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

Month: July 2012

Feministe Book Club: Catching Fire, Chapters 19-27, and Mockingjay open thread

This thread is open for discussion of Part III of Catching FIre and for the entirety of Mockingjay. Why? Because I hated Mockingjay but am sure there are some of you who didn’t and would like to discuss it. Ready, go.

Next up: We’re done with the Hunger Games trilogy. Any suggestions for future reads? Preferences for wait times before launching into the next book (if at all)? It’s summertime, which means a) plenty of opportunities to crack a book, unless b) you have grownup responsibilities, which so frequently multiply during the summer, which isn’t fair. Your suggestions in comments.

Choice: It’s None of Your Business

It’s that age.

I have one friend who is hosting her baby shower. I have another friend who is waiting at an abortion clinic.

Another friend—of the friend who is having a baby—just bought a pink blanket with baby elephants on it for the baby shower. I’ve been sending my other friend funny text messages all morning—she is too strong and fierce to let me wait with her at the clinic, no matter how much I pleaded.

Both girls made the perfect choice. Because both girls made their choice—something that will shape what the rest of their lives look like.

So, I want to write about choice today—being a woman, republicans and how the choices we make are no one’s business except our own.

Having a baby at age 22 doesn’t look easy—but as her birthday is around the corner, we celebrate her upcoming arrival. Having an abortion at age 22 doesn’t look like an easy decision to make—but having that option is something to celebrate. Neither are tragic or to be despaired. As much as those who are pro-choice lament a young woman being saddled with a child not being able to have as much freedom as her childless friends, at some point her choice to become a mother needs to be accepted and celebrated. As much as women hear about another woman having an abortion and feel nauseas, sympathetic and upset at imagining—or remembering—that decision, it’s important to respect that choice as something responsible for the future. After all, she is in good company—one in every three women gets an abortion, and sixty percent of those women are already married.

Sometimes we don’t use as much protection as we should. Sometimes we use every type of protection possible—and despite the fact that it is 99% effective in conjunction with another form that is 99.7% effective, we are the .03 percent. Until there is a radical revolution in biology, and men can also get pregnant, we will always be at a disadvantage—as we fight for workplace and economic equality, leadership positions, and careers and contributions to the world around us that go far beyond the domestic sphere, it’s important that choice is available, affordable and accessible.

It’s a difficult choice to make—no one is in danger of trivializing it. But the social stigma and forced tragedy of it seem to only make it worse.

So, I would like to say a few words to all of the Republican (and Democrat) legislators trying to make abortion inaccessible—first through manipulating insurance plans away from covering it, then through enforcing mandatory counseling, mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds designed to guilt women about their choice and then through absurd regulations designed to shut down abortion clinics, making abortion nominally legal but inaccessible.

Those words? Fuck. You. All.

You are all men. You have no idea what it is like to be a woman, and what it is like to be pregnant, not be sure if you are pregnant or even any grasp of how much taking a pregnancy to term affects every aspect of daily life—and then the future thereafter. You can have children, see them when you come home, and continue your career (as an ideological terrible politician) being as absent as you choose to, or not to be.

Your desire to control women’s bodies is sickening. The painstaking effort you are taking on legislation to choke our right to choose from the outside, all the while cutting funding from institutions that actually matter would be absurd—if it weren’t so immediately dangerous to our lives and futures.

As men who wish to be called men, you have no role in the abortion debate other than to unquestioningly support women in whatever choice they might choose to make. Politicians, we are not your daughters, and even if we were you have no right to compromise our futures with one stroke of your patriarchal pen. Boyfriends, lovers, flings, sex buddies and men we knew for a night, this is not your choice. It is ours. We will figure it out. Trust us.

Vagina Drama, and Why It Matters

Everyone is probably aware that Michigan Democratic State Senator Lisa Brown had a one-day gag order imposed upon her for using the word “vagina” in a comment about state abortion clinic regulations. What she said was, “I’m flattered you’re all so interested in my vagina, but no means no.”

On Being A Good Lebanese Girl

Or a good Greek girl. Or a good Indian girl. Or a good Mexican girl. Or a good any-ethnicity-that-has-ever-been-shoved-down-your-throat-ever girl.

I want you to meet Charlie. Charlie and I met each other just a little over a year ago—but I can’t believe it’s only been that short. He was holding an appletini and talking about fashion. I was drinking a Brooklyn Lager and talking about politics.

“I mostly write about the Middle East—it’s a little bit personal because my family is from there”

“Oh my god, me too. Where from?”

“Lebanon”

“Me too!”

That night, we talked about everything. We talked about fashion in Beirut. We talked about drag queen names—he said he would be, “Anya Knees.” We talked about Lebanon. I made him tell me stories about living there. We talked about our music. We talked about our culture. We talked about our families. We talked about our mothers. We talked about our traditions. We talked about that we were both Greek Orthodox. We talked about our recipes and our food—we talked a lot about food.

Our first date, just the two of us was a Middle Eastern restaurant in the East Village called Moustache. We only fell more in love.

Charlie is a self-proclaimed “Good Lebanese Girl.” He was born in Beirut—and came to the United States in 2006, when the country was rocked with instability as the Israeli Defense Force bombed the southern part of the country. His family went to California, where they opened a Lebanese restaurant that he worked at—later, he moved to New York City to study fashion design.

Once a month, Charlie drags me out to “Habibi Night”—a night of music and dancing for gay Arabs—or as he calls them, “gayrabs”—living in New York City. We dance. We celebrate. We get in conversations about our backgrounds with strangers and exchange stories.

On other nights, we’ve stayed in—cooking food and talking about our opinions on religion, traditionalism and how it’s affected our families and everyone else around us. We’ve talked about the differences of being Lebanese-American and being American, and how when we meet another one of our bretheren we feel more at home. Some of these conversations have taken place in his tiny studio apartment, underneath his gigantic Lebanese flag. Other times they have happened at other friends’ apartments, typically while wearing blonde wigs.

Recently, Charlie decided to move back to Lebanon—his parents had moved back there, and Charlie was both looking for a change and responding to a longing that he had felt since he left. I was nervous about him—he isn’t out to his family, and he was moving home to a country where homosexuality is illegal. Last time he was in Lebanon, he was younger and hadn’t come out yet—and despite the fact that it is painted as the progressive country of the Middle East because women can wear mini skirts, there are still many arcane laws and customs.

For our last dinner before his departure, we met at Moustache for old times sake. He looked stylish and fabulous as always—reading the Arabic written on the walls out loud to me. Equal parts gay and Lebanese, embracing and never compromising all elements of his identity. I couldn’t help worrying about him—as the country of our origins once again flirts with instability, all I wanted to do was hold him close.

But the time came to say goodbye. As I walked home, missing him since the moment we parted ways, I thought about our friendship, our heritage and our identities. Neither of us are exactly the ideal good Lebanese girl. I moved far away from my family, am twenty-one years old and don’t have a child with another one on the way and no intention of making this happen for a while. I am outspoken on a variety of topics, curse like a sailor and am most likely inadvertently offensive. I have no embroidery skills. Charlie is gay, a connoisseur of fine drag queens and fashion, is not and will never date a woman. However, when we are together, we talk about our heritage. We talk about our families, we talk about how politics shaped our lives—and brought us together to New York City, only to discuss the layers of history of another place that we identify with. We talk about how our identity has changed how we articulate our passions—fashion and politics. We dance. We celebrate our culture. We imagine meeting again in Lebanon.

We call our families everyday. We discuss and obsess over our heritage. We piece together our stories. We are proud. Our heritage and culture matters to us.

We are the perfect good Lebanese girls.

Book You Should Read: Some Of My Best Friends Are Black

Tanner Colby has written a fascinating history of segregation/integration in America, which looks at how and why the racial integration process has utterly failed. He travels across the country to look at four key social pillars: schools, housing, the church, and the advertising industry. What he finds is that black people and white people in America are living parallel but separate lives — and that the white side of things retains a hold on power, money and influence. I will be writing a full review very soon, but in the meantime, you should pick it up.

My Views On National Security As A Seventh Grader, and How it Took A Social Movement to Make Me Proud to Be An American

America.

Baby, it’s complicated.

But like all complicated relationships, underneath it all, I love you.

It wasn’t always like this. We’ve been on quite a journey.

It started when I was eleven—my first week of Middle School. I heard my mother on the phone with my father in the other room.

“Oh my god. That’s terrible. Ok, ok, ok”

She came to get me to tell me that someone had crashed two planes into the World Trade Center. You might recall the event that I am talking about.

We didn’t know who had done it, or why or where. We were just watching it replay on the TV, again and again in complete shock and horror. I had no idea what the World Trade Center, or even New York City really was in the first place. I was eleven.

I just knew that it was horrible.

Everyone was talking about it. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had a narrow escape. I can’t imagine what it was like to be in New York and to know someone who had not had a narrow escape.

One month later, I was watching the news with my family (I was a weird eleven year old), and the news broke that the United States had begun to bomb Afghanistan.

In my Middle School classroom, we shared news stories every morning—as eleven year olds, we were pretty tapped into things. A boy raised his hand and I assumed he would bring up that we were bombing Afghanistan, so I put my hand down.

“Barry Bonds got his 500th home run this weekend!”

I raised my hand tentatively. The teacher called on me.

“I think we started bombing Afghanistan this weekend.”

~*~*~

It’s one year later, and now we’re in a different social studies classroom. We were still bombing Afghanistan—but this time we were bombing Iraq, too. We were having a debate in my social studies classroom about whether or not this was right (remember, I grew up in the Bay Area).

Those who were for invading Iraq sat on one side of the room, those who were against it sat on the other. Gradually, more and more went and sat on the pro side of the room, seventh graders spewing out the ideology of Fox News that in order to have peace, we needed to have war.

I tried to see things from their perspective, trying desperately to turn needing war for peace into logic. Remember, I was a weird, emerging hyper-politicized twelve- year old who needed friends in Middle School.

Soon, I was the only one on the anti-war side of the room.

Was I crazy?

~*~*~

I was politically dissident. I was the only dark haired ethnic girl in a room full of blondes. I had yet to discover eyebrow tweezing, so even my forehead seemed like it was paying homage to Saddam Hussein.

I was un-American.

Luckily in high school I found some fellow social outcasts to befriend. I also found a socialist self-proclaimed comparative politics teacher to inappropriately fall in love with from a distance, a wonderful English teacher who introduced me to George Orwell and a drama teacher who remains a dear friend to this day who was not afraid to vent his political opinions—despite the school guidelines expressly prohibiting that.

~*~*~

I moved to New York City for college—and got out of my tiny town in California. The wars that started when I was mid puberty, had only escalated and I was very much a woman. They grew a lot more than my boobs ever did.

But Barack Obama won the election!

Everything was supposed to change. The troops would come home. We would have healthcare. The world wouldn’t hate us anymore.

I was proud to be an American for the first time—ever.

~*~*~

It has been eleven years since I raised my hand and told my class that we were bombing Afghanistan. We still are. Supposedly, we have withdrawn from Iraq—but we have decimated the country, and the destruction from the chronic diseases—both physical and psychological—has yet to take its toll. I’m not proud to be part of a country that has this global legacy.
However, last year something happened—Americans rose up.

Now, I have many mixed feelings and emotions about the Occupy movement—something I will probably have to save for another blog post where I do not divulge my entire perspective on national security circa 7th grade—but it did something magical. It criticized America—but with love and desire to reclaim America from a corrupt government and a corrupt culture. It criticizes corporate personhood, and the culture that endorses it, demands accountability for the banks that catapulted us into a financial crisis, and brought together dangerous people with revolutionary ideas.

It brought together the types of people who sat alone on the anti-war side of the room in their Middle School classrooms.

I realized that I wasn’t crazy that whole time.

So, today we celebrate a revolution. We celebrate proclaiming our independence from a country whose values we felt were aristocratic, exclusionary and claustrophobic. We celebrate the bravery and imagination to chart our own course as a people and create, rather than adhere to our future. I hope that we the people can reclaim our independence—and what it means to be American, away from how our politicians have defined it through destructive foreign policy and exclusionary immigration decisions that happen behind closed doors in Washington, DC.

I hope that we, the American people who will reclaim our independence are on the frontier of creating a new country, shaped by our unique identities and voices that is more economically and socially just, and a much better neighbor to our fellow citizens of the world.

When I look around at the dedicated, hard-working, creative and loving Americans who are coming together and doing everything in their power to make that happen, the weight I felt that I didn’t belong for so many years is lifted and I feel proud to be an American.

I’m gonna go drink beer now.

Evangelical Christian Movement: Voting and Elections

During the earlier series on the Evangelical Christian Movement I skimmed over the discussion of the Movement’s political influence in the U.S. It’s a story that’s been covered at length by the mainstream media [New York Times, Huffington Post, CNN].

There is no doubt the Movement is having a powerful impact on our upcoming Presidential and Congressional elections, but I am convinced that the more insidious influence is in our local and state elections. In the 1990s the Movement intentionally shifted their focus to these smaller elections where their voting block would have a greater impact.

As explained more than a decade ago by Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition:

The Christian community got it backwards in the 1980s. We tried to charge Washington when we should have been focusing on the states. The real battles of concern to Christians are in neighborhoods, school boards, city councils, and state legislatures.

[Hankins, American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement]

In the early 1990s, Reed reported that 4,000 evangelicals were sitting on school boards in the U.S. and the People for the American Way reported that the Movement won 40 percent of the state and local elections they participated in. [DeFilippis et al, Contesting Community: The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing].

Of course, its been a long ass time since the Christian Coalition essentially imploded. [Washington Post]. So you may be asking yourself why the hell we should care. Well, personally, I’m not sure the influence of the remaining grassroots organizations is as dead as we might think. As I argued last time that:

[T]he goals of the modern Evangelical Movement are to create social and legal restrictions on abortion, contraception, financial safety nets, family structures, and sexual behavior.

And these principles appear, to me, to be driving the vile legislation we’ve seen in recent years [Feministe]. Of course it’s just a theory.

Assuming this theory is correct (and I recognize the size of that assumption), there is one rather obvious (if impractical) solution. We have to organize to contest candidates who share the Movement’s values.

A lot of work has been done by others about how organize for social and political change. [Online Conference on Community Organizing.]* Step One? Identify the problem. Or in this case, the candidates in our state, local, and judicial elections that are aligned with the Evangelical Christian Movement.

Easier said than done of course. Such candidates are not always visible. In local and school board elections there usually isn’t significant advertising. Instead politicians rely on political party membership or “handshake” campaigning. Affiliated churches, as the organizing institution of the Movement, are extraordinarily effective for these candidates. Sometimes they are even recruited or “called” from churches in part because they are perceived as having a built-in voter base. [My father was once “called” to run for office. Fortunately, he ignored that calling but as a consequence we had to leave that particular church.] In addition, there are rousing sermons (Remember Pastor Hagee?) that instruct members about the importance of voting and voting according to “God’s will.” [Feministe] Perhaps more importantly for local or school board elections, affiliated churches provide access to motivated voters and getting a voter to recognize your name is 90% of the battle. But unless a candidate reaches national attention, the general public may never know the candidate’s association with the Evangelical Christian Movement.

Project Vote Smart (one of my favorite websites of all time) can give us some indication because they aggregate the interest group scorecards (like the one for Planned Parenthood!). Still, these are an imperfect metric for local and school board elections where that level of analysis is not available.

Ideally, I would love to see a special interest group that engages candidates at this local level on the specific issues the Movement is trying to push: for example, allowing bullying in schools, reducing sex education, permitting CPCs to operate without proper oversight, modifying school curriculums to whitewash history, among others. The cool thing is, I think it’s actually doable. If we do the work of putting together questionnaires about the issues that are relevant to our communities and send them to the candidates, then groups like Project Vote Smart will likely include those results.

So my questions to you are, first, what do you think? Do you think this might be an effective way to counter the influence of the Movement at least at a local level? Is this something you might be interested in participating in? What types of questions would you ask your local candidates given what you’ve seen occurring in your communities?

*Of course this is just my favorite link, there are thousands of other excellent resources out there. Please feel free to link to your favorite in the comments.