Choice and Class
A pretty good--but not perfect--editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle about choice, class, and the so-called "Mommy Wars":
The debate over whether mothers of young children should . . . opt out, (or) choose to stay home -- reveals its bias: It assumes that all mothers can make a choice that, in actuality, very few mothers are in a position to make.
For most mothers, working full time is not a choice to be weighed against having a family; it's a necessity in order to support a family.
....
It's easy to open a newspaper and get the impression that parenting is a challenge faced only by upper-middle-class people. . . . Should children enroll in science or soccer camp?
....
for low-income mothers, summer brings a different set of challenges: finding a new means of child care now that the days aren't filled with classroom instruction.
As the article points out, this kind of thing is a feminist problem--
The recent obsession with the Mommy Wars and its out-and-out refusal to consider these differences in an area where socioeconomic class makes a huge difference has been puzzling to many feminists. It's 2007. The idea that class matters in, well, matters of class, is not exactly the complex syllogism it once was.
Or perhaps it is. The Mommy Wars' blatant disregard of its impact on lower-income mothers has resulted in something worse than a reversion to second-wave feminism of the 1970s, which favored a simplistic focus on giving women a choice without considering economic and cultural differences.
....
In essence, it's an onslaught of negative third-wave feminism, which assumes everyone has the financial security to make a choice and tells low-income and poor mothers that this doesn't concern them
--but it's a false feminist problem. That is to say, the media portrayal of "women's issues" as exclusively belonging to (mostly) white, upper middle class women is not something that comes from feminists (and no, not even "third-wave" feminists, who are well aware, thankyouverymuch, that class and race matter). It's something that comes from sexism. The only women who "count" are women who have the money and hence the collective power to affect advertisers. Poor women? If we pay attention to them, they're "the poor"--issues specific to women either get ignored or get presented as the results of "poor choices" (interesting use of the word, no?) like having "too many" kids "too young"--which presumably means before landing that six-figure-earning husband. Women of color? Oh, racism no longer exists, didn't you know? Immigrant women? They shouldn't have "chosen" to cross the border illegally.
It's not a coincidence that the overblown hype about the "Mommy Wars" only serves to convince people that feminism is trivial (after all, what's more trivial than being a mommy?), self-involved, and at best a hobby of privileged women. But if you go around and read what self-declared feminists actually write about, you'll find a whole 'nother picture.
The Chronicle's right that the problem is the assumption that "everyone" has enough money to "choose" to do the right thing. An assumption that contains an unstated premise that even those of us who are comfortably middle- to upper-middle class often have bad luck or make "bad choices"--but since we "matter," our choices are cushioned by the ability to refinance, to borrow in emergencies, to take out student loans, to ask mom or dad to help us find a job or loan us a little bit to tide us over, to coast on our husband's or wife's health insurance, to pay for a babysitter, to join a gym, to see a doctor. Even knowing that things like student loans are available is a privilege of the middle class: think about how much of the stuff you know about money and getting by is stuff someone else told you about, or someone you know did before you.
The Chronicle concludes by saying that "The Mommy Wars can be won when we redefine victory." It's not the mommy wars that are the problem though: the real problem is a media-manufactured class privilege that relies on hidden classism, racism, and sexism. The "war" will be won when people start realizing that most people, mommies and parents especially, do their damn best. And that therefore any problem you can generalize about is not simply a matter of "good" or "bad" "choices."
Bitch_PhD passes in public as a soccer mom, and can't decide if that's funny or terrifying.
Facebook Vs. MySpace: What's Class Got To Do With It?
(Photograph by Mack Reed)
At least twice a month someone asks me for a link to my page on MySpace -- I usually end up pointing them to a blog post I made about this time last year called, "MySpace can eat a bag of dick." The short version is that I got so frustrated with every single aspect of how MySpace works that I deleted my account, walked away, and never looked back. The interesting change is that at that point people were asking me for the link several times a week and it's been steadily decreasing since then. For the most part I'm not very vocal about my distaste for MySpace so I don't think that's why requests have slowed, instead I'm getting the same questions but now asking about my page on Facebook.
I'd been noticing more and more of my social circle moving over to Facebook but had just assumed it was the same kind of migration we'd seen a few years ago when people started moving off of Friendster and over to MySpace. This was just my assumption and I had little to back it up, so when danah boyd started talking about the same topic I was very interested. Turns out it's anything but the same kind of migration, and in fact is more of a division. A few months ago danah wrote a piece called, "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace" where she noted that only certain kinds of people were leaving MySpace for Facebook but for some circles MySpace was still the premier SNS. After a bit of explanation about how "class" in America has less to do with how much money you make and more with who you surround yourself with, she points out where this split is happening:
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.
MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
A very important note to make here is that danah's research focuses on high school kids only, as that's who she was speaking with directly before she came to these conclusions. It was interesting to see that among Facebook users, all of them knew about MySpace (and often had negative things to say about it), but frequently MySpace users hadn't ever heard of Facebook. As you might expect people misread her article, pulled bits out of context and jumped to conclusions prompting her to write a response a month later addressing many of the issues people brought up. The age issues was a big one, as was the use of race in her observations. In her follow up she clarified a bit more where all this info came from, stating:
When I talk about data, I'm not talking about my friends or what I hear from teenagers in Los Angeles (or San Francisco). I drive to disconnected communities and talk to teenagers from different schools about their lives. I hang out in public places where I watch teens. I hang out on MySpace and scan the micro-profiles that one can see on Facebook. I talk to parents, teachers, pastors, and community leaders from all over the nation. I talk to people from varied backgrounds, all to get at what's going on. The trick to ethnographic work like this is to understand the biases that are operating in the spheres you study. This is not survey work. This is about contextualizing what you learn, making sense of how an individual is or is not like her/his peers. This is not about random sampling, but sampling until you start to see patterns that are predictable, until you flesh out the domain. While individual experiences are important, when I'm drawing patterns, I'm talking beyond the individual - I'm trying to paint a meta portrait.
One point from her original piece that really struck me was how this division was reflecting in the military. She found that the educated Officers were all on Facebook, while the rank and file troops were hanging out on MySpace. MySpace was recently banned while Facebook remains accessible - perhaps because of who each site is reaching. danah writes:
MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don't have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can't help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit.
Bringing this back to my own observations, my peers use their SNS for more than just staying in touch with a select circle of friends. Lots of business is done through these sites and connecting with the right network of people can make all the difference when launching or hyping a new project. As key figures in these networks jump from one ship to the other there are huge circles of people following their lead, in the same way popular kids in high school circles determine (often without knowing it) which sites their peers will be using simply by which they choose to stay on themselves. I personally shifted to Facebook simply because it worked, where MySpace never seemed to.