From Nicole:

This week marked a big Role/Reboot milestone: Our first full-time employees!  Since the site went up in January, we’ve been keeping a dirty little secret.  Behind the scenes we are a surprisingly small and scrappy bunch, each with competing jobs, roles and responsibilities in our lives. I’m proud we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve got people working on Role/Reboot every day, and I’m grateful for the renewed excitement it has brought to our work.  As we grow, we won’t lose sight of what is important about this organization.  We’re telling real stories about people’s lives, and what happens when deeply socialized gender roles collide with the realities of men and women’s lives.  We’re talking about the challenges people face, how they’re adjusting, and how role rebooting can be tense, but ultimately very liberating.  We want to be cheerleaders for role rebooters everywhere, advocating for and supporting them, and generally making the world better for folks who are bucking tradition and forging their own paths. We’re so happy to have two more allies.

Without further ado, I proudly introduce Role/Reboot’s own Melissa Thompson and Liza Roisman.

A note from Melissa:

As a member of the generation of women who were told we could be whatever we wanted and since I was always being led by my parents to set my sights high, it took me some time to realize that my experience was novel. This was not the world my mother had grown up in, and the feeling that I had every choice in the world was not something that resonates with everyone. I didn’t even realize how lucky I was until I was in my mid-20s. Through various conversations with my friends, both male and female, I have come to realize we’re really forging new ground. Men and women today don’t have a set path and we’re all trying to figure out how this all works.

As a woman who has now reached her mid-20s (nearly late 20s, but I will NOT admit that yet) I can say that I’m certainly conflicted about my goals. I’ve pursued higher education (B.A., M.A., most of a Ph.D.) for the majority of my young adulthood. This pursuit has taken up most of my time. I’ve been in and out of serious relationships, but allowed pursing my career goals to take up most of my energy. Never thinking I was someone who wanted children, thanks to the help of my good friend’s 5-year-old son I’ve now come to realize all the benefits that kids have to offer. I’ve started feeling those conflicting pressures that often come to people in their 20s and 30s: how much emphasis do I place on a career? Have a waited too long to worry about my personal goals? How will I ever sort out working and having kids? How come I haven’t started a retirement fund? Am I going to have to live in crappy rental housing for the rest of my life? My conversations with friends and colleagues tell me I’m not alone in these anxieties.

Admittedly, I’m somewhat obsessed with popular culture. Embarrassing confession time: I could lead a discussion group about pretty much everything in Bravo’s lineup. The day I met Brad Womack in a bar in Austin I almost passed out from excitement. My friends ask me when they hear a tabloid celebrity story to see if I know about it and then use this to judge whether it’s a legit story. These facts admitted, I have to point out that I also spend a lot of time thinking about more “serious” issues and what it means to exist in our society. This is where my position at Role/Reboot comes into play. I’m excited to blend my various interests by writing about issues that affect men and women today. How we’re all rebooting ideas about gender roles, workplaces, relationships, life timelines, and personal fulfillment gives me more than enough material to tackle daily.

-Melissa, Content and Communications Manager

 

A note from Liza:

Let me start off by saying that my biography is probably what you expect from the feminist blogosphere. I’m white and middle class, I grew up in the suburbs, and I’m majoring in Women’s Studies at a Women’s College. No surprises there. Given that I come from the same background as most other people who are deemed authorities on feminism, I approach my role as a blogger cautiously: as a reader, the last thing you need is another pasty academic telling you what to think. Additionally, in order to be useful, any discussion of gender must be intersectional: racism, ableism, classism, cissexism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression are feminist issues, and any commentary about gender would be remiss not to address how gender interacts with other axes of oppression and privilege. Although my personal experience is limited, I promise to do my best to write responsibly; I hope to write about topics you find relevant, to hopefully cover new ground, and to do so in a manner respectful to people who know more about the topics at hand than I do.

However, I’m excited about blogging for Role/Reboot in part because I think I have some unique insights of my own. As somebody who identifies outside the gender binary, I have an acute awareness of just how many aspects of society hinge on gender. I am not a woman, and yet one does not have to be for patriarchy to leave its mark. We live in a society (at least in mainstream U.S. culture) in which complex and rigid gender roles are coercively assigned to children from birth, and are difficult to defy afterward. We live in a society that punishes boys for acting like girls, and girls for acting like boys (although also for acting like girls); that actively bolsters a sense of animosity between genders, and of a “battle of the sexes”; and then ponders why men and women are so different after all. We live in a society in which young girls are told they can be anything they want, although they can plainly see how false, or at least limited, that statement really is. We live in a society invested in the collective fiction that men and women are now equal, but that subordinates women at every turn. It is impossible to emerge unscathed.

And yet, the whole picture is not quite so grim. People, with varying amounts of activist intent, role reboot and fight against this system daily, and often make great progress. Gender roles, when consensually taken on, provide a sense of meaning and community for many people. And as much as I may be inclined to view the whole business with a detached skepticism, the reality is far more complex.

Thus, I’m excited, in the coming months at Role/Reboot, to engage with the insights and questions and conversations already happening among people of all genders and all walks of life. As I share my thoughts with you, I hope strongly that you’ll do the same. As other Role/Reboot contributors have stated, this blog is an ongoing conversation, and I invite you to take part. If college has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t need to look to Wollstonecraft or Friedan to learn about what gender means in society: you need only turn on the television, or radio, or computer. Gender is everywhere, and the most interesting conversations are the ones that are already happening.

-Liza, Online Organizing Intern