Another day of buzz on the interwebs. This one is a true tragedy; the shooting in Aurora, CO at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie.
It is so terribly hard to make sense of such a senseless act, until you start to wonder how senseless it really is. When we live in a society that, for all intents and purposes, extols the virtues of violence, should we feel shocked when all that is offered as entertainment comes to life?
A line from an article on boston.com jumped out at me: "...maybe it’s worth having a discussion about an entertainment culture that
excels at selling violent power fantasies to people who feel powerless." I don't think the violence is limited to power fantasies aimed at the powerless.
It is everywhere from the myriad police-based shows, shows about the mafia or forensics, kids cartoons can be violent, even, frankly, the evening news shows violence. Violence isn't limited to television either. Murder Mystery books are prevalent too. Whether it is Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson, Faye Kellerman, Sara Paretsky, there probably is seldom a time when a book about violence isn't on the New York Times Best Seller List. As of this week, GONE GIRL and BACKFIRE are two that are clearly crime/violence based.
Frankly, the concept of violence extends all the way down to children's clothes. In recent years a trend has emerged of the use of camouflage in boys and girls clothing. For girls, of course it has the ever-present pink added in, but for boys it is straight up camo, like what you see soldiers wearing. Really? People want to dress their infant, toddler, elementary school age boy as though he is a mini-soldier? Ben and I often discuss what it means to sign up for the military and we both agree that a major part of it is that you are signing up to agree to be okay with killing people. It might come as no surprise that I won't be buying any camo gear for either of my children.
How easy is it for someone to obtain a gun in our culture? Pretty freaking easy. Our second amendment give us the right to keep and bear arms and the supreme court has had several cases to debate whether this applies to individuals and many cases come out in favor of people being able to keep guns in their homes. The original intention, I believe, was to allow for militias and for communities to protect themselves. I'm pretty sure the makers of our constitution never fathomed an assault rifle or the number of bullets it could dispense in a matter of minutes.
That we can get an assault rifle to keep in our own homes seems just so unnecessary. To what end does an average individual need an assault rifle? While I would personally never own a gun, if you are a hunter you would have one or if you are a sportsman you would have one. But in neither case would an assault rifle be your weapon of choice. They are meant for nothing else than killing as many people in one fell swoop as possible. Its not like you are going to take an assault rifle out into the woods hoping to stumble upon a herd of deer and just fire away.
But, I bet we see images of assault rifles all over movies and television. We might even read about the carnage they create in a book or in a story covering unrest in any number of foreign countries. I would argue that the supreme court needs to re-enact the ban on assault rifles it over turned in the 90's. But I might also argue that we as a culture need to start speaking out against the violence that pervades our airways as a way to begin to curb the senseless violence that continues to occur in our society.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Do we need maternity leave?
Yesterday the interwebs were buzzing about the news of Marissa Mayer's Fortune Magazine interview in which she stated "My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I'll work throughout it."
Mayer is the new CEO of Yahoo, no doubt a high pressure, high stakes job. She started yesterday at 28 weeks pregnant. In many ways it is progressive for a company to hire a leader who is expecting a child in just under 3 months. But is it really if the expectation is that she has to give birth and immediately return to work? Do women really still have to act like men to get the top jobs?
When I first read snippets of the article I snorted out loud to learn of her plan to just pop her kiddo out and go right back to work. Spoken like a first time mom who doesn't know what is coming. Maybe you'll be put on bed rest before giving birth. Who knows how long labor will last, how tired you'll be, whether you might hemmorage and be told to take two weeks and do nothing but feed the baby (I was). Maybe you'll have to have an emergency C-section. How will your body react to being up every two hours to feed said infant? What if the child has colic or other health issues? There are so many unknowns about labor and delivery and the first few months after that it seems incredibly short sighted to just blithely say, 'oh sure I'll go right back to work', when your company probably offers some kind of maternity leave and you earn enough to take a leave, even an unpaid one.
The cynical part of me guesses that she has a scheduled C-section set up and will immediately just bottle feed with formula for the sake of going back to work and employ any number of nannies to care for her newborn. How else can she accomplish such a feat without going down in flames when she sits down at her computer to send an email in her sleep deprived haze, unshowered, baby poop on her pants and milk leaking through her pajamas and puts together a completely incoherent message to her employees? I should say that I advocate women doing what's right for them on the breast-feeding front, and I know many who have had to bottle feed because nursing wasn't an option from a physical standpoint. But, not nursing because you are pressured to return to work is just wrong.
In the LA TIMES there was a story that quotes Lisa Stone the CEO of BlogHer as saying her phone lines lit up with people celebrating Mayer's hire and impending motherhood as a true sign that women have smashed the glass ceiling. I think there's a serious problem there. Women have gotten into the workplace and gained access to high level positions but they've had to do it by acting like they are men. Men take two weeks off (sometimes) when their child is born and go back to work. There seems to be no respect for the changes a woman's body undergoes to give birth and the need to heal from that to be healthy and happy. That healing takes time - the 6 weeks of healing your doctor tells you, you need is, from my experience and those I've talked to, really just the tip of the iceberg.
I firmly believe in women making the choice that works for them when it comes to working or not working after having children. I firmly believe that women are just as capable of holding high powered offices and succeeding just as much as a man can. But, I don't believe our workplace model has evolved to a point to allow women to succeed in doing that while actually acknowledging the demands of motherhood.
In the Atlantic Monthly recently there was an article written by a high powered mom of two tween/teenage kids who has decided to leave her high powered position because she realized you simply can't have it all. Something always has to give and usually it is on the family side. She's an older mom with older kids so she has some wisdom with which to look at things and she isn't talking about stepping out of the workplace just to have kids, but to be engaged with them throughout their lives. She discovered the neediness to survive passes when kids get older, but the neediness to thrive is still there.
I admit I was shocked to go back to work 3 months after having my first. I had assumed there was some rhyme of reason to why that was the allotted maternity leave - like, my child would be on some kind of sleep schedule that allowed me to sleep enough to be a functioning human being. Nope. She was up every 2-3 hours, nursing for an hour at a time and then going back down. I don't even want to calculate how little sleep that meant for me and I know I was not the best worker I could be in the first year of her life. I probably wasn't the best mom either, but on both fronts I gave it my best shot.
Now, that my second is due (ironically on the same day as Marissa Mayer and I'm also having a boy), I know I will not be able to take a full 3 month maternity leave. After my first I left the administrative, benefit providing side of my job to just teach part-time, 3 days a week as I believe in being home part-time to participate in the raising of my child. So, I enter into this birth gratefully covered by my husband's health insurance, but with no maternity leave. We have set money aside to allow me some time to stay home, but both of us know keeping as much money in the bank as possible is a good thing. So, I am constantly thinking about how long to take off and when to go back. I should teach 10 weeks of lessons (the fall semester starting, no less, when I am about 36 weeks along). If I did 3 before having the baby, could I do 3 after, starting say in late November? Can I handle that after just 6 or 7 weeks? I struggle to come up with a paradigm that feels right beyond, I want at least 3 months at home. Truth be told, I think women should be granted with pay and a right to return to their position without retribution, a year off after having a child. (My reasoning behind that is probably the topic for a whole 'nother post.)
So, when I read about Marissa Mayer, who probably has the option on paper to stay home for 3 months, or maybe to even have started her position 3 months after giving birth to her child, yet she's saying she doesn't need maternity leave, it irks me. I think it sends the wrong message to the world about what women have as rights in the workplace. It tells me that women haven't risen nearly so high as we like to think. It also tells me Marissa Mayer might be in for a rude awakening.
Mayer is the new CEO of Yahoo, no doubt a high pressure, high stakes job. She started yesterday at 28 weeks pregnant. In many ways it is progressive for a company to hire a leader who is expecting a child in just under 3 months. But is it really if the expectation is that she has to give birth and immediately return to work? Do women really still have to act like men to get the top jobs?
When I first read snippets of the article I snorted out loud to learn of her plan to just pop her kiddo out and go right back to work. Spoken like a first time mom who doesn't know what is coming. Maybe you'll be put on bed rest before giving birth. Who knows how long labor will last, how tired you'll be, whether you might hemmorage and be told to take two weeks and do nothing but feed the baby (I was). Maybe you'll have to have an emergency C-section. How will your body react to being up every two hours to feed said infant? What if the child has colic or other health issues? There are so many unknowns about labor and delivery and the first few months after that it seems incredibly short sighted to just blithely say, 'oh sure I'll go right back to work', when your company probably offers some kind of maternity leave and you earn enough to take a leave, even an unpaid one.
The cynical part of me guesses that she has a scheduled C-section set up and will immediately just bottle feed with formula for the sake of going back to work and employ any number of nannies to care for her newborn. How else can she accomplish such a feat without going down in flames when she sits down at her computer to send an email in her sleep deprived haze, unshowered, baby poop on her pants and milk leaking through her pajamas and puts together a completely incoherent message to her employees? I should say that I advocate women doing what's right for them on the breast-feeding front, and I know many who have had to bottle feed because nursing wasn't an option from a physical standpoint. But, not nursing because you are pressured to return to work is just wrong.
In the LA TIMES there was a story that quotes Lisa Stone the CEO of BlogHer as saying her phone lines lit up with people celebrating Mayer's hire and impending motherhood as a true sign that women have smashed the glass ceiling. I think there's a serious problem there. Women have gotten into the workplace and gained access to high level positions but they've had to do it by acting like they are men. Men take two weeks off (sometimes) when their child is born and go back to work. There seems to be no respect for the changes a woman's body undergoes to give birth and the need to heal from that to be healthy and happy. That healing takes time - the 6 weeks of healing your doctor tells you, you need is, from my experience and those I've talked to, really just the tip of the iceberg.
I firmly believe in women making the choice that works for them when it comes to working or not working after having children. I firmly believe that women are just as capable of holding high powered offices and succeeding just as much as a man can. But, I don't believe our workplace model has evolved to a point to allow women to succeed in doing that while actually acknowledging the demands of motherhood.
In the Atlantic Monthly recently there was an article written by a high powered mom of two tween/teenage kids who has decided to leave her high powered position because she realized you simply can't have it all. Something always has to give and usually it is on the family side. She's an older mom with older kids so she has some wisdom with which to look at things and she isn't talking about stepping out of the workplace just to have kids, but to be engaged with them throughout their lives. She discovered the neediness to survive passes when kids get older, but the neediness to thrive is still there.
I admit I was shocked to go back to work 3 months after having my first. I had assumed there was some rhyme of reason to why that was the allotted maternity leave - like, my child would be on some kind of sleep schedule that allowed me to sleep enough to be a functioning human being. Nope. She was up every 2-3 hours, nursing for an hour at a time and then going back down. I don't even want to calculate how little sleep that meant for me and I know I was not the best worker I could be in the first year of her life. I probably wasn't the best mom either, but on both fronts I gave it my best shot.
Now, that my second is due (ironically on the same day as Marissa Mayer and I'm also having a boy), I know I will not be able to take a full 3 month maternity leave. After my first I left the administrative, benefit providing side of my job to just teach part-time, 3 days a week as I believe in being home part-time to participate in the raising of my child. So, I enter into this birth gratefully covered by my husband's health insurance, but with no maternity leave. We have set money aside to allow me some time to stay home, but both of us know keeping as much money in the bank as possible is a good thing. So, I am constantly thinking about how long to take off and when to go back. I should teach 10 weeks of lessons (the fall semester starting, no less, when I am about 36 weeks along). If I did 3 before having the baby, could I do 3 after, starting say in late November? Can I handle that after just 6 or 7 weeks? I struggle to come up with a paradigm that feels right beyond, I want at least 3 months at home. Truth be told, I think women should be granted with pay and a right to return to their position without retribution, a year off after having a child. (My reasoning behind that is probably the topic for a whole 'nother post.)
So, when I read about Marissa Mayer, who probably has the option on paper to stay home for 3 months, or maybe to even have started her position 3 months after giving birth to her child, yet she's saying she doesn't need maternity leave, it irks me. I think it sends the wrong message to the world about what women have as rights in the workplace. It tells me that women haven't risen nearly so high as we like to think. It also tells me Marissa Mayer might be in for a rude awakening.
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