The Rise (and Fall) of That Whole Femivore Thing

I posted earlier about the NYTimes article on femivore's and radical homemakers, and the verdict is in from all over the web, and it's not too favorable. Erin said in the comments section of my post;

Ack! I can't stand all the labeling. Do we have no way of understand our world without trying to categorize people and their intentions? What about this: I'm a college-educated stay-at-home-wife and mother who is just trying to do the best she can. Rather than trying to fit people into neat categories, it seems to me that we've progressed beyond the need for "progress" and are now willing and able to pick and choose the best of all of our options to fashion lives that work the best for us. Just as medicine is revisiting the "old cures" and discovering worth in them even as it presses forward with new thinking, I think we are doing the very same in our homes. How sad that it is considered radical to be willing to learn from those who went before us. Maybe it is our college educations that make us willing to look everywhere for knowledge and keep us always willing to learn? I don't know...

Her's wasn't the only "Ack!" heard around the interwebs.

Amanda Marcotte at Slate had the most blistering assessment;

If you've ever lived in a rural area (as I did growing up) and spent time around actual pecking, squawking chickens, you probably think of them as mean, stupid, filthy animals that get into more scrapes than an unattended Roomba left to handle a fringed rug. Which is why my first reaction to this article by Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine about rich housewives raising organic chickens was to laugh for a solid 30 seconds at the ridiculous accompanying photo. In it, a slim woman in a shawl standing under an arbor of roses clutches a chicken fondly. Said chicken looks for a means to escape, while probably thinking about going to find some hole to get stuck in. Only after laughing until I let out an unladylike snort did I actually read the article, which was yet another one of those expensive NY Times pieces about how some rich ladies found an out from the supposed demands of feminism, a space where they can stay at home without being so bored they have to subsist on Valium.

It's a disappointment to see a usually strong feminist writer like Orenstein get sucked into the Times vortex of finding any and every way to suggest that women in the workplace was just some weird '70s lark that can totally be rectified, that there are ways to keep the little ladies occupied without tempting them to emasculate their husbands or male colleagues by drawing paychecks.

As a man reading that, I kind of feel like joining the chicken and looking for some hole to go get stuck in. So much for femivore. Time to come up with some other -vore word, like metrovore or globavore or pizzavore.

Comments

[Jaspenelle]

Labelfreevore? Granted it would completely defeat the point to find a label for those who wish to remain label free...

That said, I think Mrs Marcotte's harsh diatribe does far more to undercut women then the femivores article did. Sometimes I almost feel like the tides are turning, that now I am _expected_ to go join the workforce. Odd, I thought that feminism was fighting what was expected of women and and doing something that fulfills us as individuals. Be that raising chickens or enjoying a latte with extra foam.

I loved your post about it by the way, I loved the discussion it brewed.

[Karen]

I hadn't commented yet because I was still turning your original comments over in my head, Craig, but I think there's more to the discussion than what Erin and Amanda Marcotte have to say.

First, let's agree -- the word "femivore" is horrible. Break it down: if carnivore means meat-eater, femivore means "woman eater." Yuck.

Second, as the original article says, there's a certain high level of expectation among the author's Berkeley-based acquaintances; because it's Alice Waters' neighborhood, an organic kitchen garden is a given. This might seem intense to those of us who live elsewhere, but I think residents of Florida would similarly find the number of snow boots in my front closet astonishing.

Marcotte's piece leans heavily on the idea that Orenstein is exaggerating the importance of the hobbies of a few "wealthy, idle housewives" in order to make her point. I don't know -- the amount of work it takes to keep my tomato plants healthy for long enough that everybody gets their fill of tomato sandwiches seems to me like something other than idleness. Adding a more elaborate garden and living creatures into the mix makes the task of providing a significant portion of a family's food a . . . what's that word? Oh yeah, a job.

What resonated with me about your original post was the way in which it answers some of the questions I'm left with after reading Wendell Berry. His paeans to an agrarian life are in some ways so seductive: wouldn't it be lovely in this disconnected, transitory world to feel so much a part of a community that we have literal roots? That we are of a piece with the land itself? But how does that fit with the need to, you know, pay the bills?

I think this sadly misnamed movement tries to answer that question. (I think your blog, especially as you redescribed it in today's earlier post, is another, ultimately more successful way to look at the same question) The way to make it work, these women posit, is to create as much of a homestead as possible in the backyard. If there's something missing in that attempt, it's not a recognition that chickens can be mean and dumb; it's figuring out how to weave a genuine desire for interconnection and for meaning beyond a paycheck with the lack of recognition there is in the world for the work of being a parent, feeding a family, keeping a home. If chickens (full disclosure: I hate them, having worked in the kitchen of a summer camp one teenage summer with several pecking around my feet, but boy would I love to have a few in the back yard to supply eggs and eat bugs)are a step toward reclaiming responsibility for how we care for our families, I say bring 'em on.