As you all know, I don’t blog as often as I should. This month, I’ve had a totally valid excuse–I’ve been writing an article that’s due on Time Travel in Star Trek. It’s left little time for anything else.

It’s also affected all my dreams. I’m having time travel dreams and nightmares nightly. Am hoping that when I turn the bugger in this week, they’ll stop.

Of course, those who’ve missed my musings can catch the bi-monthly movie column at www.matchflick.com (upcoming: Hitchhiker’s Guide). My work at matchflick is out of pure love for movies–even though I’ve been doing the column for years, I don’t get paid anything for it. I haven’t even so much gotten one free movie ticket or press pass to WonderCon. Oh, well.

That’s why I agreed to follow Denise Du Vernay’s suggestion of joining her as an examiner on www.examiner.com. Denise is the Chicago Best Friends Examiner. I’m now the Davis/Sacramento Sci-Fi Examiner.

(Want a similar gig? Ask us about it!)

Examiner expects bi-weekly entries, but they get to be pretty short. The hardest thing about writing for them is that they discourage first person. I broke that guideline a few minutes ago on a new post, but it would have been weird to talk about myself in third.

Friends, Examiner actually pays us when you click on and read our articles. I think three views gets us a shiny new penny, but a penny is better than no penny.

Forgive me, then, for sometimes reminding you that Denise has articles here: http://www.examiner.com/best-friends-in-chicago/denise-du-vernay

Mine are here: http://www.examiner.com/scifi-in-sacramento/karma-waltonen

We’re both taking suggestions for content, by the way!

Clothing ads don’t often make the news, but clothing ads that feature boys wearing nail polish are apparently an exception.

J.Crew’s new ad featuring a woman looking into the eyes of her smiling child is setting the news ablaze because the happy boy playing with his mother is wearing nail polish.

You can see the ad here: http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/dpps/entertainment/j.crew-ad-showing-boy-with-pink-nail-polish-sparks-debate-dpgonc-20110412-fc_12731866

Multiple sites have blogged about it, and Jon Stewart devoted an entire segment to the media frenzy. The main criticism of both blog-response posters and conservative news commentators was that the mother in the ad (who works for the company) and the ad itself had an agenda. Many said this was about being gay; many complained that this was about being “accepting of transgender children.”

Of course, there’s room to talk about all of the terms getting thrown around, about how not all of those terms are as interchangeable as people believe them to be, about how some straight men wear nail polish, and about the fluidity of gender identity in young children, but instead of talking about these issues in relation to an ad, let’s talk about a real little boy who wore nail polish once.

My son.

When my son was four years old, he spent the weekend with his older female cousin. Upon seeing her paint her nails, he requested that she do his as well. On neither of their parts was this an agenda, nor a statement of sex, gender, or sexuality. Maybe this was because my son wanted to be like his nearest cousin in age. Maybe they were bored.

Whatever it was, when he came home, he proudly displayed a coat of translucent yellow on his nails. If he hadn’t pointed it out, I might not have noticed—they just looked a little jaundiced.

I didn’t give it much thought; the next morning, he went off to preschool.

When I picked him up later that day, he was crying. In the car home, he told me that another boy, another four year old, in the company of others, had punched him in the face and called him a girl.

I didn’t know what to say.

I considered myself a feminist; I was in college taking courses in women’s studies. I was a supporter of gay rights. If I had to argue with an adult, I would know how to do so. If I had to comfort an adult, I would know how to do so.

But how was I to explain to my child how the world around us had made another child violently police gender normativity? Or that someone’s parent raised a preschooler who would react this way?

My son already didn’t like his preschool, but he went because it was what we could afford. The $15 a month discount I was offered by the owner for being in college was a great help. The owner perhaps felt sorry for me. Most of the parents in the daycare were young, single mothers like I was. But I was a little younger. And unlike the mothers who worked at the grocery store and the McDonald’s down the street, I didn’t technically have an income—just student loans.

Let me clarify that this was almost fifteen years ago, when gay marriage seemed a much further off dream than today. We were also in the South at the time, where all struggles for equality seem a little bit harder.

Even in our own family, gender norming was, well, the norm. While I was allowed to be a tomboy, when my son was born, my grandfather insisted that the infant be called “handsome” instead of “beautiful.” He didn’t get my joke in buying the baby a shirt that said, “If you think I’m handsome, you should see my grandfather.”

When he was a toddler, my son found an island Barbie among some of my old toys that my mother had unearthed. He looked into her brown eyes and at her long, dark hair and declared her “Mommy Doll.” My hair was only down to my waist, whereas hers met her calves, but it was the closest he was going to find.

My son didn’t so much play with Mommy Doll as want her near. That is, he didn’t dress her or comb her hair, but he carried her with him and slept with her at night. In fact, having Mommy Doll served useful to me as his requests to sleep with me decreased when he was able to use my smaller substitute.

My grandmother was horrified and expressed concern that Mommy Doll would make him “a gay.” Since I actually knew gay people, I knew that wasn’t how it worked. In fact, one of my gay friends consistently gave my son truck toys, insisting that they’d “worked” for him as a child.

One day, when my grandmother was caring for my son, Mommy Doll disappeared. She never would tell me what she did with the body.

Even though I was very liberal and progressive for this place and time, I had no other agenda for my son than to love him no matter what and to accept him no matter what.

Unless, of course, he became a bigot.

There seemed a small chance of that given my diverse group of friends, who all took turns babysitting at times so I could finish a paper or make it to a play rehearsal. We were all on various places on the gender spectrum. For example, I taught the boy show tunes, but I also taught him about cuss words, science fiction, and discipline.

And I tried to watch my language. Once, late in elementary school, his friend overheard me saying something like, “well, whomever you choose to spend your life with probably won’t appreciate you being such a picky eater.”

“Why does she say it that way?” the friend asked.

My son sighed. “In case I’m gay.”

But right then, I was in the car with a sobbing child. A child who’d been physically assaulted. A boy who’d been called a girl.

“Are you a girl?”

“No.”

“Then why do you think he said that?”

“Because he’s mean.”

“And stupid,” I added, in a not so generous moment. “His parents have taught him something silly—that being a girl is about how you look, but we know better.”

I did not talk about the sexism (why is “girl” a bad name) or heteronormativity or Christian tendency to judge that predominates the South. Nor did I point out that because we were poor, we were in a predominantly black area, where homosexuality and gender transgression was somehow more taboo than in the predominantly white campus that was the other part of our world.

I did not say, because I was too angry to think it, that perhaps the young boy had learned to hit transgressors because maybe that’s how he had been disciplined when he failed to understand the gender rules that his parents had internalized.

“What do you want to do,” I asked the teary-eyed boy, who was still gasping a bit from his sobbing.

“I’ve been trying to wash it off all day!”

Finally, something I could solve—“I know how to take it off. We can do it right when we get home if you want.”

But then I remembered something.

“Didn’t Tessa do your toenails too?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to take the toenail polish off?”

My son thought hard.

“But they can’t see my toes in my shoes. Only you and I can see my toes.”

“That’s true.”

“Then we’ll keep it on the toes.”

My son learned about the magic of nail polish remover on his fingers as soon as we got home.

The tint on his toes remained for a time before fading away naturally and completely, as things like that tend to do.

http://www.matchflick.com/column/2377

You can check out some of the recent articles I’ve written too!

Today is one of The Simpsons‘s anniversaries. I say “one of” because while this is not the day the full-length show first aired in 1989, it is the day the family first appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987.

I was there. I saw it. I was hooked.

I’ve written a lot already about the cultural impact of the show, so for today, I’ll focus on another aspect of the show: its prescience.

Somehow, all of the things I love, Margaret Atwood, Science Fiction, The Simpsons, etc. are great at seeing where our cultural trends are going to go.

The Simpsons has both commented on and anticipated many aspects of American culture. Our current political season is reflected eerily in Season 11’s “Bart to the Future.”

In the episode, Bart sees a vision of his future. He’s a loser, but Lisa is President. The beginning of her administration is plagued by a debt: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.”

At the time, the line was funny–of course we would never be so stupid as to elect the Don. Now, the line evokes a sick feeling in my stomach as candidate Trump illustrates his lack of genius by siding with the birthers. A reality TV star courting the lowest common denominator? And winning? Yes, it could happen.

Lisa has to raise taxes to balance the budget, but doesn’t want to say that that’s what she’s going to do. Milhouse, her advisor, says that if she wants to “out and out lie,” she could call the “painful emergency tax” a “temporary refund adjustment.”

Doublespeak in politics is nothing new, but Jon Stewart was struck by Obama’s doublespeake last week enough to comment on it. Specifically, raising taxes (or, rather, allowing some tax breaks on the super rich to expire [did you know the richest 400 households pay 17% while I pay 30 something %?]) was “spending reductions in the tax code.”

This is why I love The Simpsons; they are us!

Happy 24th!

The day was supposed to be irritating to some degree, already–I was to borrow V’s car, drive to the Sacramento Airport, pick up the boyfriend and the boyfriend’s mother, move her into her new nursing home, and then head back home to do work and to get the boy to make some college calls he doesn’t want to make. Fun, fun, Friday.

Well, it’s several hours later, and I’m not at the airport yet. A few minutes after borrowing the car, I was turning right on B from Russell. A older man and his wife were in the lane beside me–the lane designated to go straight. The man decided that he needed to be in my lane, despite the fact that I was there. I yelled at him and pulled further forward, stopping to yield to a biker who had right of way.

That’s when I got hit from behind.

Not by the man, but by the car that had been behind me–he had decided to move into her car space too. In attempting to not get hit by him, she hit me.

He drove away.

Then, as she was calling her mother and I was calling Vanessa and the police, and the boyfriend called me. He’s still stuck in Denver, can’t get to Sac. Can I pick him up in a few hours in San Fran?

My head hurts for so many reasons now.

I’m sure you’ve seen the news that some countries, like Germany, are refusing to air reruns of The Simpsons that feature problems at Mr. Burns’s nuclear power plant. This is supposed to be a sensitive response to what’s happening in Japan.

The Simpsons people have said that this decision is fine with them. I’m fine with it if they are, but I can’t really see the need for it.

Might someone watching The Simpsons be reminded of the sadness of Japan? Yes. But viewers of The Simpsons know where Homer works already. And The Simpsons isn’t making light of the potential for disaster. In fact, The Simpsons has long been one of the few reminders in popular media about the dangers that this type of power pose, especially when combined with corporate greed. Many of the problems with Mr. Burns’s plant occur because he won’t spend the money to ensure safety (an emergency exit is merely painted on the wall, for example). The company that owns the plant in Japan has been hesistant to use seawater to cool down the plant for one simple reason–it means more money in repair costs afterwards (if I’m remembering correctly, that company is American).

So what are we supposed to do? Wait until this crisis is over, when we’ve all gone back to being complacent about the inherent problems that arise when safety and profit butt heads to see a cartoon satire of nuclear power?

Fine, but I’m still bothered by the censorship for two reasons.

One, the focus is narrowed in a strange way. When I watch The Simpsons, I am likely to see alcoholism, car accidents, and other common traumas. Am I so fragile that I expect the government or television stations should make sure that I don’t have to see these things? After all, in any given day, my life is likely to be ruined by a car accident. The legacy of many people’s alcoholism is ever present in my life–must I be protected from reminders about reality?

Second, if we censor for a certain amount of time, the implication is that there will be a time when we are over the crisis. After 9/11, many stations refused to show “Homer vs. The City of New York” because the twin towers are visible in the episode. The episode wasn’t about terrorism or death, but some felt that the factual depiction of what had been in that space at that time was something people couldn’t/shouldn’t be expected to deal with. It’s ten years later. I still think of 9/11 when I see that episode. I still like that episode.

While the wound isn’t as new and raw, it’s still there.

When the twin towers were referenced in a recent episode of The Simpsons, “Homer the Father,” there probably wasn’t a single viewer who didn’t think about 9/11, who didn’t gasp a little bit at the towers being mentioned (in a moment that reminded us they were gone now), and who didn’t wonder, “too soon?”

If it wasn’t okay to air depictions of the towers ten years ago, it’s not now, which is why I think it’s okay at all times, especially in comedy.

I know that I tend to be over-protective of free speech issues in comedy, but it’s because I know that comedy is what saves us, what keeps us whole, what allows us to get through the bad times. I don’t want the bad times to be what ruins comedy.

First, I should say that my child’s alliance WON! And my child is the captain of his team, which I think makes him an extra winner!

The way they play is by forming alliances–teams of three. Thus, there are six robots on the field in each game. My son’s team’s robot was so dominant that the opposing alliance devoted one whole robot in playing defense against ours–basically just trying to get in our robot’s way in scoring.

Aside from being in the winning alliance, his specific team also won the “Quality” award for the design, etc.

This is made all the more impressive because there were so many amazing teams and amazing bots out there.

Some side observations: there are way too many teenagers out there with 1970s porn mustaches. Someone needs to show them those old porns, so they will understand why the ‘staches are a bad idea.

No one, at the end of the song Macarena, should turn to someone else and say, “What’s that song called” & be serious.

Also, no one should be playing/doing the Macarena where I have to hear/see it. (And that’s not even the worst song they played.)

The boy walked around the whole competition for three days in an overheated room in his trench coat and Indiana Jones hat. When I asked him why a little while ago, he said, “it’s become iconic.”

Now what? Well, they will head to Nationals. They will need to raise $5000 just to enter. They also have to ship the bot to St. Louis. My son, since he’s team captain and driver coach, really should go. It will cost between 1000-1200.

His faculty advisor said to one of the other parents, “but not every family will be able to afford that” and stole a pointed look at me.

Not sure what we’re going to do, but we don’t have to know tonight. We just need to enjoy the Citrus Circuits first ever FIRST victory.

The boy: Mom, where’s the book with the Monty Python scripts?

Me: On the Monty Python shelf.

Later–

The boy: Do we have any white sheets?

Me: How big does it have to be?

The boy: It has to be a blancmange.

On NPR’s Talk of the Nationthis week, they did a show on the public’s perception of single mothers. The show opened with this:

“The American family has changed. The nuclear family in the house across the street is still there, but different kinds of families live on the block, too: unmarried parents, gay parents, people who choose not to have children at all and, of course, single parents.

“A new Pew Research poll asked Americans about these trends and found almost 70 percent believe that single women raising children on their own is bad for society.

“Of course, there is a wide array of single mothers. Some women choose to raise children by themselves. Others find themselves without a partner through divorce or abandonment. But when seven in 10 believe this is bad for society, it makes you wonder.”

I was surprised that the anti-single mother numbers were still so high. As a single mother, I’ve encountered prejudice. However, few people where I live are willing to voice their single mother phobia. Or perhaps since most people who encounter me now meet me as a scholar before knowing that I’m a single mother, they don’t apply the stereotype of the single mother to me.

When my child was young, my friend Miranda said that people’s perception of me would be completely different if they heard her describe my college work before my motherhood. Some people who heard that I was a young mother first basically said Miranda must be lying about what I’d managed to accomplish and the fact that I was a decent/smart person.

As Talk of the Nation noted, not every single mother “chooses” to be one. I know two women who have chosen this as a path. All of the other single mothers I know are single because of abandonment, divorce coupled with social/financial disappearance, their partner’s death, or because the woman had to flee from abuse. Being a single mother isn’t how we expected our lives to turn out, but this is our life and we’re trying to make the best of it and to do the best for our kids, just like everyone else. Thanks for making it harder by demonizing us, America!

Would it be best to have more than one parent? Probably. I think more than two would be ideal–kids are amazingly exhausting. Of course, having one stable parent is better than having two sucky ones, though. The biggest issue for single mothers–the one that “causes” problems for children and society–is money. The children of financially well off single mothers end up doing just as well as their well off peers. Poor children tend to have a hard life no matter how many parents they have. It might be more productive to blame poverty–to blame a lack of access to healthcare and childcare–to blame the fact that single mothers will inevitably suffer from the sex wage gap we maintain in this country. Don’t fight single mothers; fight inequality.

If you still want to blame people, I can’t stop you. I can, however, suggest that you remember that it takes two people to have a child. Now, it’s not a man’s fault if he dies or if a baby is conceived in a way that leaves him out of social and financial responsibilities, but we all know that a majority of single mother are on their own and struggling financially because a man is not living up to his responsibility.

These men get to live without society’s stigma while the women they’ve abandoned take the brunt of it every day. They don’t have to explain to their bosses why they have to take off because a child is ill. They are free to date without having to find a babysitter. They will miss less work because their kids won’t be bringing home every little illness from daycare. They don’t have to worry about finding healthcare for anyone but themselves. They don’t have to worry about a new boyfriend or girlfriend being jealous or not even going for it because they don’t want to be a step-parent. They don’t get called sluts. If they’re up all night, it’s probably because they’re doing something fun, not because someone is throwing up on them or screaming from nightmares.

Some men are single fathers. I’ve known a few. Their ex-wives are absent for a variety of reasons–death, drugs, jail, etc. If the woman’s not dead, she is routinely dismissed by all the world as the most evil thing in the universe–much worse than a man who’s skipping out on his child. The single fathers are praised by all who know them. It is never assumed that they’re single fathers because of some moral failing. Many women find them admirable and attractive–what an obviously wonderful man!

The Pew poll didn’t even ask people about their attitudes towards single fathers. On the show, the pollster explained that it was because the vast majority of single parent households are indeed run by women. But we all know the other reason–single fathers are never seen as a “problem.”

My son’s father left me when I was seventeen, two weeks before I gave birth. We had been engaged, and I honestly didn’t think I’d have to do this by myself. My son is seventeen now. Those of you who know him know how amazing he is. Have I made mistakes? Yes, starting with not thinking I’d have to do this alone. Of course, we haven’t been completely isolated. My grandparents took us home with them for the first few months when we had no where else to go. Many men who have loved me have loved my son too. My friends have been amazing. They have forged my signature on school forms when I was at a conference. They have become his aunts and uncles. They have gone to music recitals with me both to make sure I wasn’t sitting by myself and because they honestly care about my child and want him to know it. Melissa even taught him to ride a bike when he needed it. No one ever raises a child completely alone.

Thus, I don’t deserve your praise, but I don’t deserve your scorn, either. The problem isn’t single mothers, it’s bad parents of either sex and of any marital status. Please be able to tell the difference.