In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Class

Race, class, and street harassment

So, I have to admit – I was a little nervous when posting about street harassment the other day. I was really eager to open up the conversation, especially because it was focused on a queer/gender non-conforming/trans experience and perspective that I’m not used to hearing. But I was also worried about certain dynamics that tend to surface during these conversations, namely dynamics of race and class.

While women and other gender underprivileged folks of all races, ethnicities, and classes can and often do experience street harassment, the voices that I usually hear in these discussions are most often of women with either race or class privilege. This is not unique to conversations about street harassment: most larger conversations are dominated by the voices with the most privilege. In conversations about street harassment, though, this has an interesting and profound effect, as you’ll often have some very complex and conflicting power dynamics going on: men exerting their gender privilege and sexism over women who have class and/or race privilege over them.

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You keep on using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means, James Harkin

Talk about missing the point of feminists getting upset about sex trafficking.

There’s a big difference between illegal immigrants choosing consensual prostitution and illegal immigrants being lured with false promises and then abducted into sex slavery, moron.

Thankfully the commentors at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free mostly don’t fall for his argument about open borders (really, to argue for open borders he had to defend sex trafficking), except for the inevitable few who don’t think Harkin blamed feminists sufficiently in the post.

The real question is what is more immoral-the creation of a neoliberal world order which impoverishes so many and gets them to work for a dollar a day or the fact that some women might want to use their phzsical attractiveness to lure a lonely Western man who can provide for her without having to deal with Western women who seem cold, egotistical and obsessed with their careers.

This is a point made strikingly in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Platforme ( 2001 ). When whole swathes of the old Soviet Union were reduced to destitution because of shock therapy or where South East Asia is forced to reform by the IMF and introduced competitive neoliberal capitalism there the inevitable result is sex tourism if not out-and-out prostitution.

Feminists might well react with ‘moral disgust’. After all, who wants a system of neoliberal perfect competition in sex with a new supply of attractive and unspoilt women from countries where they value the male contribution?
Robin Brown, posting from Hungary

Nice.

Life without family planning

A new World Bank report warns that poor countries, wealthy donors, and aid agencies are losing sight of the value of contraception, family planning, and other reproductive health programmes in helping to boost economic growth.

The report – Population Issues in the 21st Century: The Role of the World Bank – stresses the urgency of reducing high birth rates which are strongly linked with endemic poverty, poor education, and high numbers of maternal and infant deaths.

This is what the anti-contraceptionists hiding behind “pro-life” rhetoric aren’t telling us all as they bleat about beautiful, precious babies. The result of their programs is beautiful, precious babies dying in infancy or growing up in hopeless squalor to bring more beautiful, precious babies into poverty in their turn. Generation upon generation of misery and despair.

There’s a lot to digest in the article, let alone the full report. I’ll just highlight a few snippets:

of the estimated 210 million women who become pregnant every year worldwide, more than 500,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth, and about one in five of them resorts to abortion because of poor access to contraception.

The report says that some 68,000 women die each year as a result of unsafe abortion, 5.3 million suffer temporary or permanent disability, and many end up being ostracized within their own communities.

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Monday Afternoon at the Welfare Office

The following is a post I originally wrote for the now-pretty-much-defunct Our Word, and then reposted again on my site. It is still extremely relevant: I’m still on food stamps (but not welfare), thousands of moms and their kids are still forced into waiting long hours for minimum benefits, and their time is still treated as completely without value.

So I spent a lovely couple of hours at the obligatorily ugly welfare office today, me and about 200 other moms & kids, waiting to see my worker for my yearly review in order to continue to get my monthly allotment of $152 in food stamps that comes between my family and starvation.

This is really funny, this cinder-block montrosity in the middle of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhood (aren’t they all) surrounded by corner stores and cheap furniture stores. Anyway, the funny thing is that they closed it down a couple of years ago for “remodeling” and then temporarily relocated (for 1 1/2 years) to the courthouse downtown while they remodeled the ugly welfare building. I heard a rumor that there was a rat problem, but what I really think is the folks in charge just needed to spend some federal block grant money. And fast.

During the remodeling period moms & their kids, who already have to spend bus time, bus-stop time, and sitting-in-ugly-welfare-building time, now had to re-route themselves to the downtown courthouse, which wasn’t prepared for the mom/baby/toddler onslaught. Not to mention that the few moms who have cars had to keep running outside every few minutes to feed the parking meter, thus taking the chance of missing their call to see their worker and then having to explain to the bored receptionists why they simply COULDN’T reschedule their appointment, they just went out to feed the meter, and why couldn’t they still see the worker? Please? Please, goddamnit???

For almost two years Milwaukee shut down the main welfare office on 12th and Vliet and forced the moms to hang out in the downtown courthouse, and when the remodeling was finished and the finished product was unveiled—IT LOOKED EXACTLY THE FUCKING SAME! Same concrete blocks, same boarded up places where windows are supposed to be, same dirty sidewalk and street where the only people allowed to park are the workers.

Except the city was nice and put a few frescos over the areas where windows are supposed to be, and re-named the building after some politician. So now I guess when a couple of moms are talking we aren’t supposed to say “oh I have to go to 12th & Vliet” which every poor person in the city knows about, but instead will feel a sense of purpose and self-worth when we talk about making our appointment at the Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center.

Where business goes on as usual. Where you wait on plastic chairs alongside what seems like every teething baby in the city. Where caseworkers routinely lose families’ paperwork so the worker has no choice but to sanction 100% of that family’s foodstamp allowance for the month.

The place where we come to beg our workers to give us back our foodstamps or our medical assistance. The welfare building where we sit sometimes for hours in those plastic chairs.

What always gets me about places like the foodstamp welfare building, or the shiny new W2 buildings (Wisconsin Works, our euphemism for cash welfare), is the absolute acceptance that life is about waiting in line without complaint, cuz that’s what you get for daring to be poor and looking for a handout. Or trying to keep from losing your cash/food stamps/childcare/medical assistance/home/children. I call it the welfare waiting-line mentality, and I see the same thing anytime the city or the state or some private charity decides to give some stuff away.

Toys for Tots is an example. I’m sure every city and town in America has something similar, where you get free toys if you’re too poor to show your kids the wonderful American Christmas tradition of spend-and-go-into-debt. So you go to apply for Toys for Tots. You wait in line outside of some building alongside a couple hundred other moms. Then you get inside and prove to some worker somehow that you’re truly poor and not a middle class person trying to scam the charity out of free toys.

Once you’ve verified your poor-needy status, you get a number to–get this–go stand in another line in a couple of weeks, once more outside in December in Wisconsin–while you wait to get called in to choose one–sometimes two–toys for your kids. And in addition you get a few generic wrapped toys that basically amount to department store over-runs (a few years ago my daughter got a Scott Baio coloring book, I kid you not).

Few question this welfare waiting-line mentality. We wait in line at the food pantry. We wait in line at St. Ben’s meal program, where I dare anybody in the city of Milwaukee to drive to 9th and State after 5 pm during the week to see all the people (hundreds!) waiting in line for a hot meal.

We stand in line to get Energy Assistance, a worthy program that keeps We Energies (our gas/electric monopoly) from shutting off our electricity and gas in the middle of the summer. They used to shut it off in the winter too, but activists shamed the utilities with all the deaths they were causing and now they wait to shut us off til we no longer need electricity or gas–i.e. the summer. Such fun camping out in the dark, with no refrigerator or fan or lights. Such fun for the disabled who die in the summer heat because our bodies/hearts/immune systems are too weak. Such fun having no hot water–but who wants to take hot baths in the summer anyway? Or cooking gas–but wait, all the meat and milk in the fridge spoiled when they cut off your electric anyway, so I guess that’s not such a big issue. Besides, there’s always the barbecue grill.

But back to the welfare waiting-line mentality. Wait in line for emergency shelters, even if you’re black and blue and have just got to escape that battering ram of a man who lives in your house.

Wait at the Social Security office. Wait at the clothing bank that will give your kids a used winter coat or shoes. Wait, wait, wait.

But don’t forget what makes waiting really interesting and fun–it’s toting along the kids. The brand-new babies, the toddlers with never-ending head colds, the babies still in the womb. Tote along all the kids’ accessories–diapers, change of clothes, bottles, backpacks, toys to keep them from driving you crazy, books, drawing papers, crayons, snacks, lunches, homework if it’s during the schoolyear.

If you’re disabled it’s a case of standing in line with your walker or cane or oxygen. Standing in line is no fun when you can only stand for a few minutes at a time anyway. Think about what else disabled moms have to tote: wheelchairs, canes, oxygen, scooters, babies, babies in womb, toddlers with runny noses, bored older kids, and the inevitable kids’ accessories. Plus we have to tote along our tired, disabled bodies.

And if anybody still doubts that every one of us waiting-in-welfare-line moms deserve a mother of the year award, remember that most of us get to that waiting line BY BUS. And almost every one of us finds time for the waiting line after or between or before long hours of low-wage work in some fast-food restaurant or nursing home or day care center or unpaid workfare-for-welfare.

And yet our kids are reasonably well-behaved, considering that many of them are either up too early or too late, are standing out in all kinds of weather, or spend inordinate amounts of their lives in day care centers. Our kids’ hair is combed and braided (well, except my kid, who often runs screaming from the comb). Kids do homework, help with taking care of the younger kids, and cope with the situation with remarkable aplomb.

I’ve decided that there must be a giddy sense of power that comes from being able to command poor people to stand in line, at the drop of a hat. Social service agencies and poverty pimps know that as long they either terrorize people with the loss of benefits, or lure them with the promise of something free (but of implied scarcity, such as Toys for Tots or Energy Assistance), they will be able to command already-exhausted and over-extended moms and kids to wait, wait, wait.

Well hello there

Hello to everybody at Feministe, and thanks Jill for this chance to guest-blog. This is a much bigger gig than the one I usually do over at my place, so I’m understandably a bit nervous. So I’m going to calm my nerves by telling you a little about myself before I go to my first post.

Over at my place I focus mostly on poverty issues at the micro-personal level: this is what poverty looks like for my family and me, this is how we cope, and in the meantime, life still goes on. I started out wanting to make the lives of women and families in poverty more visible on the net, especially since it seemed to me when I began blogging that most of the blogs I was familiar with were mind-numbingly middle-class. Where were the voices that sounded like mine? Where were the families and issues like mine? So I started my little experiment in saying, without apology, that I am poor, I’ve been on welfare, I don’t regret it, and that I believe our society has a moral obligation to take care of each of its members. From healthcare to guaranteed income, from food to shelter, we are connected and our survival depends upon recognizing that connection.

I also believed it was necessary to combat some of the stereotypes of what a person in poverty looks like and sounds like. If I can make myself real to you, perhaps I can make poverty real, and not something that happens to some vague Other; perhaps I can make our common humanity more recognizable.

So those are my lofty goals; but a lot of the time I just get lazy and talk about my kids and my life and stuff like disability and losing my car and how shitty it is when the electric company comes to shut your power off. I talk about the things that impact me, my kids, my neighbors, the inner city of Milwaukee, and always make the political very, very personal.

So this little introduction seems to be turning into a post of its own! With that, I’ll be back in a short with something of real substance. And I look forward to being in the guest-room this week!

Another post about health care

I’ve seen this anti-Sicko article by Larry Elder a few times in the past week, and it’s so full of bullshit, I just can’t ignore it anymore. Brace yourselves, this is going to be another long one:

First, understand that lack of health-care “insurance” does not mean a lack of health care. Many emergency rooms, by law, provide medical care to anyone who walks in, whether an illegal or legal resident of this country.

Tell it to the parents, spouses and children of the 18,000 people who will die this year because they don’t have access to routine, preventative care without insurance. (That’s 49 deaths today, 49 tomorrow, 49 the next day… two every hour.)

The emergency room is only required to do the bare minimum in an emergency situation (sometimes they don’t even do that), and going to the ER is outrageously expensive if you don’t have insurance. In fact, hospitals routinely charge uninsured people 2-4 times more than what health insurance companies pay.

Second, when Moore asserts that 50 million Americans lack health care insurance, he most assuredly includes some of the estimated 11 million to 20 million illegal aliens living here.

80% of the uninsured are native or naturalized US citizens.

Nearly half go without health insurance only for four months or less, usually while between jobs.

That’s funny… Kaiser Family Foundation says that 59% of uninsured adults have gone without insurance for at least two years.

Others with employment could easily add health-care insurance through their work for a very small premium.

Only 61% of employers offer health insurance to some of their employees. Many employees are ineligible or can’t afford those “very small premiums.” When my ex worked at Denny’s, for example, they offered health insurance… it would have taken more than HALF his paycheck. I’m sure premiums like that are nothing for a nationally syndicated talk show host, but for average folks it’s an impossible burden.

Many without health-care insurance consist of young people (18 million uninsured are between the ages of 18 and 34) who consider themselves — given their youth and good health — unlikely to face large health-care costs.

I’m 18-34, and I don’t consider myself “unlikely to face large health-care costs.” I would love to have health insurance, if only we could afford it. I’m sick and tired of seeing this little “fact” that 18-34-year-olds don’t want health care. It’s a goddamn lie.

Over 14 million of the uninsured, according to the Census Bureau, live in households earning $50,000 or more annually. Over 7 million are in households earning more than $75,000 a year.

Two-thirds of the uninsured population are either in poverty or just above poverty.

A small number of the uninsured include criminals. Should taxpayers provide health care for them, as well?

Why not? Most criminals aren’t eligible for the death penalty. Why is it OK to kill them by neglect?

But according to an ABC News-Kaiser Family Foundation-USA Today survey, 89 percent of Americans with health-care insurance say they are, in fact, satisfied with the quality of care they receive.

Of course they are; most of them are healthy. They haven’t faced a major illness and been weeded out by the health insurance industry yet:


Most people in countries with universal health care are satisfied, too. The difference is that their satisfaction is justified. They don’t have to worry about losing coverage. They never have to consider getting a divorce, quitting their jobs and selling off their assets so they can be poor enough to qualify for Medicaid to save their child’s life. They don’t have to worry about going bankrupt due to medical costs. They don’t have to worry about any of that shit.

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NAACP ignores pro-lifers

LOL! Pro-lifers from Georgia are upset about being ignored again at the NAACP annual convention:

This July approximately 8,000 NAACP members met in Detroit for the organization’s annual convention. While Saturday’s major theme was improving access to heath care, NAACP authorities rejected the pro-life resolution of the Macon, Georgia, chapter for the second time since 2004.

Well, duh. “Pro-life resolutions” are about removing access to health care, not improving it.

Dr. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and pastoral associate for Priests for Life, strongly urged the NAACP to recognize the importance of the pro-life resolution. “The NAACP has always been about justice,” said King, quoted in the Christian Post. “Today, there is no greater injustice facing black people than abortion.”

No greater injustice?? Seriously? What about all the poverty and the lack of health care and the racist justice system? If black women were not more likely to be faced with these injustices (and many others), they would not be more likely to abort.

A friend of mine once had to abort a twin pregnancy because she already had one baby (under 1), her boyfriend was mentally ill, violent and always out of work, her car was a broken-down piece of shit, and she lived with her terminally ill mother in a tiny, rented duplex. The family was struggling to care for the one baby while she attended community college; three would have been impossible.

But according to these crazy pro-lifers, the fact that she was allowed to have a safe, doctor-provided abortion so she could survive it and finish school and get a good job to give her daughter a better life is the greatest injustice of all! Give me a fucking break.

cross-posted

(Sorry for the delete and repost. My HTML got screwed up somehow, and it wouldn’t save my edit.)

No sex for the poor

I guess I should introduce myself. Hi. I’m trailer park, a 26-year-old (former teenage) mom living in Austin, TX with my eight-year-old abstinence-only baby and my husband of three years who (shockingly) didn’t mind that his bride wasn’t a virgin. I’ve been online for years, but I only started my little public blog a few months ago, and I’m thrilled to be guest-blogging at Feministe for a week. And now, with that out of the way…

Jennifer Roback Morse must be crazy:

A poor cohabiting teenager using the Pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. You read that correctly: nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the Pill. If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him, her probability of pregnancy drops to 12.9%. At the other extreme, a middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 3% chance of getting pregnant after a year on the Pill.

Wow, who knew that wedding rings worked as a contraceptive? It’s as if quality education and access to health care have nothing at all to do with one’s ability to use contraception effectively.

These figures cast new light on the debate over contraception education. The commonly quoted failure rates of 8% for the Pill and 15% for the condom are inflated by the highly successful use by middle-aged, middle-class married couples. Yet, the government promotes contraception most heavily among the young, the poor and the single. The “overall failure rates” are simply not relevant to this target population.

Planned Parenthood and its allies in the sex education business have had conniptions over federal funding for abstinence education. But at least abstinence actually works. If you don’t have sex, you won’t get pregnant. It works every time.

Poor people just shouldn’t have sex! That’s the ticket! It’s not like poor people need anything fun or pleasurable in their lives, right? Sex is not a natural, normal part of human pair-bonding, it’s a luxury like champagne and caviar!

God, who do these people think they’re fooling? Even before the sexual revolution, 90% of Americans had premarital sex. Poor, young, single people are NOT going to stop having sex, and raising the risks of sex only leads to tragedy:

Three times in the last eight years, investigators have fished the body of a newborn from a lonely stretch of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, haunting detectives and residents in the area.

This week authorities announced a horrifying development: Two of the three children likely came from the same mother.

The nearest abortion clinic to Red Wing, MN is an hour away, and the only Planned Parenthood clinic in town is open two days a week. There are, however, dozens of anti-abortion pregnancy centers in the area. If lack of access to abortion and birth control forces the young and the poor to remain abstinent, just how did those three dead babies wind up in the river?

Resnick said the typical profile of a mother who commits neonaticide was a 19-year-old young woman, often unmarried, who may still live with her parents, and may not be able to face her parents’ disappointment — both that she’s had premarital sex and that she’s become pregnant.

“Some may feel that they will literally be rejected from the house,” he said.

Resnick, who treated a woman who killed two of her newborn children, said that such fears can become so overwhelming that the mother completely loses sight of what she is doing. He points to the remarkably difficult circumstances under which neonaticides often take place.

“These women deliver alone, without pain relief, and without crying out, for fear of discovery. Oftentimes the parents are in a different room in the house. Then [the mothers] manage to wipe up all the blood, dispose of the baby and do all of this unaided. In that sense, you can see how the women are so much more terrified of discovery than they are of actually taking a human life.”

So much for the idea that slut-shaming creates a “culture of life.”

hat tip, Amanda

cross-posted

Pro-Life Group: “It is shameful that Christians would rally around the physical needs of the poor”

Nope, couldn’t make it up if I tried. The full press release (emphasis mine):

“Abortion is an act that takes the life of an innocent human child,” said Erik Whittington, American Life League’s youth outreach director. “It is shameful that Christians would rally around the physical needs of the poor and ignore the deaths of untold millions of babies. Abortion is poverty and the number one priority of our day should be its demise.”

This past weekend, Sojourners opened Pentecost 2007: Taking Vision to the Street, a conference aimed at placing “poverty at the top of our nation’s agenda.” Today, Sojourners will host a march that will run from National City Christian Church to the Upper Senate Park. American Life League, through its youth outreach project Rock for Life, will be there to present to conference attendees the importance of putting abortion, not poverty, at the top of the list of social concerns.

“Mother Teresa, the universal icon for fighting poverty once said, ‘It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.’ While we commend Christians for working towards eliminating poverty,” said Whittington, “we must not forget that abortion kills a human person, and leaves the mother spiritually and psychologically broken. Abortion ends the lives of more than 3,500 American babies a day. This bloodshed dwarfs any other issue, including poverty.”

What is it with this week? I feel like the running theme is “Wingnuts finally say out loud the abhorrent things we always knew they believed, but thought they were smart enough to keep under wraps.” I thought the “They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure” comment couldn’t be beat, until they came out with “The old procedure [standard D&E], which is still legal … means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling” — that had to top all, right? Admitting that they think it’s a good thing that more women will have their uteruses perforated? I was sure we had a winner. Sadly, it was beaten out by “Feminism is a minority social movement, whose members murder innocent children in order to obtain sexual gratification.” Which is most surely the champion — abortions make all the ladies come? It’s incredible.

But no. Now Christians should be ashamed for helping the poor.

Let me re-contextualize this statement: It’s a press release. Not dumb, unscripted O’Reilly-style verbal diarrhea. Not an off-the-cuff comment to a reporter. Not something penned by a notoriously pathetic and vile dude who spews wingnut insanity on the regular and probably writes his columns in crayon. A press release. A planned, vetted, thought-out, purposeful statement, deemed important enough to release to news organizations. It’s a whole new level of unbelievable.

And it should make all of us pause for a moment and recognize just how emboldened anti-choice groups have become in the wake of the “partial-birth” abortion Supreme Court decision. It’s no coincidence that these kind of atrocious views are finally being verbalized now.

Pro-choice advocates have long pointed out that poverty relief and choice go hand in hand — the more financial security a woman has, the freer she may feel to choose to give birth. The inability to support a child is one of the primary reasons women give for terminating pregnancies. You’d think that “pro-life” activists, then, would be supportive of poverty relief programs, and would place women’s economic well-being at the top of their list.

But if you were under the impression that “pro-life” activists were actually about lowering the abortion rate, you would be sadly mistaken. If that were the case, they’d not only support poverty relief and social welfare programs, but they’d support contraceptive access and comprehensive sex education, two tried-and-true methods of lowering the unintended pregnancy rate. Instead, they’re advocating against basic birth control and against medically accurate health classes. We should not be surprised that they’re now advocating against poverty relief.

And yet somehow, I was still shocked to read “It is shameful that Christians would rally around the physical needs of the poor” in a press release from a Christian pro-life organization. Chalk it up to my youthful innocence.

Thanks to Amanda for sending this on.