Misogyny in anti adoption rhetoric

I talk about adoption a lot on this blog and will continue to do so. Its no secret than I am not an advocate of adoption and I think its really important that adoption is crtitiqued through a feminist and social justice lens but I find what often gets lost in anti adoption/adoption reform positions is the idea that we should also look at the reasons and the drive for people adopting through a feminist and social justice lens. The virulently misogynistic way in which women who want to adopt is talked about in some anti adoption circles disturbs and saddens me.(and it is almost always the women who are ripped apart, once again the men become invisible) Recently the improper adoptee left a comment on one of My previous posts that said

Unfortunatly, sisterhood was destroyed by another monster. The green eyed one. Infertiles hate fertile women, because they are so jealous, bitter and feel so put upon because they can’t conceive, that they throw all their morals out the window. The retreat into the state of mind of an enraged 10 year old child, who wants to do bad things because they can’t have what they want.

firstly I think calling women jealous bitter and childish for whatever reason is really misogynistic but this is is not just about this comment, I have seen the same things said elsewhere numerous times, I have seen infertile women bee blamed for their infertility because they are too fat, don’t look after themselves, are too old, have had eating disorders, or who have spent time on their career when they “should” have been having children.

and this all seems like a kind of victim blaming to me, No I don’t think infertile women have a right to adopt, but I also don’t think its their fault that they are infertile, this kind of rhetoric takes no account of the world we live in, that we live in a world full of chemicals that fuck up our reproductive system, that we live in a world where a woman cant, unless she is extremely wealthy, have a child and a career because good child care is way to expensive, and women in the workplace are still seen as expendable.We live in a world where women are incredibly disconnected from their bodies so we do do damaging things to them, we live in a world where women don’t have their own places to live until relatively late because house prices are so expensive.

We also live in a world that tells women that motherhood is everything, that sells the ideal of motherhood as what makes you a real woman, we live in a world that doesn’t tell women that their are other just as valuable ways of giving to the future and supporting the communities we live as having a child we can call our “own”. We live in a world that individualises child rearing rather than seeing it as a communal effort.

None of this is the fault of infertile women, these things are the fault of individualist capitalist patriarchy.
also something else that’s often missed here is that not all people who are infertile want to adopt and not all people who adopt are infertile

Being infertile hurts and for some women it hurts more than others and I think that should be acknowledged and there should be compassion for that. I’m infertile myself and if I wasn’t an adoptee i might well have thought about adoption because i wouldn’t have known otherwise.

I think people who adopt do by and large think they are doing a good thing for society, it isn’t their fault that they live in a society that tells them this, and there are ways of making clear this is not true without woman blaming.

Exile

Something I’m very, very sensitive about is the way feminists often talk about women in fundamentalist religions. You can’t understand a culture unless you have been inside it yet fundamentalist cultures are often unilaterally condemned by people who have no idea how they work.

I am an exile here, grew up in a different culture, with a different language, and different norms, and different dress codes, different morality and different gender expectations. And that’s partly why the world I live in now, the world that most of the people I love have always lived in, baffles me, why I move through it awkwardly like it doesn’t belong to me

This is not my mother culture or my mother tongue, and although I love it, I choose to live in it, I do not understand it as well as the country I grew up in. Its rules are too fluid, too changeable, too arbitrary.

The country I grew up in damaged me irreparably and rejected me or I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be an exile but I understand its internal coherence in a way that people who grew up here do not.

The people I come from are not stupid, are not by and large un(der) educated, they do not misunderstand the way the world works in the way you think they do. They are not selfish they do not not care about community, they do not follow rules for the sake of it, they do not hate women anymore than this culture hates women, they just hate them differently, but like this culture they do not see it as hate, they see it as the natural order of things.

Where I come from is irredeemable, there is nothing can be done to save it, so much would have to change in it that it would become somewhere else, but that doesn’t mean every single thing about it was bad.

Until I was seventeen it was possible for all the people I loved to be in the same room at the same time and that is never going to happen again while I am alive and there is a loss there.

When my mother was sick enough to need hospitalizing, which happened frequently, the women in my church made sure there was always a hot meal on the table every meal time and that we were washed and sorted and loved enough when bedtime came round.

The night I ran away there were hundreds of people out looking for me.

When I hear people disparage women in fundamentalist Christianity, they are disparaging the women who grew me up, who nurtured me, who did the best they could with what they had.

The reasons women do not leave fundamentalist religion do not amount to them being unenlightened, stupid or brainwashed. They may have a deep spirituality that is tied up in their community, their sense of community may be more important than their sense of individuality. They may feel safer in fundamentalism than out of it.

And contrary to secular opinion, women in fundamentalist religion are not all about the men. The religion I grew up in had women only meetings and retreats, as a matter of default, it wasn’t something that had to be argued about or fought for it just happened, it was seen as normal.

I don’t think Christian fundamentalism is healthy at all but I know how it works, I know the weak places and the strong places in it, I know what gets lost and what gets gained in the staying or the leaving of it.

Shministim

This is what activism looks like

Rape Follows Me

Rape follows me, the threat of rape is a deep bass refrain in my life, I do not fear mugging or theft or homelessness or beating the way I fear rape, every room I move through, every door I open conceals the possibility of rape, before we got the big dog I used to lie awake alone in my house at night worrying about men breaking in and raping me

I live in a world with no safety, no pychic silence from the noise the threat of rape makes

Men are not safe people in my world, they are half cocked weapons, potentially full of selfishness and violence, I have very few men in my life because the negotiations that are needed to go through between myself and a man, before I can even think about starting to trust him are so exhausting that usually one or other of us give up on the process before we get to a point we can have any meaningful friendship anyway.

Often in my interactions with men is a surface layer of boredom, irritation and apathy and all of those feelings are real but they are a shield for my terror that they will take me, invade me, annihilate me

And you know what, I know that this isn’t a particularly healthy way to live, or maybe evnn particularly sensible, and certainly not practical given that half the wollrd population is male.

But the thing is I am the way I am because men have hurt me. I’ve done a lot of healing, years of it and I’ve worked really hard at it but some things don’t heal because some things are true, my body knows that its at risk of invasion by men because it was invaded so many times

But men get angry with me about it, because I refuse to trust them, and I just feel, why are you angry with me, I didn’t give myself ptsd why aren’t you angry with the men that hurt me.

And women get angry with me when I’m not immediately and obviously accepting and open with their partners, friends, sons, when I shield my body or show no interest in connecting with the men in their lives, and I don’t understand this, I wouldn’t automatically expect anyone to trust either of the men in my life, why would I? a lot of the time I don’t trust them, (this is not the same as thinking that they are not trustworthy) but also just because i like someone, just because I conect with someone why should every other woman

And then theres the old tired refrain “not all men rape” I know that if I thought that this wasn’t the case I would be a separatist, but you cant tell by looking and in my experience you cant take anyone else’s word for it either, all the men that hurt me were loved by somebody. and really i dont have the energy to find out.

There is no conclusion to this piece of writing because there cant be really.

I don’t even give a fuck, anymore

what I want, after everything i have, you know like food, clothes, a roof above my head, love and friendship, is to be taken seriously as a professional poet. and that takes luck, lots and lots of luck, but it also takes hard work, discipline, marketing, networking, lots and lots of poetry reading and you know, actually submitting stuff.

And there are tensions and anxieties there, about wanting to be come part of the establishment, about having to pander to the rules of the establishment to get this done. Also anxieties about the fact that because my name is coded male does that give me an unfair advantage in the publishing stakes of other women? Anxieties over my class and educational privilege. but at the end of the day, there’s this thing that I’m really really good at and not using it, not utilising it seems really really wasteful.

So I’m going to take big chunks out of my life to focus on this, big chunks out of my days, after my paid job (which i don’t have yet but I’m working on that) after friendship, relationship and home maintenance, after objectively useful political activism (which incorporates feminist stuff, church stuff and voluntary work) poetry is going to be the priority.

I’m going to give myself five years, three years to get stuff published in periodicals and magazines and competitions and then the next two years to try an get a book published.

I’m also setting up a blog elsewhere with my name on it to talk about poetry on and to make connections with other people talking about poetry. I’m not going to link it here because firstly its really important that its not associated with any of my other stuff on the Internet (poets are alowed to be kind of odd but not as weird as i actually am) but also there’s only one person who reads this that I think would be remotely interested. I’m going to try and get two posts up about poetry a week there , but they will be better putt together and less personal than the ones I’ve written here

And this is also a commitment to the boring bits, to the rewriting and redrafting to the email conversations with people who are willing to critique my work, to the writing of cover letters and working to submission deadlines, to the cataloguing of what I’ve submitted where.

And a commitment to networking offline by going to readings and festivals and performing at open mic nights (this is where I hanker for Swansea, because I know shit loads of poets and publishers that live in Swansea)

And then this means I have to spent less time fucking around on line, i spend a lot of my time at home alone at the moment and I just gravitate towards the Internet, when I could be writing or reading. And the Internet kind of bores me now anyway, or the places I usually hang out anyway. no one is saying anything new

I have lots of book I haven’t read. and a lot of them are ones i feel i should read, that other people feel i should read but actually I’m going to spend the next year just reading poetry and stuff about poetry, with maybe the occasional foray into fairy tales/fairy tale theory and Adolescent literature/ad lit theory because these are the things that trigger my creative brain.

I’m still going to be writing here, but just as kickback when I have time

Monday Poem: We remember your childhood well, by Carol Ann Duffy

Nobody hurt you. Nobody turned off the light and argued
with somebody else all night. The bad man on the moors
was only a movie you saw. Nobody locked the door.

Your questions were answered fully. No. That didn’t occur.
You couldn’t sing anyway, cared less. The moment’s a blur, a Film Fun
laughing itself to death in the coal fire. Anyone’s guess.

Nobody forced you. You wanted to go that day. Begged. You chose
the dress. Here are the pictures, look at you. Look at us all,
smiling and waving, younger. The whole thing is inside your head.

What you recall are impressions; we have the facts. We called the tune.
The secret police of your childhood were older and wiser than you, bigger
than you. Call back the sound of their voices. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Nobody sent you away. That was an extra holiday, with people
you seemed to like. They were firm, there was nothing to fear.
There was none but yourself to blame if it ended in tears.

What does it matter now? No, no, nobody left the skidmarks of sin
on your soul and laid you wide open for Hell. You were loved.
Always. We did what was best. We remember your childhood well.

On being a “Feminist”

I was meandering around my head the other day and I realised I no longer thought of my self as a “Feminist” and thats not because I think feminism is a bad thing, and its not because I feel feminism is too exclusive. Some feminisms are exclusive but actualy they are not the feminisms that make the mose sense to me. but its because I’ve stopped thinking about feminism as an identity and started thinking about it as a set of tools to perceive and recreate the world with, its not about an Identity it’s not a thing that I am, it’s a thing that I do

Adoption induced rage!

Today I hate social services and if I don’t get this out of my system I wont de stress

I wanted my pre adoption files and to do this I had to go to the local social services because theyd been passed on from the social services who dealt with my adoption. But its not simple and straightforward no, I had to have a discussion with a post adoption social worker on what my motivations were and what I wanted out of the information, so social services could judge if it was appropriate to give me my information. Because clearly I am not an adult and cant judge or decide my own motivations for my actions. I think post adoption support is usefull for those who want it (of whom which I wouldn’t be one) but it sure as hell shouldn’t be mandatory.

And the woman I was talking to pissed me of so much, I was trying to ask her why I had to go through this palava and she kept just saying “I cant give you the information about anybody else in your family” when at no point did I ask for the info on anyone else in my family, and then she said “well I have to follow procedure I cant make a special case for you” I wasn’t asking her to make a special case for me, I was trying to have a discussion on why there was this procedure and why any adult adoptee should go through it. Then she was all “no one else complains about it” Really? Gee that couldn’t be because you tell them that if they have the wrong attitudes and motivations you wont give them their information or help them search could it?

And she seriously fucking said “we have to go through this because for all we know you could be a mass murderer, and we need to make sure you are not” ! wtf. What kind of thing is that to say to someone? Way to show you don’t trust adult adoptees

So I had to give her loads of personal stuff about my life, that was none of her business and that I don’t really like sharing, stuff about my relationship with my partner and my siblings and my parents. I told her I didn’t see my adoptive parents much because they were not good people and she kept pushing and pushing me to tell her why which I refused to but she still felt the need to tell me in relation to this “lots of adoptions work out really well and everybody is happy with the arrangement” firstly why the hell did she feel the need to impart this piece of information? What was it supposed to achieve, and secondly “everybody”? really? Everybody involved is happy with the arrangement? Even with adoptions that work out well most adoptees aren’t “happy” they were adopted, but also lets take a poll of first parents shall we and see how many of them are happy about the adopotion., because I’m thinking that number will be vanishingly small.

And then she asked me if I was “content” with my life. What does that even mean, I don’t think humans are supposed to be content, I don’t think that’s part of the way we are built, but also what does it matter? No I’m not content, I’m restless and flighty and insecure and don’t ever belive that what I’ve got is here for keeps and all those other good things that kids who spend large chunks of their formative years in care are, but what business is it of hers and what does it have to do with me seeing my file? (I lied and told her that yes I was mainly content with my life)

Seriously information about me, should be available to me on my terms, not on the terms and whims of social services

And then I had to explaining the nature of my adoption and who I was reunion with and who I wasn’t etc and she was all “oh your adoption sounds really unusual” yeah no shit because all adoptions have their individual quirks so you know possibly the adoptee knows what best for herself support wise and should be forced into “support” from people who have no fucking idea what they are talking about and who treat her like a child

Poetry

This is a copy of a comment I left over at the Bead Shop The words in italics are Jenn’s, the rest are mine. There’s some stuff in it I might revisit further in the future

I don’t think poetry is that important to me, at least not on the face of it. I see the words on the page, I can read them – something about them isn’t coming across, usually. There are some poems I love a great deal. I can hardly stand to read Refugee Blues by W.H. Auden because it’s so incredible. At heart though, I’m a linguist. I have quite a scientific approach to language.

The thing I think people don’t understand about poetry is that it is a language (like you said further on in your post)and this is why they get so frustrated with it and are so quick to give up on it. It should be learnt like a language, it should take years and be started when young.

Books for very small children have all the basic blocks of poetry, rhyme, rhythm, repetition, but then once a child learns to read “properly” that is drooped for linear prose and isn’t picked up again till the child is in secondary school, and not only that but more often than not it is the romantics or Shakespeare that is presented as “poetry” and also a poem as presented as something to dissect, rather than something to be enjoyed whole. Learning about poetry works much better if its “well lets discuss what we like about it and what tools the poet has used to elicit that reaction in us” and that can be taken to any level from, “I like the words used” to “the trochaic reversed foot in line six and the feminine distressed internal rhyme in line seven bring about the feeling of X” but the way poetry is taught today is like teaching particle physics to someone who doesn’t even have elementary level science.

But also there’s an assumption that kids will “just know” how poetry works in the same way they “just know” how novels work, which is absurd, the reason people just know how novels work is because they read lots of them, whereas most people cultural exposure to poetry is more or less nill.

But also I think it is possible to have a scientific approach to poetry, totally, poetry is full of rules and button pressing to get certain effects, often neither the poet or the reader are consciously aware of these effects but they are there and can be unpacked if so wished.

I’m also of the opinion that you cant really say you don’t like poetry unless you’ve read lots of it, that’s kind of like saying you don’t like music.

I also get really frustrated that people can understand and talk about music the way you do and not understand that poetry works in the same way (this isn’t about you its about living in a culture that doesn’t want to understand poetry and its importance to systems of human thinking)

To me poetry is the bridge between language and music because the sounds and the meanings are of equal importance in a poem

Of course, there is a whole class struggle going on in there, a whole lot of ideology, because dissonance and weird rhythms are what those uncouth, swearing working-class people like…They were scandalous because they liked folk music, and adopted elements of it for their own music. People went to the concert hall expecting images of high-minded people strolling through fields, battling with the Gods on mountaintops, and so on – and they got, instead, images of lowly people fucking dancing and fucking in the bushes.

This is interesting, Tom Leonard who is a glaswegian poet writes a lot about code switching and how poetry written in dialects is not accepted as real poetry, because “real” poetry is written by oxbridge graduates who speak in RP. Though, in the last thirty years it has become more acceptable, though not because there is less classism but because poetry has become less culturally important so the borders of who is an acceptable poet are patrolled less rigidly. (One of my friends suggests that this is also the reason why more women are being published poetry wise) obviously its good that there is less judgement on who is seen as worthy of being a poet but the reasons for it are not.

“Religions are poems”

recently there was an article in the guardian entitled Religions are Poems which caught my eye because for me poetry is an incredibly important part of my spirituality and at some point in the future I would love to do some proper academic research on the cultural and spiritual relationship between poetry and prayer. Despite the title of the piece it actually seems as if it arguing that poems are religions than the other way round.

After the introductory paragraph, the writer of the piece, Nick Laird argues

A good poem is a closed belief system

I actually really disagree with this, I think a good poem needs to be an open belief system, needs to give the reader many ways of entering, exiting and moving around in it. To be a closed belief system a poem would have to lay all its meaning out on the table and be static and rigid, any poem that does all those things is a bad poem.

He talks about how through the use of poetry he was:

I was trying to create, I think, a kind of religion to supplant the one I was raised with, and have now lost. In my part of the world the village religion that achieved full spectrum dominance is Christianity, and I was trying to supplant its dominance of my own mind. I am struck by how often I think of things in biblical terms.

This makes a lot of sense to me, i grew up in a christian community and sometimes it feels to me that the pathways in my head that make poetry important to me are the same ones used in religious ritual and experience, the fusing of structure, ritual, and rules, with instinct emotion and heightened senses. Also something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the relationship between the bible and poetry. I have been thinking how one of the reasons the bible is misunderstood both as a literary artifact and as a spiritual artifact is because those reading it often have no understanding of poetry, but it strikes me that maybe the way i relate to and think about poetry has been deeply effected by my knowledge of the bible, large parts of the bible are very poetic,song of songs, psalms, Isaiah, even revelation if you take into account its extreme use of metaphor. and if you grow up in an environment where you have so much poetry in your life without you even thinking about it as being poetry that has to effect the way you relate to writing that is actually deemed as poetry.

Laird writes

The relationship between poetry, those goodly words, and religion is hard to quantify. Both involve the hidden, working at the borders of the sayable.

.
I love this, this is so beautiful. the reason I think poetry is so important is because it is working at the borders of the sayable it is constantly struggling to find ways to make the unsayable say able, it is constantly twisting and turning to give us different angles to look at things, different languages to speak in. and I never thought about it but yes, religion also is working at the borders of the sayable, or at least evolving alive religions are and this maybe why the pathways in my head that poetry flows down are the same ones that spirituality flows down because at the end of they day they are both trying to do the same thing.

Laird then goes on to present a critique of the lord prayer as if it were a poem:

The Lord’s prayer is one of the first poems I learned. Leached of its import by years of mindless recital, it’s almost a Sitwellian sound poem to me.

Our father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those
who trespass against us,
and lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil
for thine is the kingdom,
the power and glory,
forever and ever, amen.

The verse uses an octosyllabic baseline and contains plenty of the features we expect in poems. Even though it is syntactically complex (it’s only two sentences), the lines are heavily endstopped with solid, repetitive masculine endings and there is a lot of sound play. In “trespasses” the feminine ending (meaning that the last syllable isn’t stressed) seems to replicate the very act of trespass – by going one step further than it should – and that “amen” is a neat full stop, a click on the send button of the email to God.

I personally think this is inspired because as i say I am really interested in the poetry/prayer relationship but i never ever thought about the lords prayer as a poem before which really reinforces what laird says about how it has been Leached of its import by years of mindless recital I also love how he describes it, a two thousand year old prayer, as an email, and i think poetry does that, poetry give you away of avoiding worn thought grooves and enables you to swerve of in other directions.

he goes on to say

Poetry can hold oppositions in equilibrium. Life tends to paradox and poetry can cope with that. Doctrine attempts to clarify and erase the contradictions, to organise lessons, laws and belief systems. Doctrine insists on an ethical dimension. It insists the scriptures be prescriptive. Poetry, being many-headed, doesn’t try to cohere. It is free-floating, various, associative and each poem sets out its own rules.

We live in a world that values streamlining, simplicity, absolutes and lack of complexity or contradictions but i am a fractured mess, i am full of oppositions, I’m bisexual. I’m multiple and I appear to be following both a pagan and christian path but I think the thing is that everybody’s complicated and nobody fits the streamlined capitalist patriarchal ideal of what a person is and i think poetry if we utilize it properly could both give us ways of dealing with that but also give us ways of changing that. Poetry takes us away from the prescriptiveness of dead religions and the rigidity of the current society we live in.