When I think of it, my fingers turn to fists January 29, 2009

A week full of reading blogs coded with misogyny and meetings with hiring managers who think it’s acceptable to call and ask for a date after my interview has boiled my brain down to one gluey question: What does it take for me to be taken seriously, both as a woman in general and as myself in particular? Yes, my self is a woman; however, every little bit of nastiness and disrespect towards women that I read has been getting under my skin as of late, and said irritation is both on my own behalf and on behalf of women as a group. I think all that disrespect has an aggregate effect on how I’m presented and interpreted, and it’s not a pretty result.

Is the answer to file harassment complaints against said flirty manager-types? Not likely to have an effect. Wearing a terrible haircut, no makeup, and ill-fitting clothes to an interview? It’s not like I’m going in there with my breasts squeezed together and my hair tousled. Stay quiet, and you’re stuck reflecting the notion that all is well in the world of women’s issues and that equal pay and sexist jokes are dead issues; speak up and you’re labeled as a bitchy militant feminist who seeks refuge in her blog, where she rails against reality and verbalizes her bitterness.

Well, guess what– I am a feminist, and that doesn’t make me militant or bitchy. I cannot overstate how much work there is to be done on behalf of women in the workplace, in medical care, and in the social sphere (just to name a few areas). The thing that set me off today, as opposed to yesterday or the day before, was actually a Facebook interaction. Yes, it’s a social networking site where people post unfiltered thoughts and comments. The Posted Items and Notes features, however, have become increasingly bloggish, with many users even cross-posting from their Delicious and WordPress accounts. So I feel like it’s fair to demand a certain level of accountability from posters.

The blog/note that kicked things off today started off like a joke. It was a rant against the burgeoning culture of mandatory tipping in the service economy, but bubbling to the surface were nasty little bits of contempt against women. Interspersed were gems such as “I know better now. Take your cute little laugh and pathetic attempt to wink and [sic] you’re ‘what can I get for you, dollface?’ little voice and go practice taking caps of bottles. You’re not good enough at it yet to impress me.”

Awkward? For me, the phrasing there crosses that slim line between highlighting the game of the sexes that female bartenders play along with to get ahead and enters the territory of subjugation and misogyny. It has an unmistakable tone of, “I can’t have you, so fuck you; you’re a whore for making me want you.” Once again, can’t have a woman = not her fault. It’s that kind of rape justification logic that suffuses all other discourse about women. She was asking for it, she wanted it, she started it… so it’s her fault. Humorous intent isn’t a good enough reason to circulate content like that.

In retrospect, it could have been any post that set me off; this one just happened to do the trick. It is no longer acceptable to hide misogyny behind a character or comic voice; these images circulate in the collective minds of everyone who reads them and have a cumulative effect on our perception of women. No matter how innocuous the writer claims his intentions were, talking about women with that kind of bitterness and hate is disrespectful and reduces us, among other things, to sex objects and second-class citizens. It is no less serious than this.

Of course, my ire was already stoked by the text message I received the previous evening– from a private cellphone– saying that it was “OK that I didn’t want the job” and we could “still be friends LOL… let me know when you can hang out.” After staring at my phone, open-mouthed, I realized it was from a hiring manager who’d interviewed me the previous week. This on the heels of having to– repeatedly– explain to the big boss at my last place of employment what my policy on inter-office dating would be, should the opportunity present itself. Which was directly preceded by no fewer than three colleagues feeling the need to “confess” to crushes on me. It’s not that I’m excessively desirable or flirtatious; somewhere along the way, the message didn’t get across to these boys that the workplace is not a fertile ground for getting a date.

I don’t bring my sneaky, evil feminine wiles into the workplace; I don’t wink to get the copier fixed; I don’t sidle up to my interview subjects to get them to open up on the record; I didn’t wear a tight skirt to get my edits to newspaper articles approved. Hell, I never even did the pop-and-wink when I bartended– I was objectified enough while captive behind that bar without a push-up bra and mascara.

I thought integrity was what it took to be taken seriously. In September I thought that the dichotomy of ballbreaker vs. ingenue had been shattered by Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Angelina Jolie– women who are neither the angel in the house nor the tough guy, but are women recognized for having talents in their own right. They might be tough– and that toughness even appears novel to some people who, apparently, have never met a working mother– but nobody’s asking them to give up their femininity. I wish I knew how they did it.

Blog for choice 09 January 22, 2009

In honor of the 36th anniversary of  the Roe v. Wade decision, I’m blogging for choice. It is fundamental to remember that the right to choose is a hard-won and newly-defended right– despite the explosive scientific and medical advances of the 1950’s and 1960’s, religious doctrine guided by the hand of sexual oppression still determined abortion policy in much of the United States in 1973. Not the decisions of women and their doctors, but the doctrines of religions despite the clear delineation of church and state outlined in our Constitution.

The enforcement of that separation, combined with the right to privacy outlined in the 14th Amendment, provide women with the right to choose abortion without approval from government, husbands, boyfriends, parents, rapists, judges, or police.

It’s become clear in the subsequent years that the overwhelming majority of women do not view abortion as a method of birth control (a favorite argument of the religious right), but rather as a last resort. Despite the assertion that women use abortion as birth control, the same religious right fails to see that women must be provided with quality education about and access to viable methods of birth control– the only realistic way to reduce the number of abortions performed in the United States.

The right to abortion must be protected and defended on a federal level. The states’ rights argument is a shield that would allow individual states to violate a woman’s constitutional rights. Abortion should be safe and legal, and ideally, rare. Rare because it’s a choice nobody likes to make, and that isn’t taken lightly; rare because good reproductive planning should decrease the amount of surgical and chemical abortions necessary. But not rare because the government intervenes and tells women what to do with their wombs.

Here’s a fascinating video on another blog for choice: How to stump anti-choicers

How have they never thought about the answer to this question?

And below, from the DNC’s 2008 party platform:

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.
The Democratic Party also strongly supports access to comprehensive affordable family planning services and age-appropriate sex education which empower people to make informed choices and live healthy lives. We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions.
The Democratic Party also strongly supports a woman’s decision to have a child by ensuring access to and availability of programs for pre- and post-natal health care, parenting skills, income support, and caring adoption programs.

Defend and protect your rights, and report any organization that tries to intimidate or tread on your right to choose by reporting them to your local NARAL/Pro Choice America chapter.

Dear Barack Obama: Where’s my job? December 7, 2008

So this is appropriate… President-elect Obama’s speechwriters can party hard and that’s fine. But please explain to me how someone so inarticulate that they have to grope a cardboard cutout of Senator Clinton instead of scathingly critique her– and so misogynistic that this is how they treat women in politics– is head of speechwriting for the whole freaking White House?

Mr. Obama, give me a break. If you’re going to give this silver-platter job to some twenty-something screwup… I’ve got your screwup right here. See, I thought I wasn’t bestest and brightest enough to make the cut for the Obama dream team… but seeing staffers such as Favreau makes me realize I, too, have a chance! If this kid is qualified, I’ve no doubt that my intellectual prowess and communications skills are up to snuff. I have… what’s that… word… hope!

I’ll tell you this much: Closeted skeletons or past e-mail indiscretions aside, I’d definitely disable my Facebook upon acceptance of the job– and I can promise you I’d find better criticisms of political rivals than pointing out that they have breasts. Oh yes, yes I can.

So give that speechwriting gig to me instead, President-elect Obama. I may not have the Heineken-drinking skills or cardboard-breast-groping talents of Jon Favreau, but I promise you I could do the job at least as well as that guy.

This is for my bitches November 6, 2008

This is for everyone who said we couldn’t rock the youth vote…

This is a referendum on the poor choices that 51% of the electorate made in 2004…

It’s a real mandate for change, instead of a Supreme Court-delivered sham victory grotesquely twisted to allow a group of diabolical men to wreak havoc on the United States under the guise of a “mandate from the voters”…

It’s my generation standing up and saying, We’ve done this your way for 40 years. It’s not working. It’s our turn.

This is about realizing that it’s Christian to stop worldwide hunger, pollution, rape, and needless death at least as much as it is to blindly prohibit abortion.

This is me saying I didn’t just vote Obama for selfish reasons — I did it for my mom, and for my grandmother, because I believe he is the right choice for young and for old, for Americans.

It’s my answer to four years of asking, America, do we misunderstand each other so fatally?

This is me having my Michelle Obama “proud” moment. Not just feeling patriotic about living in a country where civil liberties most people only dream of are guaranteed; the pride that must have been felt by greater generations when they realized their achievements were more than the sum of their parts.

This is about the right to belief being contingent upon upholding the Constitution that protects it.

This is the first day of the end of Republican anti-intellectualism. This is the rejection of Karl Rove’s tactics. This is the moment when attitudes of individuals around the nation will start to shift as they learn that the quality of a person’s mind is more nuanced than the color of his skin.

This is not going to fix everything, but it’s a start.

Let’s talk about guns for a minute. June 26, 2008

The Supreme Court’s first-ever ruling on the Second Amendment– a sharp 5-4 split striking down the Washington, D.C. ban on handguns that’s been in effect since I was a child– touched off a lively discourse between myself and my significant other about politics, guns, and the law. It also revives the “bitter-guns-religion” comment the RNC seeks to use against Obama every day between now and the general election.

So let’s talk about it for a minute. Let’s talk about why the handgun ban was (and remains) entirely appropriate, why Bittergate is founded on a comment that, linguistically, makes a whole lot of sense, and why the positions I hold don’t run counter to my belief that law-abiding deer-hunting, target-practicing, crime-avoiding citizens in all 50 states have a protected right to own firearms. (AND I support the Brady ban.)

First of all, the argument for gun ownership that’s predicated on the immediate availability of a citizens’ militia is a joke. It would take a catastrophe we can’t even imagine for United States citizens to get off their sofas, load up their guns, organize, and take on an enemy. Prime example: on 9/11, I didn’t see all the gun owners protecting the Pentagon or encircling the gates to airports cracking down on passengers and sniping potential terrorists. The U.S. military & government handled that. Besides, wars aren’t fought by troop formations in militias anymore. The closest thing I can foresee to minutemen enforcing the law of the land is a solo vigilante enforcing his own brand of justice across the land. We call those “mass shootings.” The closest thing I can see to Americans protecting their way of life from a meddling or misguided government? Waco. So don’t tell me that gun ownership is some form of national security. It isn’t. That’s why we have a military and defense budget that are beyond compare.

Next up: The handgun debate. I grew up an hour outside of Washington, D.C. and I remember (even after the handgun ban was in effect) being keenly aware that Southeast was a good place to go if you wanted to get clipped by a stray bullet. Now, I know what you’re going to say: Handguns legally purchased by law-abiding citizens aren’t the issue in gun crime. And you’re right. They’re probably not. But the D.C. handgun ban is an important tool for law enforcement agencies. If they spot pistols on petty criminals who can’t be charged with much else, there is a law on the books that allows prosecution of those individuals, instead of letting them drive up the rate of gun violence. Banning handguns in the District gives law enforcement reason to believe that anyone who would willfully break that ban and carry a gun is probably not going to use it for shooting Pepsi cans.

The handgun ban doesn’t necessarily stop handguns from getting into the hands of would-be criminals. But it does create a scarcity of handgun dealers within the District. If handguns are outlawed, you can bet fewer stores will stock the clips and magazines for 9- and 8mm guns or .357s. The ban does make it just a little bit harder to commit a gun crime… and when one is committed, it makes the punishment a little harsher.

So some do-good lawyers are up in arms about this (no pun intended, but I’m keeping it). It’s a total violation of civil rights. Right? Is it really, or is it a wedge issue that the right wing can dramatize to keep their coffers full of donations during a campaign cycle? If the self-professed small-government types were that concerned about civil rights, they’d take up the issue of tweezers and shampoo in a carry-on bag long before they’d take up handguns in D.C., don’t you think? Oh but wait. That’s no longer a civil rights issue, it’s a national security issue?

Washington D.C. is unique from all the other states in the union. It’s not a state, and it’s not a city belonging to the State of Maryland or the Commonwealth of Virginia. It’s an independent federal district governed by Congress. D.C. is the international representative of the United States across the world, home to our embassies, our agencies, and our entire judicial, representative, and executive system. There are all kinds of bizarre laws that apply to the District and its residents– diplomatic immunity, an absolutely zero-tolerance DWI policy (if you get pulled over after one beer, it’s off to the chokey), can’t build higher than the top of the Capitol. You can’t even carry a pocketknife there. Why? Because it’s the nation’s capitol. And it’s different.

If banning handguns in the District of Columbia is part of a program to dramatically reduce overall crime (which it did) and make D.C. that much closer to a model city, I don’t see the problem. Owners of rifles, shotguns, and anything else that could be construed as a recreational firearm are welcome to own them in D.C. But handguns don’t make law-abiding citizens that much safer– in fact, in situations where the victim pulls a handgun on their attacker, they’re more likely to have the weapon turned against them than they are to debilitate the attacker. If you’re really that worried about it, get some damn mace!

Now, onto Bittergate. Let’s parse this sentence, and I’ll explain to you why Barry would have defended it if the average American newsviewer didn’t have the attention span of a hamster. About the former Southern Democrats, the Blue-Collar Blue Staters who have gone red, Barack Obama said the following:

“So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government” … In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it.”

And the kicker:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Please tell me what is wrong with that statement? Because I understood it the first time I read the transcript. And this is not me parsing words, this is just me paraphrasing what I hear in that statement:

“People in working-class areas feel frustrated with their government because, 25 years after manufacturing jobs have packed up and left town, it feels like their government’s economic policy has forgotten them. They don’t feel like trusting government solutions anymore because they have been burned. This economic mistrust has translated into a broader general mistrust of the United States government. Since the broader economic worry isn’t something that’s easily divided or articulated, these voters focus on easy explanations and arguments about illegal immigrants stealing jobs, or whether the government is interfering with their right to own guns, because they are easier positions to debate and defend. Since the government isn’t listening to them about the economy, they speak up about more divisive, hot-button issues in order to express their frustration.”

Now are you seriously going to tell me that isn’t totally true?

In conclusion. President Obama isn’t going to take away your .386 deer rifle, and he’s not making fun of your religion. He might try and put some windmills on your Appalachian mountains in place of the mountaintop coal removal that’s decimating the landscape, but he’s not going to destroy your way of life. You don’t need a pistol in the District of Columbia and you don’t need a damn M-16A2 to shoot opossums.

McCain camp embarrasses self, others unnecessarily early in campaign April 18, 2008

This one really makes me cringe from The Maverick, the one who’s promised that a contest between himself and Barack Obama would define a new kind of politics, you know– the one who’s above partisan attacks and negative ads?

Yeah, that guy– John McCain– he’s plucked his favorite from a list of dubious articles on a shoddy conservative website in order to pit his donors against known terrorist-coddler, Barack Obama. In a new fundraising e-mail, the Senator Above the Fray highlights a Hamas leader’s quote: “We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will win the election. He has a vision to change America.” Right up there in eloquence with the fake-ass anti-America quotes on Ahmadinejad’s blog.

The fundraising e-mail alleges that the “difference is clear” and that Obama’s policy approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict– especially the part where he acknowledges the organization that sort of, well, runs the Palestinian territories and won an election there– makes him a surrender monkey. To quote the e-mail: “Senator Obama would surrender in Iraq and hold talks with the Iranian regime, John McCain will never surrender in the struggle with Islamic extremists.”

So Obama will surrender in Iraq, talk to Iran, and (by deduction) surrender to the Islamic terrorists? Class act, you are, Senator McCain. I at least thought he’d wait to strike the bigots in their terrorist-fearing hearts until the general election.

But the real motive behind this fundraising shennanigan is revealed in its timing– before the Democratic nominee has been selected. It’s just one more example of how the Republicans are crossing their fingers that HRC is the nominee– she’s divisive enough that McCain just might beat her. Just one more reason (as if she needs one) for HRC to drop out ASAP. Hey, I wonder what her Israel policy is? Oh, oh that’s right, a single-state solution. Brilliant! Make that the newest reason +1 on my list.

I really wish with all these stunts for attention, the Obama camp would just say “your behavior is embarrassing and we’re not acknowledging it” than issuing a denunciation. Just ignore the children, Barry O.

Art, like pornography: you know it when you see it? April 17, 2008

I’m all for pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable in art. Especially when it offends, but doesn’t necessarily hurt, anyone, I have few qualms about contentious installations. Andres Serrano’s crucifix of Jesus submerged in urine (Piss Christ), for example, doesn’t fit my definition of “master works”; nevertheless, if a gallery wants post it and some collector wants to buy it, be my guest. But for my taste, what follows is completely over the line.

Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas Habacuc decided it would be acceptable– further, artistic– to take a stray dog from the streets, give it the ironic name “Natividad,” and string it to a wire in the corner of a gallery– in fact, the gallery space within Costa Rica’s National Center for Culture. His artistic decision, for this presentation, was to deprive the dog of food and water, causing the diseased animal to slowly starve to death under the eyes of gallery patrons. Let me take the sugar-coating off that for you: this dude tied a dog to a wall so people could watch it die.

And they did.

Yes, a few people stopped to protest. But the vast majority continued through the exhibit, obliviously or uncomfortably ignoring the incredible suffering before their eyes. In my sentimental view, there is a special level of wrongness in mistreating an animal; beyond the fundamental wrong in abusing any living thing, there’s the extra layer that the animal cannot rationalize why, or even that, it is being tortured. It’s an especially sick form of abuse.

Habacuc claims that the dog would have died without his intervention, and further says the purpose of the exhibit was to highlight human suffering (indeed, the point of all art?). Some gallery patrons justified this torture for its artistic message. And some critics enjoyed it so much that Habacuc has been invited to re-create the exhibit in Honduras.

Obviously, I don’t consider this exhibit to be anything more than a sick trick aimed at shock factor. The knee-jerk reaction of disgust, compounded by some high-minded ideals about artistic expression and the historic persecution of visionary artists, are my best guesses as to what mindset led others to label this exhibit art. But the exhibit does bring two distinct topics worth probing: How do we define art, and mob mentality, or what will we walk right past?

Much great art depicts or deals with suffering. As a society, we don’t shrink away from images of emaciated children, abused animals, or neglected neighborhoods. We find these images instructive and emotion-inducing, and they serve to teach us about the recognition of suffering. There are moments, however, when artists take this pursuit so far that their actions cease to be art. I can only hope that Habacuc is misguided and genuinely believes his work is a visionary example of suffering, because otherwise he is a flat-out psychopath and abuser of animals. To passively allow that dog to continue suffering in the streets, to photograph its suffering without intervention, or to allow myriad stray animals to remain wild are all deemed generally socially acceptable behaviors. Confining the dog and consciously deciding to allow it to suffer is something different. Let me be clear about this: Because a work generates outrage and demands self-reflection does not deem something art, or else genocide and FGM would be considered art.

Further, those who chose to walk past the exhibit without attempting to free the animal (and worse, those who wish to re-create the exhibit) display an interesting example of mob mentality. In a big enough group, something that assaults the conscience of the individual becomes “someone else’s problem.” A classic example: You’re more likely to assist a person who has tripped on a deserted sidewalk and dropped a sheaf of papers than you are to assist a Metro passenger who’s spilled their briefcase at the height of pedestrian rush hour. I’d like to think I’d be overcome by emotion if I saw such an exhibit, that I would immediately begin working to free the dog or that I’d ask a curator if the dog had only been given the appearance of suffering. But I can’t promise how I would react; after all, hundreds saw the exhibit and the dog still died.

Finally, consider the Joshua Bell example. He’s a lauded violinist (responsible for the soundtrack to The Red Violin) who gave a concert in a DC Metro station, for free. On a Stradivarius. As an experiment. The question: Who will acknowledge this musician, and why? The result: Less than 50 people out of a thousand paid him the time of day. I suspect that the passengers who hurried by, not making eye contact, were experiencing a bit of desensitization mixed with some of that same mob mentality. Just as something beautiful doesn’t always register, so something awful doesn’t always register with a single face in the crowd.

But forcing people to acknowledge everyday horror can be done by something other than killing a dog for show. When it comes to defining trash disguised as art, I’ll appropriate the words of Justice Potter Stewart on pornography: “I know it when I see it.” And that’s all I see in this exhibit.

Update: In another bizarre twist, a Yale art student claims to have performed repeated abortions on herself in order to “inspire some sort of discourse.” If you’re going to do this, at least make damn sure you have an articulate statement on the purpose… Well, at least she’ll probably never be able to reproduce.