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

Month: April 2010

PTSD and Healing After Sexual Trauma

This post is a part of the Feministe series on Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Before I really get started, this is a piece about how you, a rape survivor, can regain a sense of wellness after the fact. This is neither a professionally nor universally designed plan of action to combat PTSD or heal one’s spiritual self after rape, though I have tried to gather as many ways and means as possible that you can have agency in your recovery regardless of whether you have access to Western clinical treatment practices. I also want to emphasize that these methods should in no way be used to pressure someone to “get over” the trauma of having one’s trust betrayed, one’s body violated, and one’s worth shamed by a culture set up to discredit victims. “Getting over it” is subjective, it’s a process, and it’s closure well-earned, and it’s not up to anyone other than the survivor to lead the way to emotional healing, if indeed “over it” is a benchmark that can ever truly be achieved. This is not a piece about how to end sexual violence. If I’m glib, this piece is how to get on with your life as best you can after you’ve experienced sexual violence.

That said, these methods are also heavily informed by my experience as a het, cis, able, white, Western woman who has straddled the middle and lower class divide for the last decade. My healing process has been largely attempted as an adult, with short periods of access to clinical treatment and long periods without, and as such, I have provided suggestions for people who can get access to formal clinical therapy and suggestions for those who cannot. There is overlap in both groups, for sure. Unfortunately I have no expertise on methods to obtain healing services in the rest of the world, so if you come across or create resources, please share an we will link prominently. To help me close any gaps in my suggestions here, please, please, please share links and suggestions in the comments as others will certainly reference this post in a very real time of need.

If you need help immediately, please locate a rape crisis center that can help you in your area: 1.800.656.HOPE.

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Molly Ringwald Can Help Me Any Day

Don’t know if y’all know this but Molly Ringwald has a new book! And I actually want to buy it! Like, right now!

It’s being labeled a self-help book, which, okay… Part of me realizes that Molly Ringwald isn’t exactly a self-help expert, and another part realizes I’m not actually a fan of self-help books anyway, but my love for Molly Ringwald is so deep that I’m looking for ways to fit this book into my enormous pile of books to read. Whatever life lessons she has for me, I’m taking notes.

I have to admit, it’s funny even to me that my brain takes the words “Molly Ringwald book” and automatically thinks “MUST BUY!” The Breakfast Club is still one of my favorite movies and Sixteen Candles isn’t that far from the top (and, yes, I realize the gender, race, class, etc. issues in those films). I mean, I realize that the characters she played were not her, but my connection to them is so strong that my brain seems to not process that thought.

(Confession! The day I saw her walking with a friend and her kid in SoHo was the only time I’ve ever been excited about seeing a celebrity!)

Has anybody read this book or plans on reading this book? Am I alone in my Molly Ringwald girl-crush?

ETA: It occurs to me I never said what the book was called or what it was about – woops! It’s called “Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family and Finding the Perfect Lipstick” and is about beauty, friendship, motherhood, etc.

On Baby Emma

This story, no matter where you’re coming from, is incredibly sad (although it should be noted that the circumstances are very rare). A 20-year-old college student in Virginia gets pregnant, gives birth and places the baby for adoption. The baby, Emma, is placed through a Utah adoption agency. The baby’s father, John Wyatt, petitioned for custody eight days after Emma’s birth. A Virginia court granted custody, and ordered the baby returned. A Utah judge granted temporary custody to the adoptive parents, saying that Wyatt did not assert his parental rights on time. Wyatt has never seen his daughter; she is now 14 months old, and has only known her adoptive parents. Wyatt’s appeal is pending in Utah. And it’s not just a legal mess, but an ideological one — part of the reason that Wyatt is unable to attain custody of his daughter is because Utah privileges two-parent families over single fathers:

Joan Hollinger, a University of California at Berkeley professor and a leading authority on adoption law, called Utah’s decisions in the Baby Emma case “outrageous” because Wyatt filed for custody in Virginia just eight days after Emma’s birth. Utah laws and court decisions, she said, “make it virtually impossible for an out-of-state father to prevent the adoption of an out-of-wedlock child when the mother is determined to go forward.”

Utah is culturally conservative, and lawyers say the powerful Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with its emphasis on family values, has strongly encouraged adoption-friendly laws. “The Utah statutes can be harsh, but they are looking at what’s best for the child: stable placements and two-parent families,” said David Hardy, a lawyer for LDS Family Services, a Mormon Church-affiliated adoption agency that is among the nation’s largest.

That is a very scary standard, and can be used against a wide variety of people — single dads, single moms, low-income families, same-sex parents, and on and on. There also seems to be an assumption that men just aren’t as naturally adept at parenting as women are, which I’m not sure is something we want to encode into law. My initial reaction, like that of a lot of folks, is that this is horribly unfair.

At the same time, though, it really is not as simple as people like Radley Balko make it sound (although he makes many compelling points). He writes:

Speaking of which, I’m trying to figure out how Fahland—and possibly the Utah adoption agency—aren’t guilty of kidnapping. I’ll concede that I know very little about family law, and perhaps the law is as perverse here as it can be in other areas. But Wyatt is the child’s father. Once Fahland gave up her custody rights, one would think that full custody rights reverted to Wyatt. From the article, Fahland and the adoption agency appear to have conspired to make the handoff before Wyatt was even aware his child had been born, and before he could prevent the adoption from happening. If the roles had been reversed, and Wyatt had swiped the kid out of the nursery and rushed her off to an out-of-state adoption agency to, say, prevent himself from having to pay child support, is there any doubt he’d be charged with kidnapping?

I’m also not an expert in family law, and the law does differ from state to state, but there are serious public policy concerns with the proposal that once a biological mother gives up custody that it should automatically revert to the father, or the idea that a woman placing a baby for adoption without the father’s consent is doing something equivalent to a man swiping a baby from a nursery and taking it to an out-of-state adoption agency.

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Boycotting Arizona

This is not at terrible idea.

A spreading call for an economic boycott of Arizona after its adoption of a tough immigration law that opponents consider racially discriminatory worried business leaders on Monday and angered the governor.

Several immigrant advocates and civil rights groups, joined by members of the San Francisco government, said the state should pay economic consequences for the new law, which gives the police broad power to detain people they reasonably suspect are illegal immigrants and arrest them on state charges if they do not have legal status.

Critics say the law will lead to widespread ethnic and racial profiling and will be used to harass legal residents and Latino citizens.

La Opinión, the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, urged a boycott in an editorial Monday, as did the Rev. Al Sharpton, and calls for such action spread to social media sites. The San Francisco city attorney and members of the Board of Supervisors said they would propose that the city not do business with the state.

They followed the lead of Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, who had urged conventions to skip the state, though other Democrats who oppose the law, including Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix, pleaded for people not to punish the entire state.

Don’t punish the entire state? I understand the argument, but perhaps the state shouldn’t be punishing Latin@s. And perhaps this — combined with a lot of immigrants leaving the state — will help Arizona to see that immigrants aren’t the enemy, and that racially profiling and marginalizing brown people has serious economic consequences.

Anti-Choice? There’s an app for that.

The American Life League now has an anti-choice app for the iPhone. I’m sort of confused about what it does, exactly, other than let you upload photos wearing a pro-life t-shirt. Awesome, you guys.

So why this app? Here is why:

“Primarily, we are concerned with getting people to think of the child as a person from the moment of his or her biological beginning,” Carroll said. “It is much harder to murder a person than it is to “remove a lump of tissues,” and it is only when we finally get the nation thinking in those terms that we will be able to restore the right to life of our preborn brothers and sisters. Just by wearing the t-shirt and being out there in public, you will help to accomplish that goal!”

If you take a picture of yourself wearing a pro-life t-shirt and going about your daily business — brushing your teeth, holding a baby, screaming at women in front of abortion clinics, you know, the usual — you get points through the ALL app. The person with the most points gets a free iPod Touch.

So here’s an idea, pro-choicers: Let’s celebrate pre-born babies, and send pictures to the American Life League demonstrating just how much we love the smallest creatures among us. Take a picture of your used tampon, next to the pro-life t-shirt you made yourself (we wouldn’t want to give money to companies that make pro-life t-shirts, after all). Bonus: If you are fertile and have penis-in-vagina sex, there’s a chance that your tampon could even contain a fertilized egg! After all, something like half of all fertilized eggs naturally don’t implant anyway. By the American Life League’s standards, that’s basically the equivalent of taking a picture of you holding a baby. Pro-life! Or, take a picture of yourself holding a used condom. Every sperm is sacred! Aren’t pre-babies adorable when there are thousands of them? Any pregnant ladies out there? Perhaps show ALL what a beautiful pregnant body looks like without its pro-life t-shirt. Or maybe demonstrate via photodiary how you got that way in the first place! Any ladies trying to get pregnant? Let ALL know what that’s all about! Anyone giving birth anytime soon? A minute-by-minute photo shoot — from the doctor or midwife’s vantage point, of course — could be pretty great.

Alternately, we could show the American Life League what preventing abortion actually looks like. Perhaps a photo of you taking your birth control pill (or inserting your diaphragm)! Or if you aren’t the hormonal birth control/diaphragm type, might I suggest pictures of you getting a vasectomy, or putting on a condom! Maybe a nice shot of you having sex with someone who cannot possibly get you pregnant (perhaps someone of the same sex)! Maybe just a nice masturbation photo! (Although I suppose a picture of you protesting outside of an abortion clinic could also fall into this category). Perhaps, on the tamer side, a picture of you talking to your kids about basic biology and safer sex. Or maybe you at a march for universal health care, or you donating to a campaign to mandate coverage of birth control pills. Maybe a photo of you working to secure comprehensive health care coverage for low-income women, or immigrants, or girls. Maybe a picture of you teaching a comprehensive sex ed class. Maybe a picture of you helping a friend out with childcare. Maybe a picture of you doing some feminist blogging. The abortion-preventing options are endless!

Thanks to Amanda for the heads up.

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In case it’s not clear, I am kidding about sending sexy-time photos to the American Life League. Don’t do that. Or if you do, because let’s be honest it’s kind of hilarious, don’t blame me for it please. But sending photos of what preventing abortion actually looks like (i.e., comprehensive sex ed, birth control access, etc)? Not a terrible idea. And props to the lady who sends in the first tampon pic.

Arizona Immigration Law: A Roundup

A map of several Southwestern U.S. states. Arizona is in read, and instead of bearing the state's name, reads "POLICE." Text placed in a brown banner below reads "Brown Skin is Not a Probable Cause. Stop SB 1070." Tiny text along the bottom says "No More Racial Profiling! Stop the Arizona Police State!"Recently, I wrote about a bill in Arizona that would require police to check the papers of those they “reasonably suspect” to be undocumented immigrants. Tragically, infuriatingly, and unforgivably, that bill has now passed both houses of the legislature and been signed by the governor.

A brief rundown of the law can be found here. Commendably, even the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police has openly opposed it (pdf), while the former police chief of a Phoenix suburb has condemned it as catastrophic. President Obama, too, has spoke out against the law, along with Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, though they didn’t go much further than calling it “misguided.” Others worry that the Arizona law could be used as a basis for similar legislation in other states.

It’s useless and cowardly to mince words here: this new law is racist as racist gets. It is without a doubt directly targeting Latin@s. And the arguments that it’s not are pathetic and disingenuous at best. Suspicion is not going to be primarily based on shoes or attire. A Latino man dressed in sneakers, jeans, and an old tee-shirt is indeed more likely to arouse “reasonable suspicion” than a Latino man in a business suit — but the fact that class may sometimes mitigate the effect for some Latin@s doesn’t change the facts that the effect is going to be felt almost entirely by Latin@s all the same, and that enforcement will be discriminatory. Enforcement based on race with a dash of class mixed in is not materially better than enforcement based entirely on race. And while the bill explicitly prohibits against profiling “solely” on race, it does leave the former entirely legal.

A lot of people have written a lot of really brilliant posts about the horrifying passage of this law. Field Negro has a great post, and you should definitely check out both Nezua’s post at the Unapologetic Mexican and Shark-Fu’s post at Angry Black Bitch. But my favorite post I’ve read so far is Problem Chylde’s post Arizona: All Latin@s Carry Papers or GTFO. She writes:

I don’t want to do a first they came chant. They’ve never stopped coming. They come through half-cocked racist philosophies; they come through brutal murders and attacks; they come in board rooms and conference rooms; they reduce humanity and need to numbers and ledgers. They won’t stop coming until we the people as a humane, peacemaking force make them never want to come again. Constant vigilance precludes passivity. When they come, and they always do, let them come knowing every step they take closer to fascism is a hazard to their power, their money, and their sense of morality.

We no longer wait for them to come. First we fight.

Go check out all of the linked posts in full (and feel free to leave more links in the comments, as there have been a lot of posts!).

I want to close this post with a list of actions you can take to combat this law. Sadly, most I’ve come across are little more than symbolic. But at least they’re something. Problem Chylde has a list:

Where do we go from here? There is a Facebook group to join, a petition to sign, a call to boycott Arizona and Arizona-based businesses, a list of organizations to check out, and badges you can use around the internet to show solidarity.

If you’ve got other ideas and actions, do let us know.

UPDATE: For more action items, see Kai’s comment.

MOD NOTE: Since this sadly came up last time, I need to say right now that I’m not going to entertain comments that try to argue that this law is not racist. I’m going to delete them. I have as much time and patience for those kinds of comments in this space as I would have for comments arguing a bill outlawing abortion is not misogynistic. The humanity and human rights of undocumented immigrants and of Latin@s are not any more up for discussion in a feminist space than the humanity and human rights of women, or any other marginalized group. I do not apologize for this, but maintain that it is necessary to a progressive space that is safer for all oppressed and marginalized people.

Last Chance: Bowling for Abortion Access

Ok Feministers, now is the time: Donate to the Feministe team and support the National Abortion Access Fund. We’re still really far away from reaching our goal, so please help out! Also, I’ll be bowling tonight in Williamsburg with Sally, Sady and some Feministe friends, and the number of beers I buy for everyone is dependent on how much Feministe raises — so help out women in need, and get your bloggers some cheap drinks in the process.

For those who are unfamiliar with the group, the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) is an organization that provides financial assistance to low-income women seeking abortions. It is a network of local, grassroots organizations that work tirelessly to pay for abortion care and the surrounding costs — the procedure itself, bus or air fare to get somewhere that offers the procedure (87% of US counties don’t have an abortion provider), and a place to stay if a woman needs it. Abortion is not covered by federal (and most state) Medicaid dollars, and so low-income women and women and girls who rely on the government for their health care are out of luck when it comes to paying for the procedure. It can take months for women to scrounge together enough money, and to pawn off enough of their belongings, to afford the procedure — and as time passes, the procedure becomes harder to access and much more limited. I’ve written before about my volunteer work with the Haven Coalition, which provides housing for low-income women and girls traveling to New York for second-trimester abortions (you can read a little bit about that here, if you’re interested). In my work with Haven, I saw just how crucial NNAF’s work is for women in need. Women show up in New York City with literally nowhere to sleep — they often plan on spending the night on park benches or in the subway while they undergo a two-day-long procedure — because they have put all of their resources into paying for their abortion procedures. NNAF helps to close the financial gaps that low-income women face in terminating pregnancies. Their work is often thankless, but incredibly valuable. It gives women access to a necessary medical procedure, and it gives women a second chance.

This is an issue that is, for me, very personal and very important. The Bowl-a-Thon is a fundraiser to help NNAF continue their incredible work.

Oh and if you all get the Feministe fundraising page up to $1,000, I’ll bowl in these glasses. Except mine are peach-colored and python-print. Public humiliation for a good cause!