The Case for Home Ec

I was not good at home ec. I hated it. I would have failed it had I not smuggled my sewing home to my mom to do so I was able to scrape up a C. My peers were not that much better. OUr two sewing projects took us so long that they ended up dominating the enter semester-long course and we didn't even have time to start the cooking unit. It didn't mattter. The next year my independent girls' school cancelled the program all together and I never had to take home ec again. My school cancelled the class because they wanted us to focus on more "educational" classes. Our bother school, however, kept their home ec class and still have it to this day. It is mandatory. Other boys' schools in my city have popular clubs that teach "life lessons (eg, how to make scrambled eggs and hem your pant legs). The message to boys is clear: one day you will have to take care of yourself. You CANNOT just rely on other people. The messsage to girls is: progress means relying on others to feed and clothe yourself.
Now, at the age of 21, I cannot sew. I can cook only because I would starve while living on my own at university without that ability, but it took me a long time to get there. When I moved out on my own at 19, I didn't even know how to boil an egg. Today, my cooking is a bit more advanced. Indeed, I have boiled eggs every day! I can also make spaghetti, chicken, brownies, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and anything that can be prepared using a George Foreman grill. I can sort of (not well) feed myself, but if a button were to fall off my shirt, I'd be screwed.
I'm part of a new generation of women who were told not to learn how to cook or clean or sew (or do anything useful, for that matter), because we'd all be CEO's, important UN officials and fashion magazine editors running the world. Why did we need to know how to take care of ourselves? NO, all we needed to know was how to take care of the 1st quarter profits of a Fortune 500 company or solve an ethnic dispute involving oil in some Middle Eastern country.
Meanwhile, my male counterparts seem to be ever more domestic. I have never dated a guy who was not a better cook than I am. Most men I have dated also own sewing kits and know how to use them should they need to patch or reattach something. I don't even know where one would go to BUY a sewing kit. These men have learned how to do the traditionally domestic things necessary to sustain one's life because their mothers and schools taught them. Why? Because I guess they thought their domestically incompetent but financially gifted CEO wives wouldn't have time to do the traditionally girlie things; however, this proficiency in the kitchen does not render these men useless in traditionally masculine areas. Their dads are still teaching them to DIY and stuff like that, while I have no clue how to put my IKEA furniture together. These are supermen capable of doing anything necessary to survive. If they were lost on a desert island, they could hunt for the food, cook it and build you a shelter to eat it in. If I were lost on a desert island, I'd have to hope my fellow cast-aways thought I was cute and kept me around because of that, because my knowledge of post-modern feminist theory and current events wouldn't make up for the fact that I couldn't boil the boar we'd just taken down.
While women are showing up at universities in greater and greater numbers, young men are acquiring far more useful skills than sociology degrees.; they are learning how to take care of themselves. Just walking around the Queen's Student ghetto, it is evident that the stereotype of "messy" boys' houses and "clean and pretty girls' houses that smell of baked goods" are no longer true. The boys I know care far more about keeping their rooms tidy, making sure they're nicely decorated, and cutting up at least three vegetables to go into the salad, than I do. This does not mean, however, that they don't like to go out to a keg party after enjoying their salads to play beer pong and refuse to drink cocktails because they're too "girlie." There are still loads of gender stereotypes to be found on my university campus, but they no longer cripple men's abilities to develop basic survivor skills. Unfortunately, "empowering girls" means robbing them of the ability to take care of themselves. There is no reason I can't be top of my class and aspire to a great career AS WELL AS knowing how to cook and sew. Really, would an extra semester of home ec or my mom making me cook with her a couple of nights a week crippled my ability to earn good grades or taken too much time away from learning how to take over the world? Would it have told me all I was supposed to do with my life was commit myself to domestic drudgery while my husband relaxed and drank a martini after work? No! No! No!
Our society is perfectly capable of developing a way to teach girls house-keeping without making them think it is their only purpose in life. After all, if the boys develop a monopoly on cooking skills, soon they'll be able to hold hot chicken dinners for ransome to get their jobs as CEO's back from the generation of girls trying to usurp them. Girls are multi-talented. We can cook AND arrange corporate-takeovers.

What I Want...

I have dreams about having babies. I have dreams about nannying for babies. I have dreams about kidnapping babies. Something I never thought would happen at 21 is happening - I can hear the deafening tick tock of my biological clock.

You must understand that I don't want to HAVE a baby. Not now. I have no permanent job. I'm still in school. I have no life partner. I have no real home besides rented student digs I share with other 20-somethings who would resent their pre-drinks and study sessions being interrupted by an unwed mother's baby's cries. I can't have a baby. If I got pregnant today, I surely WOULDN'T have the baby, but I want to hold a baby in my arms. I want to caress a chubby, soft, gorgeously flawed cheek. I want to have a baby; I just don't want to HAVE a baby, and how does one reconcile that?

I have recently started having baby themes in my dreams. I hold a baby in my arms (it doesn't have to be mine) and I suddenly can't let it go. People try to take it away from me, and in response, I sob and I run away. I do anything to keep holding the little blob of life in my arms. I cling to it so fiercely it scares me, and when I wake up and realize there's no baby (I'm holding the air), I feel like crying for hours after it is revealed the baby I loved so dearly and wanted to die for was only a dream.

I walk around the streets, and I hate mothers with babies. I see them and resent them. They make me sad. I want one so badly and I can't have one right now and who says I'll ever be able to? Who says the time will ever be right? Who says a baby will ever be mine? But these lucky women with their infants in snugglies or toddlers in $20 grocery store strollers have had the joy of holding a baby in their arms. They needn't doubt whether they'll ever have a baby in their lives, and I hate them for their joy and my uncertainty, my absolute, crippling insecurity. What if I never find a partner who wants me and a child? What if I can't conceive and adoption fails? What if, as a single woman, I find it too hard to adopt and can't reconcile myself to the mysery sperm at donar clinics? What if, what if? What if I never have a baby to love, is what it all comes down to....
I am not really that great with kids. They don't all automatically love me, and I could never have the patience to be a teacher, dealing with 30 shouting children at a time. And yet, I need to nurture. I need something to protect. I wonder if this need makes my desire for children selfish, and whether that means I am disqualified from ever being a truly good mother and should not attempt to have children? I fear my reasons for wanting children as much as I fear the possibility that I will never have them. I fear screwing up new life and I fear the idea that I may never participate in shaping it. I fear so much, and yet, there are so many people in this world. I wonder, must every parent have the same fears? Or is parenting meant to be done on instinct. Is over-analysing one's motivation ill-advised? Although, the irony is, no one over-analyses more than the girl who wonders if she's over-analysing something.

For the sake of simplicity, I'll say what I need to say because I need to let myself hear it: I want children. Plain and simple. That's me. I hope I'm worthy of wanting somethign so big and special.

In defense of the new Femme Fatale

What do we really want our daughters to be? This is an important question. The war between Team Jolie and Team Anistan is as violent as ever, more than two years after Brad Pitt chose to spend his life as Jolie's partner and father to her children. He made that personal choice. Only someone in a marriage can walk out on a marriage, and yet Angelina is still villified on blogs and in magazine polls. Yes, if one listens to the readers of US weekly, Jen is the better friend and person. THe girl we'd rather hang out with, but why? This is the question I keep asking myself. Why don't we want our daughters to be like Angelina over Aniston?
What on earth makes Jennifer Aniston anything other than totally useless? Why is she a role-model and icon, and why can why sexual decision on the part of Angelina (the one she made regarding excepting the love of a man who'd already left his wife) does that negate Angelina's many talents and contributtions to the world? Angelina has won an oscar. She has won more than one Golden Globe. She is very talented. Aniston is famous for being on a citcom where the show's greatest asset was its hilarious, easily delivered writing, not its actors. In the talent department, Angelina wins. She's in movies that matter about women who make us think. Aniston is in Rob Reiner flops like Rumour Has It.
Angelina gives one third of her multi-million dollar salary to charity each year. Does Aniston give? Well, if she does at all, not this much. Angelina donates countless hours of her time to her work as a UN good will ambassador and discussing international law in interviews. Does Aniston even know what international law is? If so, she seems to prefer talking about herself in interviews rather than the plight of developing nations.
Finally, Angelina is a good and devoted mother. What more could we want for our daughters than for them to be good to their daughters, as well?
In everything we should value in a woman - talent, generosity, maternal aptitude - Angelina wins. So why do we hate her? Is it because she's beautiful? Perhaps. Is it because we secretly blame the other woman every time when she's not the moral agent? Yes. It's because when men are jerks and leave us, walking out on all we have, we don't want to believe we devoted our lives to assholes or that they've just callously fallen out of love with us, we want to believe the other woman is a witch who cast a spell and tricked him. We want to blame her to save ourselves from the ugly truth. Angelina has come to represent the other woman in our sexist society, where all the good one does is erased the moment one sleeps with someone society arbitrarily decides one shouldn't touch. Our society is so sexist. Brad Pitt left Jennifer because he fell in love with a spectacular woman. HOw is that Angelina's fault? I will never understand.