if only men read women's literature

[Note: These opinions are my own. I don't consult with others before having them and I don't ask permission before sharing them. This is my prerogative as the owner and writer of this space. Do I really need to say this?]

If only more men read more feminist literature the vast unknown-ness of their wives would be laid bare and life would be less confusing.

During the various ups and downs of watching my family 'find themselves' I'm struck at how hard it is for a woman to break free of social expectations. Like Lucy Honeychurch, my sister is bucking all the expectations of her class, gender, mothering status and perceived orientation and, in the process, making everyone around her freak out. Even I am stunned, watching my sister go through a process that makes me think of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own or Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

Her defiant refusal to remain in her marriage has apparently broken the rules of her little social community. In this community obligation to family (including friends) and church supercedes anything else, no matter if you're dying inside. But now, suddenly, relationships and identities are thrown into upheaval, children are endangered and all of morality has been upended and requires defense. Justifications must be made, core motivations must be plumbed and Someone needs to give a public accounting of how one has Betrayed Everyone.

Certainly, there was a betrayal. But which comes first? The betrayal of vows, or the desperate scramble for air that prompts the betrayal of vows? My brother in law asked me if I thought it was 'ok' that my sister did what she did. But I don't think in those terms. I try to put myself in her shoes and imagine what could have been done to facilitate the most immediate break in a marriage, deliver the greatest shock and bring things to an inevitable, and irreparable, conclusion. And then my sister's actions make sense.

But it doesn't make sense to the male members of her community. Their reactions are interesting. I think hysteria is accurate. There's also a degree of anger, seen especially in their demand for my sister to 'explain herself.'

All because a woman decided she wasn't happy.

What happens when men aren't happy? They can pull a Tiger, flaming out in a collection of hostesses and sleazy text messages. Or they can pull a Pastor C-, pushing everything down, only to release the unhappiness in bursts of furtive vacations. What do women do? We suck it up. We swallow our unhappiness until it turns us into the woman from The Yellow Wallpaper. Or we kill ourselves like Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary.

Again, I don't think men read a lot of 19th century domestic fiction. If they did, women's unhappiness would make a lot more sense.

A patriarchal society always inhibits a woman's autonomy and refuses to see her as an agent with a value system of her own. Her freedom, her independence doesn't exist unless some man authorizes it. And this is what I see. Men (very nice ones) demanding that my sister give an accounting of her actions because they're not satisfied with any of the answers they've received. These aren't bad men - they're just men. In defense of one of their own, they want to reassert control of a situation that she has set in motion.

For this, her journals have been secretly dissected, in an effort to find these answers when the woman herself is standing in front of them, repeating, "I wasn't happy. This wasn't me. I lied from the start. I never wanted any of this - wife, marriage. I was only that other person for everyone else."

Let's go back to literature (where all answers can be found, actually. At least humanist ones.) At the end of A Room With a View, Lucy Honeychurch is living in Florence with George Emerson, isolated from her family, even from her staunchest supporters like Rev. Beebe, because that is the price a woman pays when she betrays all expectations of her.

When a woman has defined for herself what her freedom entails, and she dares to take it, she finds herself cast outside of the castle walls. Imagine the Disney castle gone dark and quiet. The moat is filled and the drawbridge pulled up.

The only thing she has in front of her is the open world.

And it's worth it.

if only the poor were more like me!

If only poor people understood nutrition! The Fat Nutritionist

That post up there, btw, is brilliant. Unfortunately, she had to shut down comments because some folks were deliberately misreading her thesis, which I will repeat and clarify for you:

You want people to eat better? Give them enough money, a place for cooking and storage, and access to a decent variety of food.

There. That's her thesis in a nutshell.

I'll boil it down even further:
So, if we want other people to shop and consume like us, in our hip, healthy, and globally conscious ways, then they're going to need what we have.

What do I have that most really poor people (earning < $16k/annually) do not?
I have a properly operating kitchen, with counter space and lighting.
I have a gas stove that lights when I turn it on. (And all burners that work.)
I have a large refrigerator that freezes the things that need to be frozen, and a fridge that keeps my butter from melting and my food from spoiling.
I have a pantry that is free from bugs and mice so I can store dry goods there.
I have a running sink with water that isn't all gunky or rusty.
I have a mexican mini-mart, a walgreens, AND a large, clean Dominick's all within short walking distance.
I have a dude who sells fresh fruit/veg from the back of his truck during the spring/summer.
I also have about a $50/week grocery shopping allowance. Sometimes, I go over my allowance and buy $100 in groceries/week.
I live in a part of town that does not have slum landlords.
I have a few bus lines within walking distance and a train line.
I work in a part of the city that hosts farmers markets during the summer that I can visit on my lunch hour.
I have Bon Appetit, Saveur, Cook's Country Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated and a stack of other cookbooks from Borders and friends in my kitchen.
I have internet access to Epicurious.com.
I have a wok, pots, pans, serving platters, mixing bowls, forks, utensils, measuring cups, cutting boards and towels.
I have a place to store them.


I also have a job, no kids, healthcare, access to public transportation, flexible work hours, and adequate housing.

Basically, I am middle class, with typical bourgeois middle class tastes and habits.
...
Here is a completely irrelevant personal story (irrelevant because personal stories, while illustrative, are not prescriptive):

My parents were poor before they were middle class; the clothes I wore were not my own but hand-me-downs from another family. We received bags of groceries from anonymous church members - there would be a package of Peppridge Farm cookies in one of those bags. Or a bottle of Tang. A block of gov't cheese could last a really long time - for tacos, grilled cheese sandwiches, ham/cheese sandwiches, on crackers, in the toaster oven slapped over white bread.

We were poor but we ate dinner every night: chicken, pork chop or steak, a salad, rice and a desert (jello or ice cream). A glass of whole fat milk. In the morning, it was a hot cereal, orange juice or toast with butter and then to the bus.

Eventually, our meals got more complicated - coinciding with my mom going back to work and my dad getting a better job. Then we were shakily middle class.

There was a Chinese supermarket two blocks away for emergencies (we didn't trust their meat after one bad incident), and if we had to drive to a supermarket, there was a Vons or Ralphs only 15 min away by car. I remember going with mom every week after she got home from work to do grocery shopping. I hated unloading our 10 or 12 bags of groceries, my arms held stiff, the plastic handles making red rows in my skin.

Think of that. 10-12 full bags of groceries. Every two weeks. For a family of four. Without fail.

Whether we want to acknowledge it, this is the middle class standard most of us have running in the backs of our minds when we tell poor people to eat, or grocery shop, better. We never have their memories in our heads. We don't think about how the hell they're getting 10-12 heavy shopping bags from the supermarket 2 miles away from their house, on foot, with only a couple small kids to help them.

Much less from organic farmers market to farmers market.

...

Do you know where poor people live? Oh, not your hipster living in Ukrainian Village in an apartment no bigger than two cubicles at your office. Real poor people. Like, over in Greater Grand Crossing or Austin. Or Lawndale. Or Chicago Heights. Like, in those places you can see from the Green Line headed toward Cottage Grove. Or those places you see if you take the #66 bus all the waaaay west to the end of the line. Ever check out the apartments in that neighborhood that always sees the police action? Or the 'hood that always gets the helicopters hovering over it? Do you know how really poor people live?

I've only been in my Aunt D-'s apartment two or three times. It is so stuffy, I want to gag. Incense smells try to cover up other smells, but don't. And in the hallway outside, that splotch is either shit or vomit. I won't go in her kitchen. (I have never been invited to see her kitchen.) I don't dare ask to use the bathroom.

Once, when I dropped off some clothes and extra pots/pans/cooking pans, she kept us standing in her living room. There are only two bedrooms in this 'garden' apartment and I think she sleeps on the couch in the living room, giving the bedrooms to her daughter and son. She complains about the landlord who won't fix anything; he just collects the reimbursements from the gov't for providing Section 8 vouchers. She says, though, that once my cousin reaches 18, their rent is going to double or my male cousin will have to move out. (18 year old black boys, it seems are a threat to building.)

Down the street from Aunt D-, there is a KFC, McDonalds, a fried fish shack, a Chinese joint and a couple of gas stations, where you can buy cigs, bottled water or soda pop. The nearest real supermarket is in Hyde Park which is about a couple of different buses away. That's where the Walgreens is, too.

She doesn't have bus cards, so I gave her a few with $10 on them. In Chicago, one bus ride is $2.25. How far can she get on that? And how often? You do that math.
...
At my very tony Presbyterian church we once had a social services program to help provide healthier meals to really low-income neighbors. (You'd have to find these neighbors with a magnifying glass and move a few neighborhoods over, but they're there.) A friend served on this task force and they were told to help develop and test cook menus for this project.

But there were rules:
Think healthier ingredients, not necessarily 'healthy'.
The meal's ingredients couldn't cost more than $10, total.
It would have to be enough to serve at least 4.
Meal preparation couldn't involve more than 1-2 utensils.
The meal had to be cooked/served in the same dish.
It had to be able to be cooked on a hot plate.
Task force members could not assume refrigeration was available.

When you or I are cooking 'healthy' how many of these rules do we break?

It isn't class warfare to point out that the poor live differently from us. To ignore that fact maintains our caste system rather than demolishing it.

So until we are prepared to solve the 'problem' of their poverty first, perhaps we should keep mum with our 'advice' to poor families about making better nutritional 'choices'.

(And that means you, Jamie Oliver.)