictionary tells me that equality is the state of being equal. Which is friggin’ stupid, by the way, cos then I have to look up a word that was already in the word I looked up . It’s a common word, so the definition isn’t brief, but to excerpt some key parts - “being the same in quantity, size, degree or value” and “uniform in application and effect.”

  The word ‘equality’ means that one thing is the same as another. Men and women ARE NOT the same. Something I learned when I got married is that we’re not even remotely similar Women have babies. Men don’t. Men grow beards, and it’s not a pretty sight on the occasion that a woman does. We are physiologically different in enormously varied ways.

  We are mentally and instinctually different, too. Our brains are different and run on different chemicals. We men have got plenty of testosterone to influence our thought processes and women have that estrogen stuff. Again, not cool when those chemicals get mixed up!

  But that means: we think different.

  So our bodies are different and we think differently - obviously we have been created (or seeded by aliens, if you swing that way) to Fulfill Different Functions.

  Now, I’m not saying that women belong in the kitchen and the bedroom and should be looking after a brood of six. There’s an overpopulation problem, ya know I truly hate the gender wars and the fact that we treat each other without equity. All I am saying is that we are fundamentally different. Unless the true goals of the feminists were to make sex change operations commonplace, then their claim to support equality (which I don’t think they did, but that’s another story) was clearly the wrong word. They didn’t want to be men. They just didn’t want men to treat them as inferior.

  The word “equity” is a lot clearer, and it was the word some college feminist was looking for when she accidentally made “equality” the buzzword of the movement. Equity means: “the quality of being fair and impartial.”

  That’s what we’ve all been after, right? Treating each other fairly. That’s the word we gotta replace equality with.

• 
  zogmama
  December 15, 2007 at 5:39 pm

  @Emmah: Late to the party again, I see. To address your question to me, it would be miserable and untenable. We actually did exist under the same roof for four months between the time he revealed his BIG SECRET and when we physically separated. I could barely work, I drank too much, and one memorable night I was running up and down the stairs like a mad woman, with my husband locked in the downstairs bathroom threatening suicide and my son upstairs needing assistance with homework.

  I gotta tell you, I don’t ‘blame’ society for directing child’s play. Both my boys were naturally attracted to traditionally male playthings, and neither of them could, at age four, identify the color pink. It was funny, and made me realize that their mother is not a traditionally feminine woman. How about your readers who were toddlers during the experimental 70s? What did you like to play with, and how?

  @ Joel: I laughed aloud at your response to Sam re Queer Eye. That doesn’t sound like much, unless you know that my husband left me for a man. Funny stuff.

• 
  CatA
  December 20, 2007 at 5:57 pm

  Well, my childhood was largely in the 70s, and as I’ve said before on another blog some of you read, there were 7 of us kids so the parental figures just tried to keep us out of their hair as much as possible.

  What I liked about my childhood was that so much of it was spent out of doors (it was semi-rural). We often played with neighborhood kids in mixed gender groups too, flashlight tag, kickball, climbing trees, going out on leaky old boats onto the river…etc. Sure, there was some grouping by gender, but it wasn’t an absolute. I don’t remember anyone trying to force anything on anyone (except my mother would try to make me wear dresses to school once in a while, which I fought tooth and nail). My mom would get me dolls, but they would just end up in the bottom of the toy box, decapitated and dismembered. My younger sisters, though, played with dolls, and no one ever tried to stop them. Our yard was also littered with sling shots (really unsafe ones, the kind that worked!!), BB guns, tomahawks, etc. We all played Cowboys and Indians (oh so politically incorrect now. But the 70s zeitgeist might have been creeping in there, because in my neck of the woods everyone wanted to be the Indians. They were cooler than the cowboys for some reason).

  It was only later, in the early 80s, that I remember encountering the “no toy guns” for boys rule. This didn’t work out too well, they just used their fingers. A little later I remember (in shopping for young relatives) that there seemed to be a backlash, and we were back to the aisles with acres of that nauseous Pepto-Bismol pink for the girls, and bright blue and red for the boys.

  I guess I believe in balance. There is nothing wrong with letting a child expressing his/her natural inclination, but counterbalance is good, too. I was a very shy child (in spite of, or maybe because of, my semi-feral mucking about on the river and in the woods), and could have used a bit more of a push, I think, to overcome it. I also think it is a good thing to try to build a sense of empathy for others in children, in spite of gender. You just don’t want to clobber kids or go overboard.

  Overall, I’d say my 70s childhood, as far as freedom to play with who/what I wanted, was a good one, and not overly socially controlled; anyway, it seemed normal to me.

• 
  Emmah
  December 20, 2007 at 8:50 pm

  Actually you inspired a memory of my 80/90s childhood which is quite funny really.

  When I was in primary school the boys used to have the bottom end of the playground to kick a football around. For some reason the girls decided they wanted to play football too. Initially the boys were against the idea but our male teacher at the time decided to put the idea to a vote in class.

  It was arranged that girls had 2 days girls-only football, boys also had 2 days of boys-only football and then we had one day (I think a Friday) of a mixed group.

  The funny thing was, this worked really well. After a while though boys would invite the girls onto their “boys only” days and girls would do the same for the “girls-only”. Eventually we played almost everyday of football in mixed boys and girls teams.

  I enjoyed playing with guns and the rough games, but I also enjoyed collecting masses and masses of barbie dolls and used to play these games with my younger sister. I don’t know, I think every person is different and children should do whatever they enjoy doing.

  As you said though, parents could guide their children to express fairness towards other children and to make sure the rough and tumble didn’t turn into violence. I think beyond that is too socially controlling.

  I never found my childhood to be that socially controlled, in fairness. Not sure if the UK and the US or even Australia and New Zealand have similar approaches in those eras, though.

• 
  Emmah
  December 20, 2007 at 8:52 pm

  It is interesting to compare the childhoods of the 70s and 80s and 90s, I think.

  What about Zog, Female? NDK? Joel? Sam? What were the playgrounds like when you were boys/girls?

• 
  zogmama
  December 21, 2007 at 3:01 pm

  I was a bit of an outcast on the playground, and by third grade (age 7), I simply stayed inside and read books or helped the teacher. I’d say, though, that the playground was very much gender segregated, with girls clumping together to gossip and play hopscotch or jump rope while the boys played football (American-style) or dodgeball or performed feats of stupid bravery jumping off the monkey bars.

• 
  CatA
  December 21, 2007 at 3:56 pm

  Hmm, in my playground experience, I think girls had it pretty good. We could play all the games if we wanted, at least in the younger grades, and we could also play the “girls only” games like those you mentioned. Dodgeball, 4 Square, marbles, tag, and Red Rover, though, were all mixed gender on my playground, up until about the 3rd grade. I think the boys must have gone off sometimes to do things by themselves, but I don’t remember much ironclad segregation. I do remember a war that got started, though, where boys got together and girls got together to storm around the playground shouting this little ditty:

  EXTRA, EXTRA, read all about it, all the (boys/girls) are mental retarded!! This went on for days. Little kids can be so, so charming.

  There was a clique of horse-mad little girls, I remember, and apparently that is a perennial, as my niece is now a horse-mad little girl.

• 
  dollslikeus
  May 11, 2008 at 8:20 pm

  I liked to play with trucks and cars when i was a little kid .
  My boys never played with dolls least wise I never brought them for them but I did put my whole made mr and Mrs santa down stairs in the family room when they were young and they got moved around by both them and their friends .
  They were never the way I left them sometimes they were laying down sometimes standing up.

Leave a Reply