20140119.0719

This afternoon, my wife's coworkers are hosting a baby shower for her.  Several members of the family have made the trek from their natural state or hard by the meanest of greens or in the lands that gave rise to Cimmeria to this place where the wind comes sweeping down the plain to celebrate the upcoming birth of our child (due at the end of March, thank you) and the burden my wife carries in nurturing the child within her body.  It is good to see that so many others are excited about the child; my beloved wife is working hard to support the baby within her and is enduring much on the child's behalf, and she deserves praise for doing so.

(I do not mean to say by this that those who choose not to have children are deserving of censure by dint of that choice.  They may well deserve censure for other reasons; many people do.  But the informed and deliberate decision not to have a child despite the biological and societal pressures to do that very thing is also praiseworthy.  I do not think I need to seek forgiveness, though, for lauding my wife.  I think I would very much need to seek forgiveness for not lauding her--and not just for her motherhood.)

I am aware of the shower as a distinctly feminine space, however.  The event it celebrates, although yet to occur, is one with which women are most intimately concerned, and understandably.  It is the woman's body that suffers in the process and the woman's body that is put to the nurturing of the life hopefully released into the world thereby; that women are the ones to celebrate the thing in which they are the principal actors is sensible and appropriate.  And in this place, the separation of gender roles along "traditional"* lines is far more in force than in The City or in other places I have known or known of; showers is fer wimmin, or some such thing, and several of the comments that I have overheard bandied about have indicated that the men who have come and are coming along with the celebrants are not expected to attend themselves.  "Burping and farting" seem to be the expected activities, and they are to take place somewhere else entirely.

That this is so forces me to pose some questions, and their nature demands that I attempt to do so delicately, for I really do wish to know, and I truly am curious, but I realize that I can easily come off as the ass in this, and I do not intend to do so.  (I know the sentence is ridiculously complex.  So is what it tries to express.  See Barnard, "The Ruse of Clarity.")  Have I, accustomed to enjoying privilege without necessarily explicitly exerting it, found myself in a position to have had my privilege checked?  Or, rather, am I experiencing in my reaction to the event (which reaction I admit to be childish and petty, particularly since I benefit from the event in several ways) some vanishingly small semblance of the systematic and too-much institutionalized discrimination those in unadvisedly marginalized groups experience on a regular if not continual basis?  (Please do read the question in full before castigating me for it; the qualifiers are in place for a reason.)  And that leaves aside what it says of me that I can and do frame my experience in such terms, something with which I still struggle...

*I use the term advisedly because I know full well that it is problematic--and I know that some who read this know enough to call my on my error if I do not tread carefully with it.  I am aware enough of the problem to be chastised if I do not act with at least the awareness of it, even if I lack a good solution to it.