Despite my appreciation of a good rhinestone tiara, I have little patience for the sparkly pink pap marketed to little girls.If you’re also tired of little girls’ bedrooms that look like they were puked on by Cinderella’s fairy godmother, you’ll appreciate these posters by artist Amanda Visell.
Hang one over the bed of a girl you love. (Big girls love these too!)
You can buy them here.
Children born through artificial insemination can now legally have two female parents at birth in Washington, D.C., thanks to a new law.
The new law negates the need for the female partner of the birth mother to go through a complicated adoption process to legally become the child’s “other mother”.
American University law professor Nancy Polikoff, who helped draft the District of Columbia’s Domestic Partnership Judicial Determination Parentage Act of 2009, noted that when a heterosexual married couple uses artificial insemination, the husband does not have to adopt the child.
“He is the child’s legal parent automatically. Now the child of a lesbian couple will have the same economic and emotional security,” Polikoff told The Washington Post. “A mother should not have to adopt her own child.”
The law is the first of its kind in the country. A similar law goes into effect in January 2010 in New Mexico.
By law, Congress is charged with oversight of the laws of the District of Columbia, and many people feel recent decisions are a litmus indicator of Congressional attitude toward LGBT rights.
Earlier this month, with Congressional approval, the district began recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states and countries.
Posted in News Items, Uncategorized
Tagged District of Columbia, insemination, law, parenting, wash, Washington D.C.
Here’s the complete collection of Geek Porn Girl posts, serious and silly, from the past week:
Why Are There No Talking Vaginas? – Well, why aren’t there?
Postcards From a Lesbian Mommy – A roundup of links to my parenting & kid posts
D.C. Now Recognizes Same-Sex Marriages, Thanks to U.S. Congress – This post has a growing collection of lawyer jokes in the comments.
Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as Lesbian Moms – Yes, please!
Jan and Marcia Brady in Dyke Drama – Didn’t you always suspect, or at least wish?
My almost-13-year-old rock star
While Geek Porn Girl isn’t a parenting blog in the strickest sense, I am a mother and “mommy posts” do appear from time to time.
My son is 12. He would say “almost 13″. I like to stay he’s stumbling into puberty.
Here is a round-up of some of my posts about our life together, in no particular order:
Mother’s Day: How I Got a Little Fierce
Why Are There No Talking Vaginas?
We Went Marching on a School Night
According to a story in the Copenhagen Post, a Danish study has shown that children with lesbian mothers have a lower risk of developing psychological illnesses than kids growing up with a heterosexual father and mother.
The study, conducted by the University of Copenhagen is the first of its kind in Denmark.
There are an estimated 2000 Danish children with same-sex parents. Approximately 700 children have been adopted by homosexual couples in registered partnerships since 1999, when the practice became legal.
The study found that while five percent of children from heterosexual families developed conditions such as depression or anorexia between 1992 and 2008, the number was two percent among the 387 children of lesbian parents participating in the study.
The findings, according to Merete Lauberg, of the University Of Copenhagen Department Of Public Health, suggest that concerns that alternative families have a negative effect on child development are unfounded.
The reason for the positive results are unclear, but researchers are busy hypothesizing.
Some think the challenges faced by homosexual parents could play a role in how well their children ward off psychological problems. For example, it’s widely accepted that lesbian mothers may have encountered more resistance in their lives than heterosexual parents have.
“Resistance makes you stronger, and that [trait] could be passed on to their children,” Lauberg said.
Another reason, according to psychiatrist Per Hove Thomsen may be rooted in the efforts the parents had to make to conceive the child.
“A lot of other parents have challenges having children, but children with lesbian mothers face particular challenges,” he said. ‘The women have had to make an extra effort to get pregnant, and that could have an effect on the child.”
In 2007 the Danish Parliment passed a law granting lesbians access to artificial insemination at public hospitals.
Posted in Body, LGBT, Parenting
Tagged danish, denmark, family, gay parents, lesbian parents, mental health, mental illness, parenting, psychological, psychology, same-sex, study
Every year when Mother’s Day rolls around, I start to feel edgy.
Make no mistake, I’m a mother, and have been for 12 and a half years.
But there’s something about this Hallmark holiday that makes me feel inauthentic.
The thing is this: 12, nearly 13 years ago, I gave birth to the world’s coolest, kindest kid. He’s smart and talented and good, and is genuinely funny in way kids and adults appreciate.
But at this time of the year, images of mothers are everywhere I look, and none of them look like me.
Commercial motherhood, the kind that’s peddled on cards and by diamond dealers, would have you believe that motherhood is soft and fuzzy. The media wants us to think that procreating softens women, gentles us, and rounds our sharp corners. Dare I say, motherhood is supposed to tame us?
Yet, somehow the opposite happened to me.
I was married to my son’s father when he was born – a situation that now feels as distant as it seems improbable. And two years later, I found myself confronting my own sexual orientation.
I’ll save my whole coming out story for another time. There wasn’t another woman in the story, at least in any concrete sense. But suffice to say, there was therapy and tears, the support of loving friends, and more tears. My son’s dad moved out, and we went on with our lives.
I didn’t surprise anyone. I certainly didn’t surprise my parents who told me later they had always thought I might be gay and would figure it out myself someday.
My ex-husband claimed he wasn’t surprised, (but became vindictive and followed legal routes to exact his revenge, resulting in me paying him support).
I don’t think becoming a mother and coming out as a lesbian are tied together in any biological sense. However, I can say without hesitation that motherhood changed me in ways I didn’t expect.
I didn’t get soft and fuzzy. I didn’t start wearing pastels and grow a ponytail.
Instead I got a little fierce.
I wore lots of black and got tattooed. I buzzed my hair off.
I’d never been very athletic, but after I gave birth I felt like Super Woman. I had a confidence in my physical self I’d never felt before. I started kayaking and roller-blading, both miles at a time. I took some rock climbing lessons at an indoor rock gym and climbed at Joshua Tree and in Arizona. I started taking yoga. Somewhere in all this, I found the space to consider my sexuality for the first time in my life.
Motherhood taught me to trust myself.
This isn’t something that’s supposed to happen. Everything – from birth books to parenting magazines to media images of motherhood – is set up to make us question ourselves in every way.
And yet it didn’t work that way for me.
I’m not saying I didn’t read the literature – I did.
But I realized instinctively I didn’t need to buy into everything I read. In fact, the worst gift anyone ever gave me was a copy of Mothering magazine.
Mothering is the magazine of alternative parenting. It features articles like “Can jelly, make organic baby food, homemade lip balm, and chemical-free hair dye – all from the same batch of wild-harvested berries”.
I had a baby and was working full time. We were juggling a two-parent schedule that allowed us to both work without using childcare, and frankly, there wasn’t time to fold a cloth diaper, let alone properly wash one. I started throwing the magazine out the moment it arrived in the mail.
To this day, I still make a rude gesture at the cover of Mothering every time I see it on the rack at Whole Foods.
I got a little fierce and I’ve stayed fierce.
One of my good friends has a baby that is almost a year old. We talked the other day, and she said she had expected this first year to be different. She doesn’t feel the way she thought she would.
“How so?” I asked.
She said she felt edgy and a little impatient. “Not with the baby,” she said. “Just with everyone else. I don’t have time for their nonsense. And everyone expects me to be different.”
I told her about flipping off Mothering magazine and she laughed out loud.
“That makes me feel so much better,” she said. “I’m starting to hate that fucking magazine.”
Apparently I wasn’t the only one motherhood made fierce.
I’ve got this big-brained kid, and he started talking clearly right around his first birthday. Other than sleep, Lego, and reading, he hasn’t stopped much since.
He suffers from one of the marks of the voracious reader: He will frequently try to throw words into conversation that he’s read, and understands, but has never heard pronounced.
Some of these are generational, and for that he can be forgiven.
After he discovered Guitar Hero at a friend’s house, he came home and asked to download a song by Pat “Ben-Are-Tar”.
“Who?” I asked. He had no hesitancy in repeating it: “Ben-Are-Tar”.
I was still quizzical.
“Mom,” he said. “I think she’s in your generation. She sang ‘Hit Me with Your Best Shot’”.
The best thing about this syndrome of his is that complete lack of hesitancy. He has no qualms about diving right into a word, and no shame at all when he’s corrected, or when everyone around him dies laughing. He simply files away the correct pronunciation in that head of his and moves on.
He recently made a reference to a truck’s “chase-ess,” which left several people wondering until I – having learned to translate – said “chassis”.
“Right,” he said, continuing his story.
And, in a conversation about pencils, I made reference to the iconic Ticonderoga pencil brand.
“Really?” he said, without missing a beat. “Ticonderoga? I always thought it was Ticken-der-ooga.”
My favorite of all of these will be the time he came home from school and said one of the older kids had called him a “douche bag”.
“What did you do about that?” I asked, knowing he’s pretty easy going.
“I called him an “ah-nee-mah nozzle,” he said.
It took me a moment, but I was soon howling with laughter.
“What did he say?,” I choked out.
“He just looked at me with a blank expression,” my son said. “By the way, Mom, what’s a ‘douche bag’”?
Tagged enema nozzle, gay parenting, kid, lesbian mom, parenting, reading pronunciation, words
Lately I found myself ranting to a co-worker about a Bay Area formal-wear shop that has been running newspaper ads featuring local high school girls tarted up like Vegas showgirls.
Each ad features a little profile like this: “Sarah is the girl’s volleyball team captain, a member of the marching band, has a 4.0 GPA, and is an animal shelter volunteer. She’s hoping to go to Stanford and study law.”
It stops short of being a Playboy centerfold bio (“Likes: Angora sweaters, kittens, and strawberry sorbet. Dislikes: Pap smears, hairy chests, and rimming.”).
But, the sweet little bio accompanies a picture of a leggy, busty, smoothly tanned girl, made up like RuPaul, stuffed into a slinky floor-length dress with plunging front and a crotch-high slit, and balanced on shoes that would make the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence dizzy.
A teen girl hasn’t been this done up since my friend Babs ran for Miss Minneappolis Downtown back in the Flashdance era.
The girl in the ad is supposed to be ready to go to her prom.
Prom, folks. That means she’s either barely 18 or younger.
(I checked out the store’s website and found they’d made this video, which stops short of being soft-prom-porn.)
Yikes.
Call me old-fashioned, but I want to see prom images that make me think of corsages and slow dances and sweet kisses, balloons floating down, hearts all a-flutter.
I don’t want to see an ad that makes me think of prom as a pole-dancing competition followed by a quick scratch-and-moan with the captain of the football team and drinking until someone throws up on their shoes.
I keep thinking “What are these girls parents thinking?” followed by, “I’m so glad I have a son”.
I thought those ads were bad until I saw this prom dress, at sale at on an online company, complete with labia and a clitoris peeking out.
Can’t you see a young girl emerging from the dressing room in this number, asking her mom and dad, “I don’t know. Do you think it’s too much?”
Choke.
BTW, after a bunch of folks (not just dirty-minded me) pointed out the pussy potential of the dress, the online photo was changed to make the ruffles more discrete.
A couple of days ago, news agencies started announcing that The White House is allocating tickets for the Easter Egg Roll to gay and lesbian parents as part of the Obama administration’s outreach to diverse communities.
(And we’re also being invited to the Philadelphia Zoo. Will the madness never stop?)
Many families say the gesture shows that the new Democratic administration values them as equal to other families, and I suppose that’s true.
In the spring of 2006, LGBT groups pressured the White House to include same-sex families. One-hundred families rolled eggs with the straight folk, wearing rainbow leis to increase their visibility.
Alisa Surkis is a writer/computer programmer and lesbian mother of two. She, her wife, and their kids live in Brooklyn, NY. Their family has been invited to this year’s Egg Roll, and she’s written this essay on the Huffington Post.
My big request of Surkis and other gay parents who will be a ‘rollin this weekend: Please don’t wear rainbow-colored leis. Don’t wear rainbow-colored anything, except the requisite Easter pastels. Hold hands with your spouses, take pictures with your kids. Do the normal family stuff. But let’s not come onto the field like a Gay Pride parade float. We’ve been invited to the party, we should behave like guests. At least Rick Warren won’t be playing the Easter Bunny.
Tagged diversity, easter, egg roll, gay parents, Huffington Post, inclusion, parenting, Rick Warren, same-sex, white house
We’ve been experiencing a weird phenomenon lately. People have been addressing my 12-year-old son and me as “ladies”.
I suppose this is a byproduct of gay friendliness, but it’s still a little weird.
The first time this happened was in January in Disneyland when a park photographer approached us and said, “Would you ladies like to get your photo taken? You could even have it taken with Darth Vader!”
We sort of looked at each other… one of those movie looks. I told the photographer “my son would probably love to have his picture taken with Darth Vader, but I’ll just watch.”
She sort of stammered and apologized while she handed him a light saber.
Then early in March, leaving a No On 8 rally in San Francisco, a cab driver did it again, “You ladies have a good evening.”
Here’s what’s going on: My son and I are now the same height. I’m sure that by the time school gets out for the summer he’ll be towering over me. In a frisson of sixth grade fashion flair, he’s taken to wearing a fedora. But under the hat, he still has a sweet baby face, right on the brink of adolescence. I like to say he’s stumbling into puberty. And, I look really gay. Although I’d describe myself as a medium-maintenance sort of femme, I like to wear my hair shorter than Rachel Maddow’s, on the verge of crew cut. I have those interesting glasses that seem to be the mark of the modern lesbian.
So, people take one look at us – me looking like a little ol’ dyke and him a similarly-sized person in Chuck Taylors, jeans, an ironic t-shirt, and a hat – and assume he’s my butch girlfriend.
Luckily, my easygoing kid thinks this is really funny… but I’ve decided I’ll throw a couple of bucks in the therapy jar just in case he needs it later.
He's not as tall as Darth Vader... yet.
Posted in LGBT, Parenting, Uncategorized
Tagged darth vader, disneyland, kid, mom, mommy, mommy blog, mommy blogger, No On 8, parenting, prop 8, prop H8, son
As my kid stumbles into puberty, I’m handing out the stock advice.
I’ve already told him not to trust girls that call the house repeatedly and hang up when his mom answers the phone, and then lie about it later.
And, I’ve told him to stay away from junk food, and get plenty of sleep, and do his homework.
Now, apparently, I should to remind him not to take naked pictures of himself and pimp them on the internet.
It’s certainly a different adolescent landscape than the one I stumbled through all those many years ago.
A 14-year-old New Jersey girl has been accused of distributing child pornography after posting nearly 30 explicit nude pictures of herself on MySpace.com — charges that could force her to register as a sex offender if convicted.
Read more about it in the LA Times.
Posted in News Items
Tagged girl, kid, mommy blogging, myspace, parenting, puberty, sexting
Last night, my son and I, and a few thousand others, made the walk from Harvey Milk Plaza to San Francisco’s City Hall, as part of the Eve Of Justice candlelight march, intended to encourage the State Supreme Court to overthrow Prop. 8.
I’m not a mommy blogger, I’m not even a lesbian mommy blogger. Although I know I’ve mentioned that I have a son, I tend to write more about things I’m not ready to have my kid read, than about my interactions with him. However, tonight was one of those special nights and I have a really special kid.
I’m hoping that my son, who is stumbling into puberty, will grow up to be a kind man. All arrows point that way. He’s a great guy with an easy way about him, a good sense of humor, and he’s genuinely nice to people. In return people are nice back.
I asked him if he wanted go to the rally in SF last night, and at first he wasn’t sure. Then he thought about it and said “I think I would”. So I left work a little early and we drove south, over the bridge, and into the city. (Well, actually I drove, and he did his math homework.)
We arrived in the Castro with a few minutes to spare. My son sized it all up and said “I need a restroom, candles, and a sign to carry.” True to form, my son asked a shopkeeper if we could use his restroom, and he agreed. By the time I emerged from my turn in the restroom, a nice guy in a black fedora was comparing hat brims with my son. Minutes later he met us outside and handed us a sign. And again, within minutes, my son found a guy to sell us a pair of little electric candles for $2 each.
Then we were off with the crowd.
It was a school night. We’ll have to be out of the house at 7:15 this morning – he to school, me to teach a yoga class before my “regular” job. And we live quite a distance north of San Francisco.
So what was this lesbian mommy thinking?
I was thinking that I had an incredible opportunity to teach my son something about civil rights, and – hopefully – to let him witness something historic… and I think I did.
You see, one of my great hopes is that he won’t have to see many civil rights rallies in his lifetime. I hope they won’t be needed. I want him to understand the important of equal rights – not just for his lesbian mommy – but for everybody. I want him to be able to explain that importance to the people of his generation, although I’m hoping he won’t ever have to.
You can read about the Eve of Justice rally on SFGate, the SF Chronicle’s website. There’s also a video below that will give you a taste of the event.
Maybe it’s all the hoopla around Facebook’s puckered attitude about breastfeeding moms, maybe it’s my interest in taking lactation training so I can help new moms nurse successfully… who knows, but I was moved to watch Breasts: A Documentary.
I can’t recommend this hour-long film enough. It should be required watching for all women and girls. I think maybe for men too, although not for the reasons they’d think.
The film is the work of Meema Spadola, an award-winning film maker and an all-female camera crew.
Although it was released in 1996, the film remains wildly relevant.
Spadola talked to 22 women – many of whom appear topless in the film – about their relationship with their breasts. There are so many layers to the film: Mother/daughter relationships and inter-generational body attitudes, the role breasts play in sexual relationships, breast feeding, breast augmentation experiences, and of course, breast cancer. The subject’s film include a voluptuous transsexual, a stripper with implants, an 11-year-old on the cusp of puberty, a 420-pound comedienne, and an 84-year-old grandmother.
Check it out if you get a chance. It’s available from Netflix and you can buy it on Amazon. It would make a fantastic Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day gift for the special woman in your life.
**********************
The internet is rife with photos of large-breasted women, nipples barely covered. These images greet me daily on the “infotainment” feeds on CNN, Yahoo!, and other sources.
But while it’s apparently socially acceptable to display breasts as large, firm, and shiny as new cars, it’s not okay to display natural ones being used for their God-given purpose: feeding babies.
The popular networking site Facebook has come under fire for removing photographs of nursing mothers, of all things.
Over the weekend, a handful of activists sang songs, held signs, and breast-fed their children in front of Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters in protest of the censorship.
Facebook claims it’s just trying to prevent its site from becoming riddled with pictures of bare breasts and says it has no problem with nursing. Protestors say breastfeeding images are not obscene and should not be restricted.
But this sort of action is what encourages women think there’s something nasty about breastfeeding. It’s what makes them turn to formula and plastic and microwaves when their own bodies can provide superior nutrition and immune support at no cost at all. Women who have any discomfort about breastfeeding need society’s support, not ostracization.
I can’t believe that in a time when women can – and should – breastfeed everywhere, a discussion this stupid is even taking place. There’s nothing dirty about bare breasts doing what they’re supposed to do. It’s context that can make them sexual and enticing.
Believe me, as a woman who loves women and a woman who loves babies, I understand the difference perfectly well both in the breasts of others, and in my own lovely and functional pair.
Facebook needs to loosen up its e-sphincter.
You can read more in the Mercury News, here.
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