From my position in bed with a head cold from heck (Montreal), it seems Ottawa news media is hyper-sexed this week. Every time I stretch across the pillow pile for Kleenex and my connection to the outside world (Blackberry with Twitterfeed), it's the sex museum (or something), James Moore on sex (gross!), or reactions to Time on moms' boobs, which, let's face it, relate, albeit peripherally and certainly controversially, to sex (which you can learn about at the sex museum).
I chose to be driven crazy by Time (which, for the record, is a terrible magazine...bought my first and last copy this week) because it had the balls (gross!) to ask "Are you mom enough?" to a group of the most guilty humans on the planet. The audacity! I'm not even a mom and it makes me grumble.
Working moms (who are women) are getting shit on this year. Questioning economic inequity gets construed as an insult to "housewifery," and triggers a US presidential candidate to hop on a soapbox to defend the choice to stay home and bake (I joke). If you talk about mothers experiencing stress at work, tongue-clucking ensues. "Why'd you go and find a career, you bad life chooser?"
In my comprehensive exam reading, I wrestled with the idea of whether or not the "Mommy wars" (which are likened to a giant cat fight, which really makes me want to scratch someone's eyeballs out and lick myself) are a real raging thing (oh god, the militarism... today someone called for a "cease-fire"). Sociologists are divided on if working moms envy stay-at-home moms, and vice versa, or if this battleground has been staked out by the media. Cover stories like "Are you mom enough?" and the explosion of polarized responses from all over the political spectrum suggest, at least, that both are happening. Moms are stressed out by their constrained choices, and the media has a field day fanning the flames. And making sexist metaphors out of them.
This mom war, superficial or not, tells us a lot about the cultural climate these days. Basically we hate women as much as ever, especially when they have control over stuff (other than baking, 'cause who doesn't like fresh bread? and it takes so long!), so it's best to keep them busy with childbearing (which, by the way, I consider a full-time job). But beyond a gender analysis, we need to move to a feminist analysis of what else is being represented by soldiers of the mommy wars. A couple of days ago, I did a mini-class analysis of this swing toward "intensive mothering" for the Citizen, but there remains a lot to say about whiteness, thinness, sexuality, colonialism, and celebrity. What would we be saying about an image of a black woman who went on social assistance to breastfeed for four years? I'll die before "Floridian welfare moms do it right" makes the cover of Time.
