Nicole Sprinkle, guest blogging for the Motherlode section of the New York Times on "Tarring Men ":
Recently, I was in a big child care bind. My daughter began a preschool that ends at 3:30, and my husband and I both work until six. Finding a sitter for just 2 1/2 hours five days a week was tough. Most qualified nannies wanted full-time work. That left us with a relatively small pool of candidates made up mostly of students with flexible schedules who were willing to get any money they could in between classes, and one stay-at home mother with a 4-year-old looking for a little extra spending money. She seemed like the no-brainer choice. Local. Mother. Good references.
Nicole goes on to describe how the best candidate for the job was a young man with significant babysitting experience and outstanding referneces. The problem? He unfortunately has a penis, therefore he cannot be trusted. I will give her credit for acknowledging her bias but I still call bullshit on her weak defense of gender based discrimination. It is her right to hire who she wants, but I'm not gonna excuse her bigotry simply because she acknowledges it. Try transcending and then we can talk.
To illustrate a point, this prefaces the blog post and was likely written by Lisa Belkin, who ran Nicole's blog entry in her spot:
A lone man is sitting on a bench at the playground, watching the children on the swings? Your reaction?
That is Nicole Sprinkle’s as well. And in a guest post today she explores the assumptions so many of us make about men and children, conceding that she has an intellectual solution, but not an emotional one.
My reaction to seeing a man sitting on a bench near a playground? Umm, maybe one of the kids is his? Maybe he lost a child and seeing children play warms his heart? Maybe he is on his lunch break? Maybe he just likes the park?
Obviously, we are supposed to assume the man is a sexual predator and be afraid, afraid and very afraid. Hmmm.
For those who don't know, I was drugged and raped by a woman when I was 19 and was involved with some abusive women in relationships that followed that experience. I think that as a result of my personal experiences, I could easily justify projecting a sexist, bigoted and ugly knee-jerk reaction to any woman I see around my male child. Trust is an issue for me and one that I admit freely. There is a difference between admitting to struggling with trauma related trust issues and outright defending bigotry.
I have to say that the sexism running rampant in several of the comments attached to the blog entry do not sit well with me.
This one in particular got my ire up:
"C'mon, now. I don't care what your rationales may be; it is always a crap shoot whether or not children will be safe when left in the care of men-even their own fathers. Need I remind women everywhere that men are NOT women, either in their sex drives or in their bonding capabilities?"
Guess what? I refuse, despite my own personal experiences, to be a bigot. I simply refuse to give into my fears and mistrust, which would be a weak justification for committing employment discrimination, fostering sexism and promoting bigotry. I don't need a guest blog spot from the NYT to make excuses because I refuse to generalize based on gender, unlike many of the commenters in that thread who share the gender of my own rapist.
It is always fascinating how easy it is for some individuals to excuse ugliness when they happen to share the same demographic. Fortunately, many commenters took Nicole and some of the other commenters to task for their justification of bigotry based employment discrimation.
April at ethecofem summed the whole thing up nicely here :
"Nicole Sprinkle, a guest poster on the New York Times parenthood blog, used an entire article to relay a story about how she discriminated against a young man for being a male."
What she said.