“Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,” the main refrain from the Broadway play and movie Rent begins and continues over and over Seasons of Love.m4p. Defining life by your loves sounds like a good idea. Given that we’re a week away from the official start of spring, and that this time of year is a literal season of love, including marriages and procreation, it started me to think. By all of my calculations, the next few days mark forty years since my father and mother conceived me, in their season of love, in the Age of Aquarius.

I wonder, what life must’ve been like for them back then. It was the spring of ’69, and Nixon had only been in office for as long as Obama’s been so far. We were only four months away from the Moon landing. We were only a few months removed from the assassinations of King and RFK, and only two months removed from the end of LBJ’s time in the White House. We were only two months into a cultural backlash that would lead to an age of neoconservatism. Say what you will about the Sixties, at least this protest-laden period. Against Vietnam, imperialist pigs, the military industrial complex, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and socioeconomic inequalities. The fact was, ’68 was the height of liberal consciousness, and ’69 was the slow but steady move to the right for most in the US.

Being a twenty-one-year-old woman only two and a half years removed from living in Bradley, Arkansas and living in the greater New York City area must’ve been a Sinatra-style “kick in the head.” Or being a twenty-eight-year-old Black man working as a janitor for the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan after growing up in rural south-central Georgia must’ve been a daily head-swirler. These unlikely New Yorkers/Mount Vernonites were my soon-to-be-parents back in March ’69. They already had a kid, named Darren. For those of you who are Bewitched fans (you know, Elizabeth Montgomery, Dick York/Dick Sargent), yes, my older brother was named after the main male character. Born in December ’67, Darren was still a mere toddler when I was conceived. My mother was just twenty years and six weeks old when she gave birth for the first time. As my mother has said many times over the years, “I wasn’t no teenager when Darren was born.” To which I’ve said, “So what?”

My mother and father met because both needed respite from the daily grind of being in a strange and unaccepting world. They were both treated as country bumpkins, as people who couldn’t handle New York’s hustle and bustle. They talked too slow, didn’t have the “warder” or “warda” for “water” accent, and didn’t dress like African Americans in New York either. They found some comfort in Mount Vernon’s South Side, where many a Black from the South moved to get away from the Bronx or Brooklyn in the ’50 or ’60. Of course, there was still the elitism of a more established Black Mount Vernon community, of folks who looked and sounded like they were from New York.

My mother and father met at a juke-joint — what we would call a hole-in-the-wall club now. There, they hung out with other Blacks who recently migrated from North and South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Mississippi and other places further south than Washington, DC. They had mutual friends, folks a bit older than them. Matter of fact, folks around my age now in some cases. The Johnsons, the Farmers, folks with “names” like Lo, Ida Mae, Callie Mae, and so on. It made them feel more at home, made them see Mount Vernon’s South Side as an island in a sea of chaotic urban living. They met and became involved. I guess having shyness and awkwardness in common helped them develop their relationship. Within thirteen months of their first meeting at a bar, my mother had given birth to Darren.

By the time I was conceived, my mother and father were in a full-fledged relationship. They were living together, working their jobs at the Mount Vernon Hospital and the Federal Reserve Bank, raising my older brother. It sounds pretty good just thinking about it. Back then, even my father’s occasional weekend drinking was both normal and manageable. Despite the changing that were coming to their — and my eventual — world, they must’ve been hopeful, thinking about a future where they could work hard and provide for Darren, me and for each other. I can’t help but think that they must’ve been in love, that they saw themselves as two people from a different world making it in New York while making Mount Vernon their home.

My father wasn’t a great looking guy back then. He’s not particularly attractive now, although he’s in great shape for a sixty-eight-year-old. My mother was a healthy looking six-foot woman in her time. So it wasn’t likely physical attraction, or at least that alone, that led to their relationship and eventual marriage. It had to be that common bond, the practicalities of semi-urban living and working and raising a young child. It must’ve been an exciting time for them, likely the most exciting time of both their lives. It’s just that there needed to be something more and something less in their lives. The baggage from their growing up in the segregated South. Their inferiority complex around being migrants to the largest city in the country. My father’s alcoholic path. Their lack of post-high school education.

None of that mattered in the spring of ’69, though. It was their season of love. I was a result of that season. Their hopes and dreams, love and loss. I hope, at least for my own sake, that another season of love is in store for me, even if they both have long thought that their season of love ended with the ’60s.

Off and on over the past eight years, like the progressive I generally am, I’ve threatened to move to Canada if things in this country didn’t improve for all of us average citizens. My idle threat became more than that after Bush’s win in the ’04 election against Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), a win that shouldn’t have been, given Kerry’s credentials. After that, I actively pursued jobs in Canada, mostly academic positions at the University of Toronto or the University of British Columbia. But even with a doctorate, or maybe because I have one, it’s not as if there’s tons of unfilled jobs in Canada where they’re in need of someone with a Ph.D. in History whose worked in academia and in the nonprofit world on education reform and social justice issues. It’s not like there aren’t experienced Canadians who could fill those jobs. So I swallowed hard and hoped that the ’08 would bring change to a better president and better times.

We do have a better president, one whose entire campaign exemplified change. “Change you can believe in,” as a matter of fact. Now that we have President Obama, his emerging policies and his administration’s heavy level of activity on all front, we at least have half of my equation fulfilled. We don’t have better times, though. In fact, things are as bad for average Americans now as they were a quarter-century ago, when welfare became my mother’s last option to keep us off the streets of Mount Vernon, New York. Despite our economic struggles, our family is no where near that frightening scenario. But it’s also obvious that we may be in for a longer ride of financial stress than we could’ve anticipated a year or two ago. My question is, should we think about moving to Canada or somewhere else now?

Conventional wisdom — which isn’t wisdom, by the way, it’s acting on what other “smart” folks say — would say no, since this recession is a global one. Meaning that there’s a scarcity of quality jobs all over the world, not just in the US. That’s only part of the truth. The ability to obtain a job is a function of the combination of “whats” and “whos.” As in “what you know,” “what you bring to the table in terms of education and/or experience,” and as in “who you know.” What I know in general is enough to qualify me for many mid-level jobs, even ones outside of the nonprofit sector and the university world. What I bring to the table educationally and experientially is enough to qualify me for fairly senior jobs — or at least low-level senior management positions — at small colleges, some universities, and in the nonprofit world in general. Who I know, however, has always been a concern, even when the people I have come to know have written letters and served as references on my behalf. And that’s in the US. Would they be helpful in me finding a job in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, or even say, London or Paris.

That’s the rub, I suppose. If I were to look for work overseas, I would be in a truly global competition, one that someone whose talent is as overpriced (in this country, at least) as mine might have trouble winning. Combined with my lack of social networks outside of the US, there wouldn’t be anyone on the receiving end of my c.v. and cover letter who would feel compelled to do anything other than to file my packet with the rubbish. Or even worse, lose it in a pile that would serve as the annual winter festival bonfire at the end of the year.

Still, given the state of the American economy, our politics, our civility, our education, it’s still something to think about, check out, mull over, and actually do as things get worse before or until they get better. Vancouver’s weather is typical of the Pacific Northwest, and only a couple of hours from Seattle. On the other hand, I’d be 2,500 miles from relatives on the East Coast. Toronto’s a happening multicultural metropolis, with one in six Canadians living in its metropolitan area. But like much of Canada, it’s cold for long stretches of the year, and really is a truly warm city from May through September. London and Paris, New Zealand and other places have distances, language, climate, cultural and other barriers for this well-traveled-within-the-states individual to overcome. Much less my wife and son.

I’m not afraid of the possibility, though, and will keep my eyes open for an opportunity, if there is one to be had. One of the greatest myths that American perpetuate is that we are the greatest country — not only on Earth, but in the history of human existence. With the recent steep recession, the media types keep saying, “This is a land of opportunity. Everyone wants to come here.” At face value, the statement isn’t exactly incorrect. There’s a reason why 300 million people live in this country today, including about 200 million Whites. Let’s not get carried away, however. Even during the height of European immigration to the US, this time about 100 years ago, as a matter of fact, one in six immigrants left. It might have been a land of opportunity, but those immigrants who left obviously didn’t see it that way. Out of 33 million European immigrants who came to the US between 1870 and 1920, it meant that about six million flew the coop, so to speak. Roughly half of them went to other countries, including Mexico, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru.

We were even less hospitable for Asian immigration. Between the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and other quotas on Japanese immigration, many Chinese and Japanese went to other parts of Asia (including Singapore and Indonesia) and to Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and Argentina at the same time. Freed Blacks in the nineteenth century — not to mention escaping African slaves –and Black intellectuals in the twentieth left the US for enclaves in Toronto, London, Paris, Amsterdam, even Berlin. All of these groups, however small, saw the US as less a place where hard work and opportunity meant a successful life and more a place where they were being held back from achieving their dreams.

So not everyone’s coming here to work and stay, even when one accounts for undocumented (mostly Latino and especially Mexican) workers. Certainly those who are coming here to do more than wash and fold hotel linens, slaughter and render cows and pigs, and pick strawberries and plant pine trees aren’t staying for the long haul. The brain drain that drew Indian, Chinese, and African immigrants to the US after ’65 has slowed in many cases over the past two decades, especially in the first two cases. So much for the idea that everyone who comes to the US is welcome and that they too can enjoy the American Dream if they do come.

I’m not sure I want the American Dream as it stands today. I don’t want a huge house or a gas-guzzling SUV. I want a modest home with a hydrogen full cell powered automobile. I don’t want to have to work upwards of 100 hours a week to generate enough income to pay for my son to go to Harvard. I’d prefer working 35 or 40 hours a week, with state-sponsored health care and vacations, and my son to go to college for free. And I’m willing to pay 60 percent of my income in taxes to have that peace of mind. I want meaningful work that enables me to grow as a person even when I’m in my sixties. I don’t want to move from one dead-end job to another in pursuit of something that only existed for the majority of Americans between the end of World War II and the beginning of the OPEC crisis in ’73.

Wow, I guess I’m a socialist now. Last I checked, though, the US Constitution is a living document, and the Founding Fathers never intimated that it was a document for greedy capitalists or power-hungry communists or evangelizing Christians. It was meant to be flexible, not rigid. If those in power keep us from having that flexibility in our lives here in America, maybe I should really come up with a long-term strategy for living in a place that does provide that flexibility for its citizens and visitors.

A Facebook friend of mine recently commented in her status update that she was “amazed by just how long an impression can last. Human nature is interesting…” True that. Two years ago today was my last in-person interview for my manuscript Boy At The Window. Over the course of five years, I’d made a half-dozen trips to New York alone for interviews, not counting trips to visit folks and family in Georgia and Florida, California and other parts of the South, between ’02 and early March ’07. I interviewed people I liked, one person who was once my ultimate crush, and people I thought were mean-spirited and as unlikable as any humans I’ve met since my Mount Vernon days. To a person, they all commented about how much I smiled, or that I “had a great smile,” or I seemed “content and in my own world” during my middle school and high school years.

My smile. My smile? My smile! That’s funny on so many levels that I could write another book about the assumptions that we as Americans make about ourselves and about each other. One of those assumptions is that if someone isn’t walking around kvetching all of the time or looking like life has beaten the living daylights out of them — and they occasionally crack a smile — that things were generally all right. I knew I hid a lot with my face, eyes and mouth while I was in school. But if I took what my former classmates were saying about my smile to its logical conclusion, I’d have to say that I had the acting chops of Edward Norton. Maybe I should give an agent a call!

The character played by Brian Dennehy in the ’85 surprise classic Silverado — ranked by critics as one of the best modern-day Westerns — said, “No tellin’ what Paden’s gonna care about.” He was referring to Kevin Kline’s character, who seemed to walk around with a blank smile on his face. It was a smile of concealment, a smile that was meant to hide emotions and ideas that could get you hurt or even killed. The only time that smile left his face was when it was time to defend others. The reason Cobb could never tell what Paden would or wouldn’t care about was because his smile hid his fear, his love, his sense of self-preservation, his anger, and his sense of right and wrong.

More relevant and immediate to those of you who somehow haven’t seen this instant classic is the movie Finding Forrester. Rob Brown played a teenage character caught between two worlds. One was his world of the South Bronx, gritty and hard, one where options for success are few. Basketball, from the point of view of his friends and older brother (played by Busta Rhymes), was the character’s way out. The other world was a world created by his writing and, inadvertently, by his brain, providing a path for success that no one in his life, including loved ones, could imagine.

Brown’s character did what I actually did twenty-five years ago. He hid his talent, he hid his emotions, he hid his dreams and ideas. If it weren’t for his stumbling into an intervention on the part of Sean Connery’s character — not to mention his older brother in the end — Finding Forrester would be my story prior to ’85. Either way, Brown did the greatest job of holding his face as a permanent blank slate, as if unfazed by an atomic bomb blast. His eyes, though, were always a give away of emotions, from sadness to anger to sarcasm and laughter. He’s a great actor, even if few others in Hollywood or elsewhere recognize it.

My emotional—or rather, emotionless—story is a bit of Kline’s character and a bit of Brown’s character. I obvious did a good job, so good that the brainiacs that I went to school with hardly ever picked up on my facade. I don’t recall smiling that much during the Humanities years. I was deliberate with my facial expressions. I had a sarcastic “No shit!” look when I sniffed naivete or bullshit. I cracked a smile when others were in a cheerful or unhappy mood, either in admiration or to help them smile as well. If anyone had cared to notice, the only times I truly smiled were the times I laughed out loud, or the times I couldn’t help but act goofy, or when something I had heard on radio had momentarily put me in a good mood. Otherwise, the “smile” I had on my face was an almost perpetual facial expression, a smirk really by the time we’d reached eleventh grade.

It was my way of controlling and concealing my emotions. I wanted, needed them under control really. You could say that by the time I was a junior in high school that I’d gotten used to disappointment and the realities of abuse, poverty, an overpopulated family and an unrelenting sense that I didn’t belong to anything or anyone important other than my Christianity—and even that was beginning to wane. Yet I had and I hadn’t. My expectations of others was typically low, to the point where I trusted only a small circle of folks with the tiniest bits of information about my life, my hopes and dreams, my attractions and distractions. And if I expressed these outside of this circle, it’d be like someone had jumped me and knocked me to the ground, the rejection felt so great.

Of all people, it took my late AP American History teacher Harold Meltzer to begin the work of pulling out of me the real me, the fragile, delicate yet tough when and where it mattered me. The me that had given up on 616, Mount Vernon, high school, Humanities, and most of the people I went to school. The me whose hopes, dreams and talents were more expansive than I had ever dared to believe, at least up to that point. He began a conversation that would last for eighteen years, and only ended when Meltzer died in ’03. He began it by asking me, “How you’re doing Donnie?,” and didn’t allow me to get away with a bullshit answer. Meltzer was weird, eccentric, and other things that others suspect but won’t mention. But he was also caring, giving, bitter yet still sweet.

Even when he died at the all too young age of sixty-six, he was less apathetic than many of the people I interviewed for Boy At The Window. Even though I approached the project keeping an open mind about my former classmates, their apathy remains my lasting impression. To be fair, some of my ex-classmates have changed for the better. Many of those are on Facebook, sharing pieces of their lives. Still, it’s a shame to think that in an era of apathy and disinterest, that many of the folks I grew up around skew that scale, making the average kid from the ’80s look like an Obama volunteer by comparison.

It’s early March, and there’s not much positive to report on these days. Unemployment’s high and rising, and the ice caps are melting. It’s a great time to talk about something really serious, like music, for instance. I’ve often discussed how music has provided an emotional boost for me during the worst of times. This time is no exception. Except that with iPod and iTunes, I don’t have to just conjure up the music or wait for a few days to hear a song in rotation at a music station, like I did in the days before I owned a Walkman. I can span thirty years of music awareness, sometimes all at once, just by pressing play.

This does cause some dissonance, though, especially if I were to roll down the windows in our Honda Element. That’s likely because playing Elton John, Isley Brothers, Coldplay, Soundgarden, Eminem, Brenda Russell, Sam Cooke and Celine Dion in sequence would stop the average person in their tracks. And living in the DC area, I’ve gotten some weird looks out of pedestrians and other drivers with my music pouring out of the car (I really don’t have it that loud!).

So on a really warm first weekend in March, at least on the East Coast, I’ve decided to go in sequence to discuss some of my songs of early March over the years. These aren’t necessarily my favorite songs, at least not overall. But they do provide a sense, I think, of the changes I’ve gone through since I was nine years old.

1. “This Is It” – Kenny Loggins. After Michael Jackson’s frightful press conference in London this week, I should maybe refrain from mentioning this song. We can still wipe this one clean from the dethroned King of Pop’s stains, though. I first heard this song in March ’79 during my self-appointed exile from playing outside (after being grounded for six weeks over the holidays for running away from home). Its combination of jazz and pop rhythms, not to mention Michael McDonald on background vocals, is what attracted me to the songs, even though I didn’t know that at the time.

It sounded good, it reflected my mood, and it introduced me to “White music” in a way that wasn’t filtered by my mother, stepfather or by my neighbors. I had many adjustments to make. My mother’s second marriage to my idiot stepfather. My mother’s pregnancy, ending my monopoly on her time (it ended two years earlier, but the pregnancy confirmed it). This internal need to be academically on point. I became a somewhat serious learner for the first time.

2. “As” – Stevie Wonder. I’d been introduced to his all-time great Songs In The Key of Life through vinyl and radio for years by the time March ’82 rolled around. We all have, actually. I was five or six listening to this music at one of my mother’s parties or off the radio. I’ve only come to appreciate Wonder’s genius more as time has passed. But with the magic of my first true and real crush twenty-seven years ago, “As,” a song I’d only heard a few times before, became my theme song off and on for the next few months. Nine years later, March ’91, I borrowed Songs In The Key of Life from a Pitt friend whom I was attracted to at the time. “As” didn’t become my theme song for that crush. It reintroduced me to an album that I hope survives this age.

3. “Africa” – Toto. “Hmm,” I’m sure you’re wondering, why Toto, and why “Africa,” with all of its potential racial implications? Because the song’s about the lusts of people who in their attempts to stereotype a continent, they end up stereotyping themselves, part of an interesting theme in pop culture’s treatment of Africa in the ’80s, wouldn’t you say? That said, there’s some real context here that isn’t academic or theoretical. My first crush had ended, the end of ’82 and early ’83 left me and my family a shambles financially and otherwise. And the best music on at the time was early New Edition (gag me with a spoon), Rick Springfield, and The Time? Given my range of choices, it wasn’t hard to like Toto or “Africa.” I did, and I still do. It served as musical grist for my mental mill. It was a channeling of energies for the goal of academic excellence and remaining on an even keel at home, even as we fell into welfare poverty.

4. “Kyrie” – Mr Mister. It was the beginning of March ’86 that this not-so-great song by this not-so-great duo reached #1 on Billboard’s Top 40 for pop music. I liked the song for obvious reasons, at least to me. I could relate to the lyrics, as those last few years in my life had been pretty rough. While not completely reflected in my grades, I realized that if I wanted to go to college on a scholarship, I’d need to raise my game at least one more notch. “Kyrie” became my theme music for that.

If anyone cares to remember, most pop music on either side of the racial divide was about as serious as a five-year-old after drinking orange soda and eating a Snickers bar (I’m talking about me, not Noah – I would NEVER do that to my son ;)). So a pop song about a higher power watching over me through every step I’d take, well as a Christian without a country, I couldn’t ask for anything more. It helped that I actually liked the guitar riffs and could run to it.

5. “Piano In The Dark” – Brenda Russell. Part of being me is to be eclectic, which was why even I was surprised when I found myself liking this song. It was such a serious song during such silly times in music. I was a semester and a half into my Pitt years, and already I found my music tastes changing. The channeled anger from my crash and burn with crush # 2 that had sustained me for the first few weeks of the Spring had dissipated by early March ’88. With the warmer weather of that first Spring Break came also some sense of sweetness. I felt better enough about myself by then. Between Richard Marx, Michael Bolton, Michael Jackson (yeah, well, what can I say), Anita Baker, Salt ‘n Pepa, Kenny G, and others, I found myself beginning to find my self, my voice again. Some of that voice is contained in Russell’s “Piano In The Dark.”

6. “You Can’t Deny It” – Lisa Stansfield. By March ’90, with my first CD system (it was a boom box with high speed dubbing), I understood myself to be eclectic, and so did my friends. I no longer felt weird about the wide variety of music I liked, even when occasionally clowned about it. The ’90s finally had arrived, and with it came more and, in my opinion, better music to listen to and consume. Lisa Stansfield was the first “new” artist of the decade for me, and even though some of my female friends played her ad nauseum, I fell in love with this song because it was so fresh and different from much of the music from the late ’80s.

7. “Beautiful Day” – U2. I skipped over most of the ’90s because most of my musical discoveries in that decade didn’t occur in March. Plus, once I started grad school, I was constantly inundated with different kinds of music. By the end of the decade, I was so consumed with work and writing and a new marriage that I didn’t pay as much attention to music as I should. I knew full well that U2 had released a new album in October ’00. But I didn’t snap up the new CD, wasn’t listening much to the radio, and was working upwards of 120 hours a week while finding a new job. Luckily I “discovered” “Beautiful Day” before it was too late to enjoy it.

It reminded me of all of the hopes and dreams of my past, my past crushes, my heartbreak and my deepest joys. It reminded me to remain hopeful about the future, even if things do look bleak at the moment. God knows we need that more than anything right now.

It’s “Women’s History Month,” where we’ll hear about the struggles of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug and Naomi Wolf. Or about the highlights like the 19th Amendment, the Rosie the Riveter days of World War II and the founding of the National Organization of Women in ’66. Or of landmark Supreme Court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) — which ruled the 1879 Connecticut law prohibiting hormonal contraception usage unconstitutional and proclaimed that the US Constitution did protect our right to privacy — and Roe v. Wade. That’s all fine and dandy. But from where I sit, there remain many tensions within American feminism and in everyday relations between women and men and women that are unresolved and are usually left unspoken even during Women’s History Month.

The main refrain from Alana Davis’ ’97-’98 hit song “32 Flavors” 32 Flavors.m4a (a cover version, yes, but she did make it her own) includes the words “I am what I am.” The song serves as a reminder that women aren’t the equivalent of cookie dough cut into even circles by cookie dough machines at a Pillsbury plant in Minnesota. Yet leaders of the feminism movement lean toward the cookie cutter methodology of describing the roles, rights, and relations of women in our still sexist nation. It makes me cringe whenever I hear these feminists speak of “women” in the universal. Even with the emergence of third wave feminism in the ’80s and ’90s, of people such as Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Trishala Deb, bell hooks and numerous others, when feminists in this country say “women,” most of the time they’re only referring to White women.

Even more to the point, they’re really talking about professional, middle class White women with at least a four-year college education at a liberal arts or state institution. Given the middle class and affluent backgrounds of these folks, when they discuss things like “women” facing a glass ceiling in politics or in corporate America, or how “women” are struggling with their relatively new roles as caregiver and primary breadwinner, they’re really talking about their friends. It’s not as if Black or Latino or Asian women haven’t been struggling with these issues and their dual roles for decades. It’s not as if poor and rural White women haven’t faced aspects of these bread and butter issues off and on since the 1920s. But when presented at conferences or in the media, whether it be Nadine Strossen or everyday commentators on MSNBC or in the New York Times, the universal “women” remains in vogue. It’s drives me nuts, because it doesn’t represent most of the “women” I’ve known in my life. “Thirty-two flavors and then some” isn’t typically represented by their faces and voices.

What also drives me nuts in our gender discourse are double-standards that are also like double-edged swords. We still live in a world where men — regardless of race, class or sexual orientation — are expected to treat “women” as “ladies,” a very Victorian idea indeed. Of course, this applies to everyday practices like holding doors open for women, letting a woman take your seat on a train or bus, allowing a woman to exit an elevator or train before you move to do so yourself.

These ideas are also applied and implied in dating and in marriage. In these scenarios, men are expected to be assertive but not aggressive, or, at least, most of the time, assertive and on occasion aggressive. Preferably in the bedroom. Men are expected to be vulnerable but not expected to be emotional, or at least, it’s okay to express your full range of emotions sometimes.

While much of this is ambiguous, some of this isn’t at all. Men are still expected to be the primary breadwinners, to be bad at parenting and to be decent and dumb fathers that learn to be pretty good by the time their kids are in college. Men are expected to deal with all of the big family issues like finances and bills, getting the car fixed, retirement accounts and life insurance, and mowing the lawn, while women do all of the cooking and cleaning and child rearing. At least, that’s what even feminists in the media eye often imply. I consider myself a feminist, a good father and at least a decent husband, and I still find all of this confusing. Luckily I tend to treat my wife as an equal, for no other reason than I can’t do it all, that I’m hardly perfect.

Which leads me to that other thing that annoys me to no end. When women — and this one really is universal in our culture — describe themselves with adjectives like “strong,” “assertive,” “aggressive,” “bitch,” “sensual,” “sexy,” and so many others. In my experience, women who say these words often don’t demonstrate the meaning of these words in their lives. The women I known who are such don’t go around saying these things about themselves. Some of the strongest women I’ve known in my life demonstrated their strength in their actions, not by describing how they would like to be in a casual conversation about it. Could you imagine any man describing themselves with the adjectives “strong” and “assertive.” Or for that matter, “masculine yet effete” or “in touch with my feminine side?” And all as part of an everyday adult conversation, casual or political? In this case, action and activism that demonstrates all of this is more important than asserting these adjectives over a glass of red wine.

One last point. If the goal of all branches of feminism is to level the playing field for all women, to speak truth to power, to overturn patriarchy — or at least to separate patriarchal wheat from chaff — then it should also respect the rights of women whose views of gender relations and feminism may not fit with the full program. From Rihanna and Chris Brown to the “Octo-Mom,” commentators and bloggers have gone overboard with their criticisms of men and women who don’t fall in line with the feminist mystique. In both cases, we don’t or can’t know the full story. As someone whose mother was abused by her second husband and was abused as well, I understand the sense of anger and outrage expressed in the blogosphere. As someone who spent his teenage years helping my mother take care of her four youngest children — ages between one week and five years old at one point — you have to shake your head at someone who doesn’t understand why women from every stripe fought for Griswold and Roe.

But people are more complicated than feminist philosophy, and circumstances are never as easily sorted in real life as they are by Nancy Grace or Campbell Brown. If we all truly believe that women are “32 flavors and then some,” then we should stop with the rabid knee-jerk responses to what comes out of our popular culture or political discourse. We should be truly universal when talking about the contributions of all women — and a few good men, I guess — to expanding and preserving the rights of women in this country and around the world. We should recognize that sexism in this country isn’t just practiced by men, and that feminism itself isn’t completely innocent in preserving aspects of American sexism. All that said, I hope that I’ll continue to meet women who are strong, assertive, aggressive, and even sexy, but hopefully without them saying so.