On being a girl. Who's neither mermaid nor knocked up nor ugly-hot.

Well, sort of. My alternate title was something like, "Ways that Huckabee, The Little Mermaid, and what I'm calling The Sexy Librarian Complex undermine ladies" sounded waaaaaaaaay too "Wag of the Finger" for a Friday afternoon. And while I'm not, typically, terribly ashamed to spend post after post camped on my slick little soapbox, I figured fewer readers would be inclined to even bother with a tirade that begins with a 16-word title that sounded so...femidictive. New word, by the way. Combine feminist with vindictive and you've got the second viable word I've created this year. The first: VERBUSE. Meaning: verb abuse. The incorrect use of a verb in a way that ratchets up my blood pressure. See the word: GROW.

But ugh, this is off to a boring start (and this really wasn't meant to be a grammar lesson. I was, actually, quite bad in the official grammar part of English classes back in the day. I know how words ought to be strung together, I know the difference between Hung and Hanged, I know Who versus Whom, I know when a semicolon is appropriate, but talk transitive/intransitive and  --- oh holy jeez, this just went from boring to damn near unreadable).

I think I have to just own the fact that I'm not a super-cute, funny, har-har-har, "LOL, ROTFL, OMG you're SOOOOOOO funny!" sort of writer. These days. I manage wit from time to time, but mostly I'm just cranky with well-executed punctuation. There are worse things. I'm just not gonna make you giggle today, that's all. If you want to giggle, go remind yourself how magnificent Natalie was in the "Natalie Raps" days. Here, I'll make it easy for you.



Okay - back to getting serious and un-funny.

First off: The Little Mermaid.

Really, I could use any of the Disney movies to this same end, but I've actually been neck-deep in The Little Mermaid soundtrack over the past week or so and, while singing along with "Poor Unfortunate Souls" at the top of my lungs in traffic and realizing it would be the PERFECT karaoke song, ALSO realized that any little girl who watches this movie is getting about the world's WORST example of what a woman's priorities should be, like, EVER.

So the first question is, "uh, Heather, why the heck are you driving around blasting Mermaid tunes?" And the answer is, "because Part of Your World was stuck in my head and it was driving me NUTS, so I took to iTunes and bought the soundtrack to placate myself - complete with weird covers of half of the songs done by Disney hacks like The Jonas Brothers. Seriously. They cover 'Poor Unfortunate Souls.' And Ashley Tisdale sings 'Kiss the Girl' (gag) and Jessica Simpson sings -- oh nevermind. Anyway - the song was stuck in my head, I bought the album."

The second question is, "uh, Heather, why is The Little Mermaid the most toxic example of womanhood, like, EVER? And what does this have to do with Huckabee and librarians?"

Well, let's look at it this way:

Young girl (fine, mermaid, but since those are mythical creatures upon which the average elementary school student is unlikely to stumble in the course of their day, we'll substitute "human" for "merfolk" and make the analogy easier to follow) decides she's SOOOOO discontented with the trappings of her current life she must absolutely leave it all behind and make a break for the dark side. Cross over to the fascinating, off-limits land of the OTHER people (in this case, upright, air-breathing bi-peds, but for the sake of example, could be anyone DIFFERENT). Her father is a tyrant who'd rather declare the other people "bad" instead of presenting any sort of cogent argument in defense of protecting his cadre of daughters from the "others." This backfires, and daughter decides she's gonna defy daddy and sign over her soul in order to go be with a MAN whom she's only met once (while he was unconscious, mind you), with whom she's never spoken, and for whom she's willing to completely change in order to be with. 

So - in human-speak, we've got a girl willing to endure physical pain to impress someone she's only just met in a bid to piss off her parents. Think, oh, plastic surgery to look more like the girls on TV, maybe. She's so fed up with iron-fisted, ask-no-questions parenting that she'd abandon everything she's every known to chase after someone she's only just met.

In the end, she gets in over her head and her father jumps to her defense, saves the day, slays the, um, octopus to whom girl has sold her soul and reclaims his daughter. At which point a NORMAL girl would be all, "ooh, dad, THANKS for saving me, you were so right, I belong here where it's safe and where I'm not Octo-Prey and where I can be myself, and hey, by the way, these bi-peds aren't all bad, maybe we could talk about it!"

But nope. Disney decides, in fact, that the happy ending would be for her dad to pussy-out, put his daughter's romantic happiness first, succumb to her whining, and send her back to live happily ever after with Prince Stranger. Oh, yeah, Prince. Because if we're taught nothing else by watching Disney movies, we're taught that our primary goal should be to secure a husband, and that he better be a rich prince. Because we're not worth much on our own apart from our good looks and our ability to charm a rich man senseless with our great hair and big, gigantic eyes.

*Cue a massive roll of those big, gigantic eyes.*

Every one of these Disney neo-fairy tales has the same bottom line. Our primary purpose as burgeoning women is to find a rich prince to marry us. No matter how much pain and separation and trial we have to endure to snag the man. Our life is a success once we've netted the prince.

I could go on, but you get it. The funny thing is that the lyrics of that Poor Unfortunate Souls song was supposed to represent the vile, reprehensible machinations of a deranged evil witch, BUT, the trouble is that Disney is espousing PRECISELY this:

You'll have your looks, your pretty face.
And don't underestimate the importance of body language, ha!

The men up there don't like a lot of blabber
They think a girl who gossips is a bore!
Yet on land it's much preferred for ladies not to say a word
And after all dear, what is idle babble for?
Come on, they're not all that impressed with conversation
True gentlemen avoid it when they can
But they dote and swoon and fawn
On a lady who's withdrawn
It's she who holds her tongue who gets a man

Yep. Pretty much.

Okay - moving on to the next knock to girls: Huckabee. Today he's making headlines for suggesting that Natalie Portman is "hurting America" by having a baby "out of wedlock."

Ah, wedlock. That word that's never used alone, only used in conjunction with "out of" and always seems to refer to the conditions under which Poor, Unfortunate Babies are born. Which is fine - that's still pretty much the conservative, evangelical party line on babies, that they must be born within the structure of a traditional marriage - and I'm not going to dispute that fact. I don't plan to have a kid until I'm married, I want to raise my children within the context of a traditional, nuclear family with two parents, I want to parent as part of a partnership, I care fiercely enough for the children I've not yet conceived to want them to be raised in the most supportive, healthy family environment possible, so, yeah, I track with him on that point.

Where I do NOT agree is when he gets into vague stats about single moms:

"Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock....You know, right now, 75 percent of black kids in this country are born out of wedlock. 61 percent of Hispanic kids — across the board, 41 percent of all live births in America are out of wedlock births. And the cost of that is simply staggering."

Oh, Huck.

Shut your mouth.

Let's check some ACTUAL, US census stats along a similar vein:

"The age of custodial mothers has increased over the past 14 years. In 1994, one-quarter (25.4 percent) were 40 years or older. By 2008, the proportion had grown to over one-third (39.1 percent). The proportion of custodial mothers under 30 years of age decreased from 30.9 percent in 1994 to 25.8 percent by 2008.9
The educational level of custodial mothers has also increased during this period. In 1994, 22.2 percent of custodial mothers had less than a high school education and 17.1 percent had at least an associate’s degree. By 2008, the proportion of custodial mothers who had not graduated from high school decreased to 15.5 percent and the proportion with at least an associate’s degree increased to 26.9 percent.10 "

"Custodial parents receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), formerly known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), fell from 22.0 percent to 4.3 percent during the past 14 years."

"Among White children in families, 22.4 percent lived with their custodial parents.5 The proportion of Black children in families who lived with their custodial parent while the other parent lived outside their household (48.2 percent) was more than twice as large as the proportion of White children. Among children of other races— including American Indian, Eskimo or Aleut, Asian or Pacifi c Islander, or other races—16.1 percent lived in custodial-parent families. Approximately one-quarter (25.4 percent) of Hispanic children, who may be any race, lived with their custodial parent."

Look, I don't know where he got his info, it's not possible for me to go out and refute each of his percentage stats in a meaningful way, and I'm not out to disprove him based on numbers - I'm out to raise a little bit of alarm over the cavalier way in which he dismisses single mothers, while at the same time supposing that "out of wedlock" equals "without a partner." The two are not synonymous. Two unmarried people raising children together would, technically, count as "out of wedlock." But are these necessarily poverty-stricken welfare moms living in crack dens with 8 children, depending on the state to support them? Hardly. Oh - and, by the way, along the lines of "the goal of our lives should be to get married," Huck also said, of Natalie's statements during awards season:

"She was very visibly pregnant, and it’s really it’s a problem because she’s about seven months pregnant, it’s her first pregnancy, and she and the baby’s father aren’t married, and before two billion people, Natalie Portman says, ‘Oh I want to thank my love and he’s given me the most wonderful gift.’ He didn’t give her the most wonderful gift, which would be a wedding ring! And it just seems to me that sending that kind of message is problematic."

Hey, heads-up, sir: she's engaged. Getting hitched. Planning to raise the little genius "in wedlock" (or however you use that phrase in the affirmative). But to say that the greatest gift we could ever hope to receive from our men is a WEDDING RING is sort of, oh, ignoring that whole matter of LOVE. Support. Devotion. Loyalty. Partnership. None of which are necessarily guaranteed by virtue of a ring. She's (presently) in a loving relationship, excited to raise her kid with a man who likewise loves her - what's to hate about that?

OH - or is it that he thinks so little of the American public that he assumes any 17 year-old girl who sees a knocked-up actress thanking her boyfriend for the gift of life will automatically use that actress as an inspiration to get pregnant and live off of the state? Trust me, Huck, the institution of marriage is not being denigrated when an engaged woman raves about her fiance and her unborn child.

Some of the comments on the "Feministing" blog where I read the Huckabee quotes were very intelligent. Here's are some favorites (pardon in advance, they're lengthy):

Commenter 1:

Huckabee’s words are really quite telling—he thinks that somehow marriage prevents poverty.

"But it doesn’t.

You know what would prevent poverty among women and children?

Ending sexism.

But that would be too much for Huckabee because he ignores the history of what marriage actually has been."

Commenter 2:

Clearly we can jump all over his assumption that having children outside of marriage is somehow worse than having children inside of it, that somehow a marriage provides something that a committed relationship does not. However, I would like to go after a few highly practical points:

He could increase of participation of marriage by pregnant or would-be-pregnant women by allowing same-sex marriage (relevant when women who have same-sex partners undergo in vitro fertilization), providing children comprehensive sex education, and giving women greater access to birth control. On the topic of baby bumps in particular, not unnecessarily constraining access to abortions would allow women (generally unmarried) to end unwanted pregnancies that would have led to such “unwholesome” baby bumps. 

However, Huckabee has priorities besides just curtailing the rates of pregnant people who are unmarried (or is unmarried people who get pregnant?) He also advocates for his brand of Christianity that is often at odds with many of his stated goals/concerns, and any sort of opinion base needs to establish what the priorities are, and what consequences or trade-offs it is willing to pay to work towards each of its goals.

One more set of points deals with his interest in the racial minority statistics, because history is very relevant. Until 146 years ago, Black people in the US were usually slaves. For them, they did not have rights. They were not in control of their relationships with each other, and any legal notion of marriage was controlled by their masters. For many reasons, marriage was not as desirable to slaves as it was to free White people. Even when slavery ends, Black people were still subject to abuses by White people and the government, and it is not unreasonable that they would not have fully warmed up to participating in the White man’s construction of marriage — and submitting forms that would potentially draw the government’s attention to them. It’s really not until the Civil Rights of the 1960s where racial minorities gained more serious protections that such people would be mostly safe to participate in this institution, but there is still a terrific amount of cultural inertia that leads to the disparity we see today. Marriage wasn’t a real option for so long that it simply lacks the relevance and significance to Black people that it generally has to White people. 

Of course, there are also confounding factors that can contribute to this disparity (wealth, education [wealth-segregation contributes to quality disparities here], a mass media obsessed with differences), but culture is pretty powerful stuff.

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Huckabee hasn’t thought that through — I hadn’t even really thought about it until ~a couple years ago myself. But then, I don’t have my own opinion show.

DBT: That’s a rather telling omission, isn’t it? The Internet has jumped all over it, and I don’t think Huckabee is going to be able to outrun this idea."

Commenter 3:

"Because I have a Republican father, and heard stuff just like this my whole life, I understand the logic of this particular attitude. But it’s more a tone-deaf assumption that all single parent situations are similar and inherently detrimental. And it’s a romanticism of the old ways where one parent worked and another stayed home. That’s increasingly a thing of the past, just as marriage itself no long resembles its former self.
But before you can criticize single-parent African-American households, we have to talk about the culture of incarceration among black men, and the legacy of generations of economic inequality. And the same basic economic inequality applies to Latinos as well."

Commenter 4:

Man, I so didn’t want to be disappointed by this guy. But to say:
“Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock”
That’s ridiculous, it’s arrogant, it’s ill-informed and it’s an out-dated way of thinking. With the divorce rate as it is for our generation, better believe there are plenty of HARD-WORKING, employed, single-moms living WELL above the poverty line, CERTAINLY not relying on public assistance and doing just as well as any other mom out there.
Let’s talk deadbeat dads, shall we? Stop demonizing mothers, Huck.

Oh - and about that whole ugly-hot Librarian Complex? Yeah, this got too long -  you can read about it here on Pajiba. I totally agree. 

Anyway - this ended up long, rambling, unfocused and probably without much of a "thesis." Other than that I kept finding examples today of women being given too little credit - and we're starting our girls on these lame messages very young. Hmmm. And we wonder why I struggle with self esteem and body image issues and a consumer-driven lifestyle that stems from a deep-seated, much-loathed sense that I'm not good enough as-is....hmmmm, thanks, Disney!