Karen Brody | Birth Activist

April 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Karen Brody | Author of Birth [18:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I talked with Karen Brody about her successful play and brand new book BIRTH. Fascinating discussion about a topic that people don’t broach often enough! More from Karen Brody’s website:

Hailed “The Vagina Monologues for birth” by renowned women’s health expert Dr. Christiane Northrup, Birth is a documentary-style play based on over one hundred interviews playwright Karen Brody conducted with mothers across America. It tells the true birth stories of eight women painting an intimate portrait of how low-risk, educated women are giving birth today.

Since 2006 the play been performed around the world as part of BOLD, a global movement using the Arts to inspire communities to improve childbirth choices and put mothers at the center of their birth experiences.

This special edition of the book includes the entire play, playwright’s introduction and reflections,and the impact the play has had on BOLD communities. It also includes a foreword by Christiane Northrup, MD, FACOG, author of The Wisdom of Menopause, Mother-Daughter Wisdom, and Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Health, Medicine, Politics, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Karen Brody | Live on Sound Authors

March 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! My next guest on the show today is birth activist Karen Brody. Her latest book called Birth is based on her play and it deals with all sorts of issues with being born. Welcome to the show Karen Brody.

Karen Brody: Thanks so much, happy to be here.

Dr. Kent: So tell me a little bit about this whole movement that you’ve got.

Karen Brody: Well I wrote a play about birth in America because I thought I noticed a lot of low risk pregnant women were going in the hospital and coming out having what I would term bad birth experiences. They suddenly went from low risk to high risk and there didn’t seem to be any clear reason. So I interviewed over 100 women and afterwards I thought I’d write a book. I ended up writing a play and then I wrote the book. What came out of the play was a movement of people in their communities who also saw this happening in maternity care where there weren’t satisfactory birth options for women in communities and people felt that we needed to raise awareness and money for better birth options for mothers and that’s what came out of my play was a movement called Bold and its an organization that is a theater for social change, using my play as a catalyst in communities. The book is not only the play but its also stories from the Bold Movement, really understanding what people in their communities are doing to make maternity be more mother friendly.

Dr. Kent: For those that aren’t as familiar with the issues you’re talking about, tell us the issues surrounding birth these days.

Karen Brody: Well I think that most people when a woman gets pregnant they just ask them after the birth how’s the baby, the question I wanted to ask is how’s the mother? When you start to ask that question, you start to find that today in childbirth there’s over, if you look at statistics alone, over 30 percent cesarean rate and many of those cesareans are not necessary. You hear the stories to that and you know just looking at the statistics alone you see that the world health organization says for an industrialized country a 16% or less cesarean rate is what they deem appropriate. To have something over 30% we know we have a crisis.

There’s a problem; most women are going into the hospital and while drugs are wonderful when used properly, unfortunately women get into the hospital and they’re on a clock; meaning within 12 hours if you don’t have the baby, they start using drugs and usually way before 12 hours; they want you to have the baby in less than 12 hours. So there’s a crisis in maternity care today. There’s also just the general philosophy in the United States. If you look at other countries, it’s very clear in England, they say immediately we use midwives because they’re cheaper and out comes our excellent bid for low risk pregnancies. The US doesn’t use that model of care that is more in view with those models of care where low risk women should be getting midwives and women who are higher risk should be getting obstetricians who are the trained surgeons, the people who you want when your high risk and there are women who are high risk.

Dr. Kent: You must discover this in your work in this genre but people must always go back to their own birth so now of course I want to tell the story that my mother when she had me she was in labor for more than 24 hours and I had a big head and they had to pull me out and I think I was on my face instead of my back and all sorts of mishaps. Every birth is different, right?

Karen Brody: Absolutely every birth is different. I think we have to the model now unfortunately is birth is an illness and its treated that way in the US where if we saw birth as normal I think it would revolutionize how we treat maternity care and the mothers having the babies, but yes, every story is different and there are many factors that go into a woman’s birth story.

Dr. Kent: How did you get into this field?

Karen Brody: Surprisingly I had two kids! I actually never thought I’d write about maternity care but I was really astounded after I had my first son. I had him with midwives and had him at home, not because I knew much about birth I just instinctively felt I didn’t want to medicalize my birth. I didn’t know anything about the politics of birth but I found after I had my son I had a wonderful supportive compassionate birth experience and then I went to the playground with both my sons as they were getting older and I heard horror stories from women, traumatic stories which I’m really happy to hear now just this past year in 2008 The Wall Street Journal had a piece about birth trauma and motherhood.

You wouldn’t have seen that when I wrote my play, now you’re starting to see people saying actually due to medical intervention there are a significant number of women experiencing birth trauma. I heard it again and again in the trenches with mothers on the playground and I thought something is wrong. These are intelligent women, these are women who are educated and have access to good options. They should have access to good options. They have the money it takes empowering child birth class or whatever it is and yes, you’re hearing some horrible stories and its too many women I thought had these stories so I wanted to write about it.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a hot political topic talking about mother’s rights in situations of rape or with talk about abortion and the rights of the mother versus the rights of the child. It seems like its been an issue since the day the world started.

Karen Brody: Well reproductive rights absolutely has been, unfortunately for some reason childbirth doesn’t get up there in ranking. Everyone will go rally Washington on abortion issues but whose rallying Obama and Washington right now about childbirth? There’s a big push for midwives. They are finally doing a really wonderful job at mobilizing people to start speaking out and we’ve got to start changing the model of care of how we treat maternity care but for the most part reproductive rights have been big buzzwords, but childbirth doesn’t rank up there.

Dr. Kent: Huh; what’s your goal with your company, which is Bold Action?

Karen Brody: The boldaction.org and the goal I mentioned is really to mobilize communities so that they will take action and educate their community members about maternity care and to tell the truth. We have to start telling the truth about the care so our cornerstones are education, truth and action. Do we really want people to start figuring out, learning what is happening today, and I in childbirth through my play the reason I didn’t initially write a book is because I felt who’s going to read it? Maybe a few birth activists would read it but I wanted to get these ideas out to a more mainstream audience and also wanted to take a different medium like theater which is much less threatening. My grandmother wouldn’t pick up a book about the childbirth crisis but she would go to the theater and see a play on birth if her granddaughter said hey come with me and that’s been a transformative experience for many people because story telling has a long history of people retaining that information and taking it with them. Stories can live on in people more so than statistics.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the success of the play, the whole process of putting this on and then also about your work with women’s groups around the world.

Karen Brody: Well the play has sort of an organic following, meaning I wrote the play and it initially had been reading the play in Washington DC where I had written it and really didn’t tell many people about the first reading and that night it was a very cold winter night in December over 100 people showed up to a space that seated 30-35 people. That showed me and that was without I mean there was no marketing or publicity; it was word of mouth, with the internet people can send an email saying hey why don’t you come?

Mothers, fathers, packed into a theater where we did a reading of the play, babies in swings, everything. In there really because they felt passionate about this; finally somebody’s written about this, finally something creative like a play is showing the truth about maternity care. So from there it really just took off because again the interest in it is unbelievable in terms of studying information and I started getting emails from all over the US at first saying that we want to do this in our community.

People started bringing it to their communities about six productions happened initially the first year and the second year I decided to start an organization called Bold; boldaction.org and that organization was from then on people did it under the auspices of bold which is to raise money and awareness about maternity care. Kind of what V-day does with the vagina monologues, it’s very similar. That’s the mission and from then on we had over 100 performances of the play and raised over $150,000 in the last couple of years.

Dr. Kent: Just flipping through the book it’s a lot about conversations, a lot about people and actual stories, how do you feel working within that medium?

Karen Brody: The book is eight stories. I did pick eight women who I had interviewed out of these 118 women total. So eight women I thought were typical of what’s happening in childbirth. I chose their stories with a little creative license to make it more for the stage. That’s the play; the play is these women telling their stories. The stories range from a woman who has a planned c-section to a woman who doesn’t want any drugs in the hospital and has a range of stories.

Dr. Kent: It’s such a fascinating topic. You list on your website among many other things one woman dies every minute worldwide in pregnancy and childbirth related causes and it’s something we don’t often think about. We heard a lot in elementary school talking about the old west but we don’t think about it happening these days.

Karen Brody: We have to be careful about those types of statistics because those types of statistics often scare women about childbirth. Its not risky, childbirth the problem with those statistics and everyone says oh when I have my baby, here’s this low risk woman, the likelihood you’re going to die is very low and if you go to the hospital the likelihood you have interventions and not a good experience is high because of the intervention medically. So people have to be aware. Women were dying in childbirth during the frontier days because there weren’t adequate supplies; there weren’t all these things that women are still dying of in third world countries. That’s why the statistic was so high.

Dr. Kent: So how about this in conclusion my father is a developmental pediatrician and deals with a lot of kids after birth, so I don’t know a whole lot about the birthing process but I do know he said that there’s certain things that happen the more children that women have and I recall in working in the middle east a couple of my young students said oh yeah I have 20 siblings or 15 siblings. Around the world there’s a big difference between having two or three kids than 20 or 25.

Karen Brody: That’s not really the point of my book but that is an issue and certainly I think in the US you’ve got to think of the 30% or higher cesarean rate; to have major abdominal surgery three times or more is extremely risky for women. The more surgeries you have the higher risk you become and its very serious for women to be having two, three, four cesareans and that’s what’s happening in this country because we have something called VBAC, vaginal birth after cesarean that is being denied to women in hospitals today, not every hospital, but the American College of Gynecologists and Hospitals put out guidelines that made it very hard for hospitals to adhere to those guidelines and therefore their not allowing women who had one cesarean to have a vaginal birth the second time.

We’re more or less forcing women to have major abdominal surgery if they want more than one child if the first one was cesarean. So if women want three children, they need three surgeries. We’ve got to think about that. That is a HUGE cost to women; or you just got to stop having babies. I mean it’s no joke it really isn’t and I think people who see the statistics and that’s why I wrote the play because you see 30% over 30%, no you want to hear the stories of how women are really being treated in maternity care and through that you see what needs to change.

Dr. Kent: Give me a sound byte about your work and I know we can find out more at boldaction.org. Tell me more.

Karen Brody: My work is the play and it started a global movement to make maternity care mother friendly so there are more communities that want to be involved and now we do red tents which is such an inspiration to many communities that we were finally telling women’s birth stories that the communities wanted to tell their own birth stories. So women are gathering all over the world to have gold-red tents and tell their birth stories.

Dr. Kent: It’s a beautiful book, it’s called Birth by Karen Brody and it’s available across the web or in the stores. Of course we should check out boldaction.org and go see a play nearby. Thank you so much for chatting with me Karen Brody.

Karen Brody: Thank you

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is a musician. He has a wonderful sound; sometimes strings, sometimes electronics. His name is Dan Goldman and I’m going to play a short little bit of his music before we talk to him live about it. This is a song called LeMetro. I’m sure I slaughtered that French pronunciation but this is a song by Dan Goldman.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Health, Medicine, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Sharon Waxman | Live on Sound Authors

February 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! I’ve got four great author guests on the show today. My first guest will be award winning journalist Sharon Waxman. She’ll be speaking to us about her latest book called Loot: The Battle over stolen treasures of the ancient world and later on in the show we’ll talk to Jocelyn Crowley, who has a book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America and there’s an author called Karen Brody and her latest book is called Birth and at the end of the show, we’ll speak to musician Dan Goldman who has truly gorgeous songs. But my first guest, it’s my special honor to welcome Sharon Waxman. She’s written a wonderful book called Loot: The battle over the stolen treasures of the ancient world. Beautiful inside and out this book. Welcome to the show Sharon Waxman.

Sharon Waxman: Hi, thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about how this book started for you.

Sharon Waxman: Oh this book well you know I’m actually better known to my readers as someone who’s written about Hollywood a lot in the past decades plus, but before that I was a foreign correspondent for about ten years and for particularly interested in the ancient world and the middle east. Living in Los Angeles where I do there were a lot of headlines that at one point started to emerge as problems getting ###, which is based here and Italy and Greece, demanding antiquities be returned from the museum.

Then I started hearing from friends; I used to have long-distance relationships in Egypt and the chief archaeologist of Egypt was telling me he had started this campaign to get the return of major treasures from western museums like the Bust of Nefertiti, which is in Berlin and the Rosetta stone which is in London at the British museum. I started putting the pieces together thinking there’s some broader trend going on here, what is it all about? Why are all of these smaller countries challenging big countries like the United States or France and England to get these things back? Then I started realizing that its part of a bigger picture that’s going on in the world, which is people, smaller countries taking control of their cultural heritage and taking possession of their cultural identity and wanting the return of these treasures as part of that.

So I decided to explore that question as a journalist, just to take that journey back in time to countries where pieces are now residing and where it was taken from and it was really fascinating. I learned about these amazing characters in the 19th century and I also learned a lot of stuff that I had kind of taken for granted. For example, I never knew how the Rosetta Stone got to the British museum or how the bust of Nefertiti came to be in Berlin. In fact I didn’t really know how the great treasures or even how the collections of ancient treasures even originated at the great museums. So all of it was a great learning journey for me and if readers are interested in learning about that I think they’ll like that journey back.

Dr. Kent: Its almost its not too far a departure from your Hollywood reporting because all of us love talking about these ancient treasures in Egypt and since we were small children we’ve seen it in cartoons and documentaries. How did your passion start for all of this?

Sharon Waxman: For the ancient world?

Dr. Kent: Yes.

Sharon Waxman: Well I think probably going to museums as a kid. I grew up in Cleveland and there was a really great collection of antiquities and art too in the Cleveland Museum of Art by the way which is not a major character in the book but does happen to be one of the museums in the crosshairs of countries like Italy and Greece. In fact they just made a deal to give 13 pieces back from their collection, so this is a trend that’s going on and its affecting our museums. It’s absolutely true that as a young person, which I guess I’m not anymore, it was going after college to the Louvre and discovering these amazing treasures helped really peak my curiosity in archaeology and the ancient world and ancient civilizations.

Dr. Kent: So let’s talk about the politics of this right away because I don’t think all that many folks are familiar with the battles that have gone back and forth and the legal aspect. You talk about what’s the law surrounding it. How long does it have to be gone and all that stuff?

Sharon Waxman: Well there aren’t really laws that govern who took what, when and what’s the right thing to do. That’s part of the reason why it’s a free for all right now and why as you say it really does become political very quickly. There are local laws in each country for example, the curator, the former curator of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marian True, is on trial today in Rome under Italian law for fraud and for receiving stolen goods. So it’s actually a criminal trial. You’re talking about a Harvard educated PhD in Greek and Roman civilization who for 24 years collected antiquities as chief curator of the antiquities department at the Getty and its not like she was stealing for herself, she was collecting for the museum.

That is the person who is now on trial for fraud and criminal possession in Rome under Italian law. So there is a problem that you have a ### law and you can have a politically motivated prosecution because this is certainly politically motivated in the case of Italy and the Getty. In fact they told me and you can see in the book what they say is what they really wanted was to get their stuff back but the Getty wouldn’t give it so they undertook this prosecution of the Getty curator. The thing about it is my first instinct was to say the west stole all these things, they should give them back it would be the just thing to do, but as I investigated I found its really more complicated than that and raises so many questions.

In addition to that, of course I traveled to the countries that were where the ancient world was; Egypt, Turkey and one of the stories I tell in the book is how Turkey through the Metropolitan Museum a law suit actually sued under American law the Metropolitan Museum of New York in the 1980s to get these golden treasures back from the time of King Crisis. You know the phrase he’s as rich as Crisis so there really was a King Crisis and he was very rich of course and they were very skilled in making gold and silver back in the time we’re talking going back 2500 years. That civilization is now completely gone but its in Turkey so Turkey found out that the Met had bought illegally dug up and smuggled gold and silver pieces and sued and got them back. Then I went and found out that in 2006 a hoardist called the Lydian Hoarde was stolen from a museum in Turkey where they didn’t have security cameras and they didn’t take care of it and let anybody visit it.

So the question arises is the right thing to do, certainly its not right to buy illegally dug up things because it ruins archaeological sites and kills our common heritage, but is it always the right thing to give it back if that country cant take care of what they have.

Dr. Kent: I spent a little time in Cairo and went to the Cairo Museum and I was astonished that the wall is just plastered with things and I had no idea what I was looking at.

Sharon Waxman: Yeah, exactly. That place is a relic in and of itself, it’s amazing. their trying to build a new museum; trying to raise money to build a state of the art museum outside of the pyramids, but it is astonishing. I’m sure some of your listeners have been to Egypt and if they’ve been to Egypt they’ve been to the Cairo Museum and you can see that the lettering on the typewriters looks like it was done in 1902 and it was. The labeling is there; the museum was built in 1900 so it’s a great example of colonial architecture and stuff goes missing. I could go on but its all in the book.

Dr. Kent: I heard that they even stored mummies in the hallway for awhile for some reason.

Sharon Waxman: Things are stored not only in the hallway but one of the things I tell in the book because I had lost who your listeners if they’ve seen anything about Egypt they’ve seen this guy. He’s an Indiana Jones type character, you know he wears the Indiana Jones hat; he’s always very charismatic and is really trying to drag Egypt into the 21st century so he has a team of people building a computer database because they have no proper inventory of what they even have. But what I discovered when I went to the museum and lots of people were doing the inventory were students who were volunteering from France and England and America, but on this little team of people on the left off in this very sweaty corner of the museum.

I found that there was another rival project going on underneath the building which I also went to visit, which is funded by the Japanese to do the same thing. So there’s bureaucracy, politics, and I went and asked why are there two projects duplicating one another’s work? They said, well it’s true that there are but we are going to take this out to the new museum when it opens. It kind of highlights a bit of chaotic and Byzantine and a hard job to take a country like Egypt which has so many issues; poverty being a main one, and try to bring it to a state of the art museum. They have so much, they have far more monuments and statues and mummies than even a wealthy country would have trouble taking care of all of that.

Dr. Kent: Now I’m curious, I’d like to talk a little about your background. I did read that you learned both Hebrew and Arabic. I’m also an Arabic speaker.

Sharon Waxman: Oh cool; we could conduct the interview in Arabic. You might lose all your listeners, they might not like that.

Dr. Kent: Yeah, I don’t think the transcriptionist would be happy with me! How have all of your life paths crossed in your latest project?

Sharon Waxman: In my latest project? Are you referring to the book?

Dr. Kent: The book and whatever else you’re working on.

Sharon Waxman: My latest project is actually a news site, a news organization which took me back into Hollywood and that was launched a week ago and is called thewrap.com, which is a play on “that’s a wrap” and that’s taken me back out of the world of cultural politics where I’ve gone to and I’m not sure that all the strands of my life do meet. I’ve been a newspaper journalist for 20 some years and you may know and your listeners may know that newspapers are in deep trouble financially at the moment and we’re trying to create a new kind of digital news organization that’s still professional journalism.

Dr. Kent: I’m looking at one of your latest articles that says exclusive, Bale says his F-bombs were justified.

Sharon Waxman: Oh where did you find that on Google?

Dr. Kent: No I found it on your thewrap.com site.

Sharon Waxman: On the site, right, so we got a big story today, the studio is rising, the studio is falling, deals are falling through the Oscars are coming.

Dr. Kent: I’m curious about this whole Christian Bale thing and all of the celebrity things that end up being pitched to major networks and coming through CNN and all that. How does all of that happen?

Sharon Waxman: How do celebrities get on major networks?

Dr. Kent: There’s a lot of people that have meltdowns, how does this particular story about Bale get front page?

Sharon Waxman: Well that’s one of the things that we’re really focused on in the wrap because nobody’s really chronicling and the web has changed our culture; that’s too broad a statement but how it has just I’m sure nobody’s reporting on that in the Hollywood arena basically because that’s exactly what happened is you had this A-list star Christian Bale who had a long moment of indiscretion on the set of his movie but that happened nine months ago! Just because somebody released the audio of that, it was the seed that was in his microphone. He was miked as an actor, got out on the internet and within 24 hours the guy went from being a hero, the Dark Knight into being the subject of ridicule and satire and poor moral judgment.

Not to say that he does not deserve that but it serves as a mirror of what the bloggists here and the web becomes as a collective judgment. That in turn percolates up immediately to the broadcast networks or the big boys of which there are fewer and fewer. It is a real lesson I think in how our culture has changed so profoundly. Just think about it, a set is a very private place where it’s considered a closed circle of that family. For that to come out in public in this community where I am in Hollywood is a very jarring but it’s the world we live in now.

Dr. Kent: I’m fascinated; now as I’m listening to you and checking out your site at the same time, you’ve got the waxwork and I find it so interesting these days that all these media collide. Books, blogging, and news media all sort of blend into one these days. Where do you think its going?

Sharon Waxman: I think we don’t know exactly where it’s going and that’s what makes for a very exciting time as a journalist to be able to be writing about it and learning and exploring. Stuff is being invented every single day and the kind of changes we’re seeing in the way we communicate and the vehicles that create common glue that holds together as a society. Movies are a big part of that; TV is a big part of that. Newspapers were a part of it but they’re going away so what’s going to replace that is obviously something that’s a conversation, the connection that’s happening on the web but a different kind of communicating and its much more interactive obviously and fluid and instantaneous and global. That to me as a journalist is one of the most fascinating things we can observe and write about but yet we’re also part of that because we are changing too as part of those changes. It’s a really interesting time to be doing what I’m doing, at least for me.

Dr. Kent: Wow. It seems like you always choose the things that you enjoy. Let’s go back to Loot for a minute. Because you’ve covered celebrities and big figures how did you find it chronicling these big figures in all of history here? Being tossed back from country to country.

Sharon Waxman: It was really wonderful. It was like being Indiana Jones as a journalist because the 19th century had; you know what they did in the 19th century? You’re bopping me back and forth but I spent a year mostly by myself in libraries and crawling through tombs and now I’m back in the web world which is completely different. The thing about the people in the 19th century is that they all kept journals. All these guys with these incredible characters; one of whom I write about in the book, this guy Giovanni and he was a circus performer who became an archaeologist at a time when it was being invented.

Archaeology itself only dates back to the 19th century and he kept these amazing diaries of his travels up and down the Nile. He discovered the Abu symbol, these huge statues in Aswan that was a temple built by Ramsey’s and he discovered the entrance to the second pyramid and he really was a circus strongman, that’s how he started. But he was a self taught engineer and inventor and all these guys in the 19th century is part of the people getting educated and they learned how to draw. So they would keep diaries and do sketches of their work. There’s this one amazing character after another that you can read and listen to their own words because they really come to life.

Dr. Kent: When you cover Hollywood, do you also find yourself in a back dusty room of libraries?

Sharon Waxman: No, not at all, I’m at my desk.

Dr. Kent: How do you go about that?

Sharon Waxman: Oh we’re just fielding phone calls, emails, texts from all over but yeah, we do go to the movies occasionally, not often enough.

Dr. Kent: You really tread the line between generations; it’s fascinating. Well there’s many websites online that detail things about this book Loot.

Sharon Waxman: There’s my site which is lootbook.com and all the reviews and commentary are there, discussion about the book and that’s the most gratifying thing is the response from readers who really have embraced the subject and offered up suggestions and thoughts. That was my goal with the book to bring the subject out of the hands of the museum authority and bring it to the wider public because there are solutions to be found to this issue of antiquities that are in a state of war at the moment. But only when more reasonable people, which are those of us who are not primary actors in this thing, there are ways to find to come to solutions that serve all of us and that in fact most of all serve the antiquities themselves so they’re not lost.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely and where can we find out about the antiquities after reading your book?

Sharon Waxman: Well, you can go to lootbook.com, that’s one place where there are resources, there’s lots of resources in the back of the book in the bibliography and I would contact the local museum and get involved in your local museum.

Dr. Kent: And visit Egypt.

Sharon Waxman: Yeah.

Dr. Kent: Now I have another question for you. from my personal experience, when I went down beneath the pyramid like most tourists do in that narrow, narrow tunnel and there’s this sort of empty room at the bottom.

Sharon Waxman: It’s a tomb.

Dr. Kent: What did you feel? You’ve been down there I assume.

Sharon Waxman: I didn’t go down there because I went all the way to the top, which is I think his name was ### tomb at the top. ### And it’s amazing; it’s like being in a modern art gallery, all wax that was floated up the Nile and yeah.

Dr. Kent: In your mind can you picture the works of art in those spaces? I know when I was in this tomb I was like man, this is empty I wish I knew what used to be in here.

Sharon Waxman: Either it was empty, or I think the tomb robbers took whatever was in there many years ago and I’m not enough of an Egyptologist although I did learn a great deal from doing this book, but I don’t know if that tomb was full in the same way that the tombs in the Valley of the Kings was filled absolutely chalk a block with furniture and food and like King Tut which was absolutely top to bottom every square inch filled with the belongings of the king. Those might’ve been the same.

Dr. Kent: It’s so much fun thinking about this stuff, just like I’m pretty obsessed with the newest headlines in Hollywood and this book I’ve heard a lot about it. I’m only a few pages into it but I’m psyched to read the rest. It’s called Loot: The battle of the stolen treasures of the ancient world. It’s by Sharon Waxman, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Sharon Waxman: Thank you and I hope your listeners will check out my new site thewrap.com if they’re interested in intelligent dialogue about what’s going on in Hollywood.

Dr. Kent: Yeah, its good stuff. Thewrap.com. Well thank you so much and have a nice day!

Sharon Waxman: Thanks for having me, see you later.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be Jocelyn Crowley who has interviewed more than 150 father’s rights group leaders and she’s got a new book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America, so come on back and listen to that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Jocelyn Crowley | Live on Sound Authors

February 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! My next guest on the show is Jocelyn Crowley, PhD. She’s a professor of public policy and she’s the author of the book called Defiant Dads: Fathers’ rights activists in America. It’s a gorgeous front cover and pops right off the shelf and it’s an honor to speak to her today. Welcome to the show.

Jocelyn Crowley: Thank you so much for having me, I’m glad that you like the cover!

Dr. Kent: Oh I love it; it’s that nice blue shirt that dads love to wear.

Jocelyn Crowley: That’s right, they’re trained to wear I guess.

Dr. Kent: So tell me about this book and how you decided to write this one.

Jocelyn Crowley: Sure, well I think there were a couple of reasons that I got interested in the topic. First of all I would say it is my primary area of interest academically so when I finished up my first book which was about the politics of child support policy in the untied states I found out that there were these organizations that were sprouting up all over the country dedicated to pursuing fathers rights and as I concluded that book I started to think to myself, wow, what are these groups about? What do they want? And do these claims have any merit? So I think academically I was just very drawn to what they were doing at the time. I think secondly I was interested in researching these groups because of my own family circumstances. Growing up in a single parent family during the 1970s and 1980s, there wasn’t a lot of interest or research about fathers at that time and the role they play in families. What their absence might in fact do to children, so personally I became interested in the topic as well.

Dr. Kent: It’s been fascinating, since Barack Obama has been elected president there’s a lot of talk especially in the African American community, this role model of a man who loves his kids and is there for his kids, it’s a two parent household in a cultural group that doesn’t necessarily value that as much.

Jocelyn Crowley: Well I think that the president can do a lot in terms of modeling good parental behavior and having two young children in the Whitehouse at this moment in time is definitely good for the nation. It’s a great symbol for what we can aspire to be because there is a general consensus in the research community that two parent families do provide one of the best environments for children. Now of course not every two parent family is perfect, but we do know they buffer children against a whole host of negative outcomes like poor school performance, teenage pregnancy, involvement with drugs and alcohol, so I think what researchers have noted is that increased supervision that these parents supply for their children really help prevent these outcomes. The question my book also tried to look at though was what happens when families fall apart? How do fathers try to stay in their lives and what kinds of barriers do they confront in trying to stay in their children’s lives?

Dr. Kent: Huh. Lets talk for a second about you’ve published many articles that are lets say academic. As someone who came out of academia as well, I know definitely that those aren’t necessarily accessible to everyone. What for you and your career, do you feel that there’s a different message coming out of your articles that are academic and books that are more for the trade audience?

Jocelyn Crowley: That’s a really interesting question. Definitely I would say that there are pushes and pulls in both areas. When you’re in academics you do have to publish more scholarly articles in order to move ahead professionally so it’s something I’ve always struggled with but my aim in publishing this book is to write it so that it meets the needs of both audiences. In the sense that I do believe that it covers some of the more scholarly and academics related to child support and custody issues. However at the same time I tried to weave in and out all of these fathers voices with whom I spoke over the course of a couple of years; 158 fathers rights activists and try to weave their personal stories in the book in order to make the book more accessible to people across the spectrum and hopefully make it interesting to them as well.

Dr. Kent: I think often, I watch a few movies on the Lifetime Networks and I have three powerful feminists, a mother a sister and a fiancé.

Jocelyn Crowley: Oh congratulations on the fiancé part!

Dr. Kent: Thank you but there’s a very strong presence I guess in the world of women that says if there’s someone that deserts the family it’s the father and if someone needs to have more rights it’s the woman. So what does it mean to have father’s rights? I was just writing a comment on twitter about the interview we’re having right now and I got a response that was sort of responded immediately to that term fathers rights and it’s so loaded.

Jocelyn Crowley: It is so loaded. What I found interesting in talking to these guys is that I was really interested in delving into this question of what does it mean by rights and what these activists really want to do is they want to modify child support law and child custody law in ways that definitely will be more favorable to them than they currently are. Basically I argued that’s not necessarily the best thing for women and children. So that’s what I’m concerned about there. in the area of child support, when a family falls apart we know quite consistently that research has shown time and time again women suffer economically, much more than men do. Why is that the case?

Oftentimes they drop out of the paid labor force when they have children or they work part time or from home and their skill set can definitely suffer over time so when the family dissolves they’re not in the same place that their former husbands might be economically. So I find that calls to modify child support awards to reduce them in most cases are not necessarily good for women and children. On the other side of the coin, father’s rights activists talk a lot about child custody and wanting to reform child custody. Right now we know in the majority of cases when families do fall apart, women get the majority of time with their children, they tend to get primary physical custody and fathers have visitation or parenting time.

So they really want a 50-50 split of time when the family falls apart. I think this is a noble goal and something I would support. I think its always in the best interest of a child to have continuing positive contact with both parents in the case where a family falls apart; however, I do think women studies show that they do almost double the childcare work as fathers do so that when the family falls apart that child might have a stronger attachment to the mother figure in the child’s life. So what I would encourage fathers to do is definitely get more involved with their children while the families are together. If that means scaling back on work hours and making some professional sacrifices, I think that is ultimately worth it if heaven forbid they have to divorce their partner down the road, they will have put in that time and be able to show the judge they were in fact an equal parent to that child while the marriage was still together.

Dr. Kent: I guess this whole issue is really tied up with lawyers and judges and depositions and all of that and that takes a huge emotional toll on all parties.

Jocelyn Crowley: Oh absolutely. I mean there definitely is a cottage industry around divorce and child custody and a lot of my interview respondents really complained about this. There are social workers that can become involved when custody is in contention, there are psychologists, there are mental health evaluators and what is a little bit troubling is that they do try to play God in a sense where they become involved in a particular case and try to create a report for the judge saying in their view who might be the parent for primary custody. I think this can be definitely problematic.

The mental health professional might not have the best idea of who the best parent might be after exposure to the family only for a brief period of time. I understand the force of those complaints. Again I think ideally at one point in time we are going to move toward the more 50-50 standard of custody if that’s possible if both parents live near each other but at the same time we do need to encourage fathers to take more responsibility for childcare while their families are together so when the judge does look at what’s going on in the family, he or she can say look, both parents did equal amounts of care giving, therefore a 50-50 decision is warranted.

Dr. Kent: I just had someone comment in on the show and they said, there are no such things as father’s rights. There’s a great deal of vitriol on both sides; whether an individuals had a bad experience as a man or woman in one of these situations. What kind of stories did you find when researching all of these?

Jocelyn Crowley: It’s definitely true. Wherever you are, when you have a family that breaks up emotions are high on both sides and in my book I only spoke to these fathers’ rights activists so I didn’t speak to their former partners to get their side of the story but definitely emotions are running high. Although I’m critical of some of the father’s rights policy positions in that I don’t know if they’re necessarily helpful to women and children, what I did find was they created in many cases a positive set of circumstances by which fathers could start to rebuild their lives and make the best possible relationship with their ex-partner and their children.

For example one of the father’s rights activists that I interviewed was in one of his group meetings and talked about how he was extremely angry with his ex because she never told him about his daughter’s doctor appointments, dentist appointments and all these things and he yelled at her. The group really gave him a talking to and said that’s not the way to make things work. You’re not supposed to be yelling at your child’s mother. If you have an issue, speak in a civil non confrontational way. He actually took from that group that experience and advice and ended up writing a card to his ex saying I’m really sorry for what I did. The group also tends to give really good advice when it comes to making sure fathers are confident in their new roles as perhaps non-residential fathers.

So one man in a group described his experience of wanting his son to stay with him the entire summer because he didn’t get a lot of time during the year but that son wanted to go back to school early because he wanted to try out for the football team. The father was struggling because although he wanted his son to play football, at the same time he wanted the most amount of time with him. The group really counseled him to go and be a little bit generous and make sure that child was able to play football because that was what would make him happiest at that stage in his life. So he ultimately decided to give up some of his time to benefit his son down the road. So there were lots of stories like that and lots of ways the group was able to help these fathers move along and like I said rebuild relationships in families.

Dr. Kent: So what’s with the title Defiant Dads?

Jocelyn Crowley: I was thinking of what a catchy title might be and when I talk about them being defiant, what I mean is they are definitely trying to defy current policy positions in the areas of child support and custody. They think they’re paying too much child support in most cases and definitely want more custody. So they’re trying to organize politically and trying to defy the current status quo in those two areas.

Dr. Kent: It’s such a fascinating topic and I have a good friend who is a wonderful house dad and his wife goes off to work and he stays home with the kids. I have a brother in law who took my sisters name so there are some very sensitive men. What is the future of moms and dads and fathers rights and all that?

Jocelyn Crowley: Well I definitely think that these fathers’ rights groups have a role to play in American family policy. I think they should continue to provide the support that they do to fathers going through a break up to provide them with legal information regarding obtaining a lawyer, getting proper advice as to what to do in their case. I would ask and encourage them to reconsider some of their more hard-line policies on child support and custody because I think we need to really take into account not necessarily completely what they want and desire but what’s in the best interest of the children and the former family unit. So I encourage them to think about modifying some of their position but continue the really good work in terms of helping fathers rebuild their life in the aftermath of a breakup.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a fascinating discussion, it’s not something I think about every day but it’s a beautiful book; Defiant Dads: Fathers’ rights activists in America and are you working on any new projects?

Jocelyn Crowley: Right now I’m working on a project that focuses on mothers. Mothers for a change; I’m interested in how mothers right now in 2009 are trying to combine having careers with having children and how did they balance it all? So I decided to take a step back from fathers and now focus on mothers.

Dr. Kent: And it’s such an important time right now to think about single mothers because they really are the ones suffering the most in this economic downturn.

Jocelyn Crowley: Absolutely I agree.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been such an honor chatting with you and the book is called Defiant Dads: Fathers’ rights activists in America by Jocelyn Elise Crowley, thank you so much.

Jocelyn Crowley: Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be a birth activist. Her name is Karen Brody and her latest book is called Birth and we’ll talk to her in just a minute so come on back for that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, TRANSCRIPTS, Politics, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST