What does marriage even mean anymore?

When I tell people I’m having a baby in September, I notice a lot of them glance almost automatically at my left-hand, presumably looking for a wedding ring. Some have even outright asked me if I am- or going to be- getting married. My answer is always the same: “No. Not yet, anyway.”

It’s not that I don’t believe in the commitment. I love my partner dearly. After all, I’m having his child. When I was a young girl, I dreamed of that handsome prince from just about every Disney movie that I was told I was entitled to. Even though I wasn’t technically a princess, I couldn’t escape the belief that I deserved a knight in shining armor just as much as Snow White.

Modern men are many things wonderful. But most of them aren’t princes. It was easy to let relationships fail, citing the lack of true fairy tale love. But mostly, it was probably my fear. Or, like they say, the timing just wasn’t right. The glass slipper didn’t fit.

After I spent a lot of time alone, and a good bit of that relationshipless time with a male friend, we soon found ourselves falling in love. It’s hard now to even remember us just as friends, but it is that friendship that lies at the core of our love, and why we are starting a family together.

It’s not because both of us endured our parents’ ugly divorces that we’re choosing not to get married. It’s not that we’re scared, or don’t love each other enough to make that kind of commitment. We love a good gathering. And lord knows, we could use a new toaster. It’s our discomfort in the way our country now views marriage that has us feeling so disenchanted by one of the world’s oldest, and most beautiful rituals.

How could we have a wedding and invite our friends—many of whom are homosexuals and lesbians—to celebrate our heterosexual right to marry while they’re denied that same right just because of who they love?

A baby is certainly an incentive for us to get married, but the injustice for people whom we already know and love dearly is an even bigger reason for us not to, no matter the difficulties we’ll be faced with as unmarried parents. We have friends who’ve been in much longer relationships than ours who are unable to marry. And even though ten eleven states (go Delaware!) now allow gay marriage, the Supreme Court has yet to rule on the issue. More than that, there are those narrow-minded individuals who somehow feel threatened by same-sex couples. We allow these people their first amendment right to speak their shallow minds, of course, and they throw our Constitution right back at us, saying our forefathers would have never approved of same-sex marriage. (I won’t even go into the religious hypocrisy of the we’re-not-gay-we’re-just-serial-pedophiliac-sex-offenders aka the Catholic Church.)

It’s not like we won the lottery, and our unrich friends have to adjust to us now being millionaires. And it’s nowhere near the unbelievable comparisons homophobes make suggesting gay marriage is the same as marrying a relative or (sigh) a dog. I didn’t live through the Civil Rights movement. My parents weren’t even born when Hitler was rounding up our relatives and executing them by the trainload. So I can only look back at the mistakes my fellow Earthlings have made with hindsight and melancholy. It hurts to think about those millions of people who suffered at the hands of fear and entitlement. It hurts to know that it took so long to correct, and in some cases, we’re still battling those same issues. Gay people aren’t slaves. They’re not forced to live in the ghetto wearing yellow stars before their families are ripped apart, tortured and murdered. But they’ve certainly been unjustly treated. They’ve been demoralized, attacked, ridiculed. Before anyone is a homosexual, a lesbian or a heterosexual, we’re all human beings first.

The real issue here is we have a lot of issues around sexuality. We allow abuse and objectification to proliferate. We don’t stand up for victims of sexual abuse–regardless of their gender. We suppress our own feelings for fear of what others will say or do. That’s what this issue is about. It’s not about what our forefathers envisioned for America. It’s obvious they envisioned progressive leadership, compassion and an ability to grow as a nation as our needs and wants changed with the times.

I don’t believe that any of our gay friends would criticize us for marrying. They are friends, after all, and want to see us happy, just as much as we want the same for them. And many of them are probably going to be shocked to read this. But until we can all enjoy the same recognition of our love—regardless of our sexual orientation—I can’t possibly see marriage as an option anymore. And I know my daughter will understand. Perhaps one day, she’ll even get to attend her parents wedding.

Image: CarbonNYC

The post Until We All Can: Why I Won’t Marry My Baby’s Daddy appeared first on EcoSalon.

Be pure. Be sexy. Be a nurturer. Don’t breastfeed in public. Messages to women are more conflicted than ever.

We live in an advanced era of cloud computing, virtual personal assistants and cars that can parallel park themselves. So why is it that women so often feel like we’re still living in the dark ages? The question of whether we should even have access to birth control is still a part of our everyday political discourse. Fathers are symbolically claiming their daughters’ virginity. We’re slammed with objectifying ads that tell us to be more sexy, then shamed for claiming our sexual identities. And perhaps the saddest part of all is that it isn’t just men who are forcing these forms of suppression and control onto women’s bodies; the pressure comes from other women, too.

Purity pledges

Young girls are such delicate, corruptible little flowers that their wise, protective fathers must not only rule their sexuality with an iron fist, but demand that their daughters pledge their virginity to them. So goes the rationale of the Purity Ball movement, engineered largely by Christian fathers as a means of control over their progeny’s blossoming bodies.

What makes this even more disturbing is the fact that these girls are not making this decision for themselves at puberty (and even then, they’re too young to realize just what their fathers are asking of them.) Girls are brought to their first Purity Ball at the age of five, where they prance around in white dresses, listen to sermons about living a “pure life” and pledge themselves to their fathers. Throughout childhood and adolescence, the girls are given ominous warnings of the “terrible consequences” of losing their virginity, and essentially told that they have no input on their own burgeoning sexual identities at all. Many girls receive lock charms on necklaces, the keys held by their fathers, who will pass them over to their husbands on their wedding day in a transfer of male power.

Of course, there’s no equivalent movement that attempts to force young men into pledging their virginity to their mothers. Because that would just be weird.

Virginity tests

Taking control over young women’s vaginas to a far greater extreme, virginity tests are the literal examination of a woman’s hymen to be sure that she hasn’t had sex before marriage. These tests are illegal in many countries, and Amnesty International classifies them as torture. That doesn’t stop them from happening all over the world, both in institutional and private settings. Some cultures require that brides-to-be undergo such a test before their wedding day. Last year in Egypt, female protesters were subjected to them by military authorities; an official explained “We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place.”

Because if they aren’t virgins, clearly they’re asking for it.

Think this practice is long gone in the west? The British government used virginity testing for young female immigrants until 1979, believing that if they were virgins, they were more likely to be telling the truth about moving to Britain for marriage.

Gender segregation

Women are told to sit at the back of the bus – in Brooklyn. In Israel’s Beit Shemesh, a growing sect of powerful ultra-Orthodox extremists are fighting to keep women separate from men in nearly all public settings, even preventing women from going to the podium to accept their rightfully earned prizes at an awards ceremony. In many other areas of the world, the segregation of men and women has been going on for so long, and is so deeply entrenched in local culture, that changing it seems like an impossible task. The problem is particularly troubling in Islamic cultures, where fundamentalists place strict limits on interaction between women and men who aren’t their relatives.

In many cases, the reasoning behind segregating women from men is preserving the “virtue” of women and the “honor” of men, the idea being that women are not only helpless against the temptation of jumping on any random men who cross their paths, but that the mere sight of women could corrupt and distract men who are supposed to be focusing on more important things. It also reinforces the idea of women as property, who must be governed by male overlords.

Reproductive rights

Our supposedly progressive president refused to relax restrictions on Plan B, preventing women of all ages from accessing the morning-after pill directly off drugstore and supermarket shelves. Our legislators threaten to cave to fringe groups that want to redefine life as beginning at the moment of fertilization, which would outlaw all contraceptives, including birth control pills. One of our Republican presidential nominees, Rick Santorum, not only believes that birth control damages society, but wants to make all abortions illegal, even in the case of rape or incest, saying women should “make the best of a bad situation.” A bill in Georgia proposed the persecution of women who couldn’t prove that they didn’t cause their own miscarriages.

In other nations around the world, women’s ability to make choices about their own bodies and lives are in even more desperate straits. Women are all too often seen as passive baby-making machines, essentially existing only to further the continuation of the species.

Breastfeeding brouhaha

Breasts are so sexy – except when you’re feeding your baby. Then, they’re just gross. So gross that people will go out of their way to yell at mothers trying to provide her infant with the best sustenance in the world, and shame them into hiding. The problem is, society at large only wants to think of breasts in a sexual context; we’re so far removed from the biological realities of our species that many people feel disturbed by the sight of a baby suckling. Some honestly believe that women only breastfeed in public because they’re exhibitionists or trying to make a statement, not because their babies are hungry. Some even view it as pornographic. It’s a sad state of affairs when a mother is told that a dirty public restroom is a more appropriate place to feed her baby than a table at a restaurant.

The great cover-up

In Saudi Arabia, women who are already shrouded from head to toe in impenetrable layers of cloth, even in the harsh heat of the desert, are being told to cover up their sexy eyes. If a man decides that a certain woman has eyes that are too “tempting,” he has the right to order her to cover them immediately lest she face fines or public lashings. In Israel, the same extremists segregating the sexes are spitting on little girls who are dressed “too provocatively” as they walk to school. There are even movements within America to return to some misguided Victorian celebration of modesty. Women have come a long way since the days when they could be institutionalized just for having a bad reputation, but they’re still treated as if their bodies are weapons with which they might accidentally (or intentionally) bring ruin upon themselves and the men who look their way.

Slut shaming and rape blaming

Well, if you don’t cover up, don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you when you get raped. That’s the message that’s foisted upon us by modesty advocates and other groups who argue that showing virtually any skin equates to inviting violent sexual assault. And if you dare to claim your own identity as a sexual being, you should be ashamed of yourself. Slut-shaming has everything to do with patriarchal directives for women – how we should dress, how we should act, how we should conduct our sex lives. If we don’t conform, and especially if we dare to be aggressive about our sexuality, we’re ridiculed. Men, on the other hand, get a free pass – the more frequent and public their conquests, the more admiration and approval they gain.

Objectification

On the other side of the coin is the duality of expectations on female roles in society, specifically the wife versus the mistress, the modest and nurturing woman who is practically asexual versus the sex object that only exists for the pleasure of others. Both roles objectify women by removing their personalities and individuality. Sexual objectification is much more in-your-face, pushed on women every day by the mass media, treating women like commodities to be ogled and traded. For all of the pressure to be chaste there’s an equal opposing force pressuring women to be vapid, fleshly blow-up dolls. A prime example is a t-shirt offered by Abercrombie and Fitch (the same store hawking push-up bras for kids) emblazoned with the slogan, “With These, Who Needs Brains?”

Lesbian torture clinics

It’s no secret that homosexuality, another basic biological reality of our species, is seen by certain groups as something to be “cured.” But your jaw might just drop in horror when you learn that some of these “cure clinics” use physical torture and psychological abuse in an attempt to “straighten out” queer women. Ecuadorian activists are speaking out about 200 torture clinics operating under the guise of rehabilitation centers where both men and women are shackled, starved and sexually abused. Thankfully, a Change.org petition has brought about the beginning of the end to this practice in Ecuador, but we’re all too aware that there are still plenty of other groups across the globe that want to dictate who you can and can’t have sex with.

Female genital mutilation

Circumcision is a touchy issue, even here in America where it’s routinely performed on baby boys. Delve into the sticky cultural context of female circumcision as it’s practiced in Africa, and you’re opening a whole other can of worms. Some African feminists maintain that female genital mutilation is part of their cultural heritage, and one that “first world feminists” have no right to condemn – just as Jewish and Muslim traditions dictate that circumcision is a must for boys. But many woomen can’t help but feel that these practices were designed to control women by robbing them of sexual pleasure. Can you imagine a cut to your unanesthetized clitoris as anything other than torture? This is controlling other people’s bodies to the extreme, and truth be told, maybe we should leave everybody’s genitals alone and let them decide what they want to do with them once they reach adulthood.

Photos: progress ohio, tim & selena middleton, rutlo

The post 10 Ways the World Still Tries to Rule Women’s Bodies appeared first on EcoSalon.

10 global events we were all intrinsically part of.

What makes an event memorable? How does a “happening” sear into our collective mindset and take up permanent residence in our hearts and in our souls? Most often, of course, we are not personally there to witness or directly experience occurrences of global importance.

How many of us were in Cairo’s Tahrir square as protests raged earlier this year?

Who among us lost a loved one or ate radioactive food in Japan, or suffered pangs of hunger in East Africa?

In our media-saturated world, memorable events – indeed memories themselves – are delivered to us via an increasingly wide range of words and pictures, bits and bytes, accounts that stream to our attention, some touching us for a moment, some for a lifetime. Here’s a look at our Top 10 (in no particular order), with links to the stories and accounts that made them indelible to us.

1. March of Horrors: Japan’s Suffering

A tsunami generated by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of northeast Japan killed nearly 20,000, caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and triggered a nuclear power plant disaster that unleashed radiation into the environment. Within hours, videos of the unimaginable waves crushing the Japanese shoreline flooded world consciousness via YouTube and other Internet outlets.

2. The Harder They Fall: Arab Spring

Beginning with a small demonstration in Tunisia that grew to topple a regime, flames of unrest spread to Egypt, ousting dictator Hosni Mubarak, and then to Bahrain and Yemen. Eventually Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi would be dead, and even today, Syrian protesters remain caught in a bloody battle with dictator Bashar al-Assad. Did social media enable and perhaps even spark these events?

3. European Disunion: Economic Crisis in the E.U.

The global economic downturn wreaked havoc in the European Union where austerity measures in Greece resulted in riots and protest, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was driven from office, and measures taken by Germany and France exacerbated an ongoing fissure between the E.U. and Britain. Meanwhile, disagreement about how to avoid a catastrophic meltdown flared across the Atlantic, as opinions about what to do remained as numerous as there are pundits and stakeholders.

4. Wanted Dead: American Operation Kills Osama Bin Laden

In May, American helicopters bearing a special operations team raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, whose followers carried out the 9/11 attacks. Within hours his body was buried at sea, and images of the corpse suppressed. Instead, a powerful and now-famous image of White House personnel – including president Barack Obama and Secretary of state Hillary Clinton – remotely watching the mission was made public.

5. The Fruit of Invention: The World Mourns Loss of Apple Founder Steve Jobs

The world lost some great minds to cancer and health issues as 2011 wore on, including writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens and Czech playwright, dissident and politician Vaclav Havel. But, despite the sense that “it was coming,” the loss that seemed to most deeply move our high-tech world was that of innovator, inventor and Apple Founder Steve Jobs. As news of his death spread across the internet in October – in part via millions of his own inventions – biographer Walter Isaccson’s iBio hit the presses, eventually to set new sales records.

6. From Wall Street to Main Street: Occupiers Take a Stand

Beginning with a September protest in a New York City park near Wall Street, what became known as the “Occupy” movement quickly spread to many major American cities and beyond. The “leaderless” protests are said to represent “the 99 percent” against the richest 1 percent of Americans, who benefit from corporate and political corruption and greed at the majority’s expense. In November, images of a campus police officer at the University of California Davis pepper-spraying students went viral over the internet, instantly becoming a rallying point for the movement.

7. Us vs. Them: Obstructionism Paralyzes Washington

Despite being fractured between party traditionalists and Tea Partiers, a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives shackled the hands of Democratic President Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Senate. On issues ranging from the economy to the environment, American leaders reached a seemingly endless stream of stalemates. Most notably, the President unveiled a massive jobs bill that was labeled dead-on-arrival by members of both parties. The New York Times commented on the political gamesmanship, and EcoSalon presented the many rifts dividing America.

8. Weather, Weather Everywhere:  Climate Change Marches On

With drought in Texas, killer cyclones in the Philippines, and monster floods in South America and Thailand, 2011 was another year in what seems like an annual escalation of climate change and severe weather. Perhaps the most wrenching weather-related disaster was the return of drought to the Horn of Africa. Data continues to show the impact humans have on the world’s climate, yet deniers continue their war on science. In October, EcoSalon named names.

9. We are the World: All 7 Billion of Us

As the human population reached the 7 billion mark (with 3 billion more projected by the end of the century), debates about resources and birth control reheated. Can our planet sustain such exponential growth? In its inimitable way, National Geographic gave us the story in pictures.

10. Ask and Tell: End of Anti- Gay Military Policy in the American Armed Forces

After 18 years of controversy, the Pentagon repealed its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in September. After encouraging those who have been expelled under the policy to reenlist, President Barack Obama declared: “We are not a nation that says ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ We are a nation that says ‘out of many, we are one.'” An MSNBC story covered a historic kiss.

Images: TenSafeFrogs, Official U.S. Navy Imagery, S a l e e m – H o m s i, PIAZZA del POPOLO, bkusler, lwpkommunikacio, bogieharmond, Alex Barth, kevin dooley, woodleywonderworks, Beverly & Pack

The post The 10 News Stories of 2011 You Shouldn’t Have Missed appeared first on EcoSalon.