Jazz Bagpiper Rufus Harley: A man who really did go his own way

My mother raised me as a feminist. I can’t pinpoint a moment where I consciously identified a such, I just always was a feminist. And it all seems to go back to how my mom raised me. I do remember, as a teenager, working through my high school libraries pitifully scant selection of feminist books, though. If I recall, they consisted mainly of The Feminine Mystique and a couple collections of essays.

Evil Mr Farts!

I do like the bagpipes. The local high school is the highlanders so they have a bagpipe and drum band as well as they more usual brass band. I hear them practice in the summer and fall while the weather is good.

I also have a picture of my father in Highlander’s regimental kilt, sporran and bearskin cap from after my parents married during WWII. Since he was American it must have been a lark to get his picture to send to his relatives in rural Texas and maybe get them ready for a war bride from the north of England near the border.

My mother influenced my feminism in the sixties. We talked about her memory of getting the vote and the then current movement to make abortion legal in Washington. Both of my parents were pro-choice. However most important to me was changing the rules so I could wear pants to school.

Skirts were still required attire and even changing to pants after school was not common so got me my first harassment. Leaving school in pants to catch a ride with my brother on his vespa I got asked if I “turned tricks”. Not understanding the words at 14 (though I got the tone) I had to ask my brother what had been the intent of the insult.

What I don’t understand about the men’s movement is that many say that it’s not about women, it’s about men’s issues (eg. increasing prostrate cancer awareness, equality in the court system for men) but it seems to me, they spend 24/7 thinking and talking about how evil women are. They don’t set out to actually help a suffering man. They say they are “going their own way” but everything they post or talk about is about women!!

I was a feminist before I even knew the word, and when I did hear it I just thought “so that’s what you call it”, but it took until university for me to be exposed to radical feminism, which basically felt like “finally, people who’re willing to be honest about all this stuff and put it in a clear sociopolitical context without sugarcoating it to avoid offending anyone”. So for me the awareness of injustice and belief that it needed to be addressed was always there, and then the theory helped me make sense of why things were the way they were and what to do about them.

ceebarks – cripes, that’s bad. I worked with a trio of Assembly of God members in my first job, in the mid 80s, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t that far down that rabbit-hole. Maybe they were outliers, I dunno.

I think I’ve always been a feminist, in that I’ve always agreed that women and men should be equal, ever since my mum told me about the Suffragettes when I was a very small child. I dunno if I ever really called myself a feminist until sort of my late teens, and it was only at university that I found out about Intersectional Feminisms.

I now feel disappointed in my parents, especially my mum, because she brought me into feminism, but she now claims to have done the “PC thing” in her youth and emerged out the other side, with a “more balanced” view of things – by which she means she’s gone back to being comfortable with things and not examining her internalised prejudices.

She thinks racism against white people is a thing, and has a very dim view of my having a friend who is trans, because she thinks I’m just parroting *their* “extreme lefty woolly liberal crap” if I call her out on bigotry. She thinks I don’t have my own opinions, and she’ll “win” by misstating my position back to me in a way that makes me sound ridiculous (e.g. “You’re saying we should be ashamed to be white”).
I can’t have any conversation with her without feeling the need to call her out on something, so it’s a constant battle, and we ALWAYS end up disagreeing in a way that means she’s left thinking she is the one who is right and that I am just stupid.

In fact, it came up on a car journey last night – parents talking about girls in a care-home who were preyed upon by a paedophile ring, saying it was partly the girls’ fault for being wayward and “making bad decisions”, and I felt compelled to call them out on victim-blaming, though they denied that was what they were doing.

It made me feel awful, partly because my much younger brother was with me in the back seat, and I don’t want him picking up on that attitude, and partly because it made me question how they would respond if either one of us were in an abusive relationship and needed their support.
They didn’t really listen to what I was trying to say, got defensive and actually shouted me down over it, whilst saying “of course” they would believe me, and that I could simply phone my dad and be whisked away from any situation like that, but they also said that if I stayed, they would tell me I was being stupid.
And I know they mean that out of a position of “snap out of doing things which are bad for you”, but it actually felt really upsetting, because while I think I could trust them for practical support if I ever needed it, (a van to move out, a place to stay, etc), their response made me feel that, on an emotional level, there might be a level of victimhood that I’d be required to meet, or that they just wouldn’t be able to offer me any support emotionally, because their being “right” is always more important than whether I feel safe or accepted in their presence.
And that just hit a nerve in a way that still makes me feel weird and vulnerable.

I think this has gone waaaaay off-topic and into a very rambly emotionally-charged place. But I guess I identify with what Mouse Farts and ceebarks said about “untangling reality from all the indoctrination (and figuring out what you actually think vs. what’s a knee-jerk rebellion) can be…a process.”
I my case, I’m pretty sure I know what I think and know to be true, it’s just my parents who don’t trust me to know my own mind. And I feel like I’m being gaslighted every time I express an opinion in front of them.

Sorry for the personal teal-deer. Dunno if I feel better for saying it out loud, or not.

Sometimes I think Cassandrakitty and I are the same person!

My family was both highly patriarchal and very conservative and I became who I am philosophically by constantly butting up against things they said or did and thinking, “well, that’s not right!” but I didn’t know that my rage against the injustice I saw was called ‘feminism’ and it wasn’t really till college that I read deeply enough for it to be more than a sensibility.

I used to be kinda shocked by the “I’m not a feminist” thing, and even more so by anti-feminists, but over time I have come to understand it as the result of a powerful “marketing” effort, and I’m not surprised that so many of the folks who seem to be parroting that line seem to be awfully young. It doesn’t surprise me now that some actress or musician in her 20s would think feminism isn’t a thing she needs because for the most part she’s out there, achieving her dream with the support of her friends and family, who may even be serving as a buffer between her and the worst of the institutional sexism (and/or racism) that is embedded in the system. In other words, folks like that are lucky, and given how we as human beings so often conflate luck with our own virtue, I can’t hold it against them.

I have had the experience of watching friends who would have run screaming from the word feminist when we were in our 20s progress through dawning realization and then abject disgust as things they were convinced couldn’t be true come back to hit them in the face more and more as they got older. As you start aging and losing the shell of seeming privilege provided by benevolent sexism, it is harder and harder to ignore the other side of the coin.

Anyway, a hearty welcome to Mouse Farts. And to AltoFronto, a shared “UGH!” because I have been there.

@AltoFtronto: One of the fundamental problems that virtually all of us have to deal with is that as children we know very little of life and have to trust information and ideas that others hand to us, so we end up absorbing a lot of crap — if not from our parents, then from society at large — that later on we have to spend a lot of time and effort seeking out and discarding: the mental muck that was shoved in there before we were sophisticated enough to be critical about the things people try to teach us. And it seems that if you don’t begin this process when you are fairly young, it will never happen.
Sadly,you will probably have to be somewhat philosophical about your parents — they have settled into the comfortable world-view that says that the way things are is basically fair, people get more or less what they deserve, and that if you fare poorly in the world you probably deserve it — you’re not a victim, you just make bad choices. They don’t want to accept that not only do bad things happen to good people — everybody recognizes that — but that some of the bad things are a result of systematic flaws in society. Your parents simply have too far to travel — essentially they would have to discard almost all of that comfortable world view to get to where you are — and it’s hard enough to discard all of your notions about life and build up a new and very different world view when you are young, and almost impossible when you are old.
The first rule I tried to teach my children was “Question authority.” But if one is a member of the favored groups in society, it tends to be a lot easier to never ask “Why?” when someone says “That’s just the way it is.” Feminists make a lot of people uncomfortable because they are constantly questioning (mostly male) authority, asking “Why?” when authority doesn’t have any good answers. I’m afraid when your questions make your parents uncomfortable, they’ll just retreat farther into their shells, like frightened turtles.
I was fortunate to be raised by a father who spent his whole life questioning authority, who managed to become something of a feminist in his 70s.

Just wanted to thank everyone for the insights/responses to my questions. Every now and did it seems I could really use a reminder of how lucky I am to have been raised by parents who have always both rather supportive and progressive. And if ever I tried to like Ann Coulter it would only seriously worry them, LOL.

So my hat is really off to those of you you were raised in a familial framework that you really had to fight against in order to decide to call yourselves feminists.

Ack, my comment was a proofreader’s nightmare.

every now and then, I mean.

always been rather supportive and progressive, I mean.

to those of you who, I mean.

I was raised religious but not fundamentalist, and progressive. There was never any talk from my parents about how X is for girls and Y is for boys. Me and my brother played with the same toys and got the same opportunities. My mother in particular had the attitude for both of us that we should be able to do what we want with our lives, she’s always valued our independence (my father too btw).

Equality and fairness (ergo feminism) has always been a keen idea for me ever since I was young. I’ve always lived by the belief that I just want everyone to be happy, and that involves freedom to do and be what you want. For everyone. I hate gender roles and when people try to force other people to behave how they want them to. So I instantly agreed with the values of feminism even though I never actually called myself one until recently. Partly because of the “feminism = man hating” idea, partly because I try not to label myself things. My parents were and are very much egalitarian in marriage (actually my mum wears the trousers) but they had the idea that feminism is extremism. That’s where I got that from until I started reading about the kind of thing people here have mentioned, religious misogyny, and the Social Justice Warrior side of me got really mad.

Things went from there when I started reading about secular and institutional sexism and now here I am.