The Boy is Mine

The Mothering magazine I picked up the other day has been sitting in our bathroom for weeks now. I was suckered in by the article titled "How to raise strong confident women." It is a testament to how ill-prepared for that I feel that I'm grasping at 1,200 word magazine article straws.


Anonyhub (who has read more of the magazine than I have at this point) was suckered in by an article on Ani Difranco, a woman he has loved to hate for musical reasons since the mid-nineties. She apparently annoys him as a philosophizing mother as well.


"She kept complaining about how men have taken medicine and birth away from women and have made it horrible, like women didn't have anything to do with it. I mean, she's right about men making it bad, but my mother and my sister and pretty much every woman in my home town wouldn't even consider giving birth without drugs and a hospital bed. It's like she's saying women were forced to do things a certain way."


I've since read the article, and I don't think Ani sounded as victimy or man-hating as Anonyhub thought she did, but I like the implications of what he's saying by refusing to see women as the victims of mean old men. He's saying, hey, don't come crying on my shoulder, don't you have brains, and a will, and the ability to strategize? Then use them. He refuses to see women as powerless. And I love him for it. And I'm glad he's going to be emanating this philosophy around Anonybabe.


Women are sitting in the catbird seat when it comes to demanding better care surrounding pregnancy and birth. And maybe, like me, if more women get a taste of how good it feels to demand what we want in pregnancy and birth then we'll learn to demand it elsewhere.