Kaylara
April 5th, 2001, 08:14 PM
Found at:
http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?f=/stories/20010314/499645.html
The sexuality of motherhood
Patricia Pearson
National Post
I was at the Children's Museum in Toronto with thousands of highly excited toddlers streaking by me in every direction like a huge colony of snow-suited ants, when at some point, feeling harried and claustrophobic, I looked up and noticed a dad checking me out.
No way! He can't be looking at me, can he? I'm a mom! What's he looking at, is there something on my shirt? An unusually large smear of applesauce or snot? Because he can't be looking at me. I. Am. A. Mom. There must be Scotch Tape on my pants.
Five years ago, I might have registered his gaze as admiring or desirous or lustful, and it wouldn't have been rocket science. But here in the altered state of consciousness called motherhood, male attention inspires a slow-motion double take. I think it has to do with defining myself in the eyes of my children. My face could be a boiled ham, as far as they're concerned. Therefore, wondering if I look sexy is irrelevant, not to mention hopeless, and entirely beside the point.
My sexuality has gone AWOL. I cannot find it under the couch with the stray puzzle pieces and empty formula bottles. I cannot find it in the bathtub amongst the spouting whales and duckies. It isn't in the bedroom, which is knee-deep in Barbie shoes and crackers. Sometimes I wonder: Is my sexuality behind the garden gate in my toddler's lift-the-flap book? No, but there's Spot and Tom, the green alligator, playing ball, yay! Is it in the refrigerator? No, but there are some crinkly grapes in there ...
Surprisingly, I am married. This used to have a romantic connotation. I keep assuring myself, as my husband does, that all will be romantic again just as soon as we can reach for each other in a bed and not bump into two children, a Groovy Doll, the TV remote, our dog, a pacifier and Goodnight Moon.
Wishing to be guaranteed of this eventuality, I recently attended a conference at York University on motherhood, sex and sexuality. The conference was organized by ARM, the Association for Research on Mothering, together with the Centre for Feminist Research. Much of the conversation centred on society's discomfort with maternal sexuality, but that has actually grown more ambivalent of late. If we used to divide neatly into madonnas and whores and crones and virgins, what of the pop star Madonna, sauntering across the Miami sand looking gorgeous in her forties with two children in tow?
She rather confounds the categories. But she works at it. Women are generally becoming mothers later now, in their thirties, when their sexual ambitions have played out a bit, seeds have been sown, blocks have been run around. We were whores, so to speak, and now too many of us are behaving like madonnas with chronic fatigue syndrome.
There's something the matter with that, which has to do with yielding to the loss of sexual vitality without a fight, as if it doesn't matter as much as it does. But maybe one of the reasons we yield to the shift from sexy hottie to frumpy hen is that we derive a great deal of sensual nourishment from our small children.
This subject was explored rather intriguingly by Pamela Courtney Hall, a professor at UBC. She proposed that many parents derive an erotic pleasure from their children that calls for a new vocabulary of sexuality or eros, for it isn't sexual in the orthodox sense, but deeply intimate, and physically sustaining.
We declare childcare to be an "eros-neutral domain," Courtney Hall said, "but caregivers report connections to their children that are rapturous ... and rooted in intimate bodily contact." They are not sexual, however, not dirty and self-pleasuring, not pedophiliac. "The language we have inherited," she noted, "is inadequate to the lived experience."
Thus, mothers who unexpectedly find breastfeeding to be sensually enthralling are suspected of sexual abuse, while mothers who find their children's bodies beguiling, like the photographer Sally Mann, are accused of taking pornographic pictures.
This same point, about the unspoken "tender-erotic" connection between parents and children, as Courtney Hall calls it, is raised in a new book by American writer Noelle Oxenhandler, The Eros of Parenthood. Oxenhandler tries to promote an invisible but uncrossable line between parental passion and pedophiliac lust, sensual joy and sexual exploitation. It's tricky and fraught, like playing with a conceptual hand grenade. I think most parents intuitively understand what's being spoken of without needing a language that can be so dangerously appropriated.
A child's bodily integrity is not at stake in a mother's embrace, but that doesn't mean that hugging your daughter is the same as hugging a friend. It is more intense and lovely and delicious. It also ends -- at about the point when daughters make mothers walk five paces behind them in public so as not to be embarrassed in front of their friends.
Then it is probably time for a mid-life crisis. Not the best path to tread, this celebration of the tender-erotic. Better -- surely? -- to insist upon our sexual vibrancy as women all along, to allow ourselves to be viewed as Madonna rather than as madonnas, as, if anything, more beautiful because of motherhood. I deserve to recognize a man's gaze in a crowded kid's museum for what it is, admiring, and take some sustenance from that.
Kaylara
http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?f=/stories/20010314/499645.html
The sexuality of motherhood
Patricia Pearson
National Post
I was at the Children's Museum in Toronto with thousands of highly excited toddlers streaking by me in every direction like a huge colony of snow-suited ants, when at some point, feeling harried and claustrophobic, I looked up and noticed a dad checking me out.
No way! He can't be looking at me, can he? I'm a mom! What's he looking at, is there something on my shirt? An unusually large smear of applesauce or snot? Because he can't be looking at me. I. Am. A. Mom. There must be Scotch Tape on my pants.
Five years ago, I might have registered his gaze as admiring or desirous or lustful, and it wouldn't have been rocket science. But here in the altered state of consciousness called motherhood, male attention inspires a slow-motion double take. I think it has to do with defining myself in the eyes of my children. My face could be a boiled ham, as far as they're concerned. Therefore, wondering if I look sexy is irrelevant, not to mention hopeless, and entirely beside the point.
My sexuality has gone AWOL. I cannot find it under the couch with the stray puzzle pieces and empty formula bottles. I cannot find it in the bathtub amongst the spouting whales and duckies. It isn't in the bedroom, which is knee-deep in Barbie shoes and crackers. Sometimes I wonder: Is my sexuality behind the garden gate in my toddler's lift-the-flap book? No, but there's Spot and Tom, the green alligator, playing ball, yay! Is it in the refrigerator? No, but there are some crinkly grapes in there ...
Surprisingly, I am married. This used to have a romantic connotation. I keep assuring myself, as my husband does, that all will be romantic again just as soon as we can reach for each other in a bed and not bump into two children, a Groovy Doll, the TV remote, our dog, a pacifier and Goodnight Moon.
Wishing to be guaranteed of this eventuality, I recently attended a conference at York University on motherhood, sex and sexuality. The conference was organized by ARM, the Association for Research on Mothering, together with the Centre for Feminist Research. Much of the conversation centred on society's discomfort with maternal sexuality, but that has actually grown more ambivalent of late. If we used to divide neatly into madonnas and whores and crones and virgins, what of the pop star Madonna, sauntering across the Miami sand looking gorgeous in her forties with two children in tow?
She rather confounds the categories. But she works at it. Women are generally becoming mothers later now, in their thirties, when their sexual ambitions have played out a bit, seeds have been sown, blocks have been run around. We were whores, so to speak, and now too many of us are behaving like madonnas with chronic fatigue syndrome.
There's something the matter with that, which has to do with yielding to the loss of sexual vitality without a fight, as if it doesn't matter as much as it does. But maybe one of the reasons we yield to the shift from sexy hottie to frumpy hen is that we derive a great deal of sensual nourishment from our small children.
This subject was explored rather intriguingly by Pamela Courtney Hall, a professor at UBC. She proposed that many parents derive an erotic pleasure from their children that calls for a new vocabulary of sexuality or eros, for it isn't sexual in the orthodox sense, but deeply intimate, and physically sustaining.
We declare childcare to be an "eros-neutral domain," Courtney Hall said, "but caregivers report connections to their children that are rapturous ... and rooted in intimate bodily contact." They are not sexual, however, not dirty and self-pleasuring, not pedophiliac. "The language we have inherited," she noted, "is inadequate to the lived experience."
Thus, mothers who unexpectedly find breastfeeding to be sensually enthralling are suspected of sexual abuse, while mothers who find their children's bodies beguiling, like the photographer Sally Mann, are accused of taking pornographic pictures.
This same point, about the unspoken "tender-erotic" connection between parents and children, as Courtney Hall calls it, is raised in a new book by American writer Noelle Oxenhandler, The Eros of Parenthood. Oxenhandler tries to promote an invisible but uncrossable line between parental passion and pedophiliac lust, sensual joy and sexual exploitation. It's tricky and fraught, like playing with a conceptual hand grenade. I think most parents intuitively understand what's being spoken of without needing a language that can be so dangerously appropriated.
A child's bodily integrity is not at stake in a mother's embrace, but that doesn't mean that hugging your daughter is the same as hugging a friend. It is more intense and lovely and delicious. It also ends -- at about the point when daughters make mothers walk five paces behind them in public so as not to be embarrassed in front of their friends.
Then it is probably time for a mid-life crisis. Not the best path to tread, this celebration of the tender-erotic. Better -- surely? -- to insist upon our sexual vibrancy as women all along, to allow ourselves to be viewed as Madonna rather than as madonnas, as, if anything, more beautiful because of motherhood. I deserve to recognize a man's gaze in a crowded kid's museum for what it is, admiring, and take some sustenance from that.
Kaylara