This morning I got a message from my past. I sent it on November 6th using a web site called FutureMe, which lets you send messages to your future you. I requested delivery for today, February 13th, 2008.
Here’s the message:
Dear FutureMe,
read this and post about it:
And so that’s what I’m doing. It’s appropriate for today, the day before Valentine’s day.
This is one of a series of posts about Awesome Things To Do In Life.
A gang of six to ten ethically challenged Nova Scotia upperclassmen boys recently took it upon themselves to verbally harass a 9th grade boy for the high crime wearing pink to school, calling him a homosexual.
Seniors David Shepherd and Travis Price, above, decided to do something about it. Says David: “It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something.”
What did they do? They organized a protest, using the internet to encourage people to wear pink the next day to school. They purchased 75 pink tank tops, armbands and a basketball to distribute to other boys. They guess that about half of the school’s 830 students participated.
The Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald reports on what happened:
“The bullies got angry,” said Travis. “One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We’re glad we got the response we wanted.”
David said one of the bullies angrily asked him whether he knew pink on a male was a symbol of homosexuality.
He told the bully that didn’t matter to him and shouldn’t to anyone.
“Something like the colour of your shirt or pants, that’s ridiculous,” he said.
As for The Boy Who Was Bullied:
When the bullied student put on his pink shirt Friday and saw all the other pink in the lobby, “he was all smiles. It was like a big weight had been lifted off is shoulder,” David said. No one at the school would reveal the student’s name.
Not only to these boys seem to get bullying, they get community organizing, and they get the importance of privacy. Awesome.
Thanks to Lauredhel at Hoyden About Town, which is where I read about the story, and is one of my favorite feminist blogs.
The reality of social movements is that they tend to be populated by the people who are most effected by the movement. The civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s was predominantly African American. The feminist movement is driven by women. I’ve found myself more and more interested in participating in these movements, but I often find myself without good role models. It’s not appropriate for me to emulate Claudette Colvin or Malcom X or Dead Prez. I’m not black. Nor can I emulate Virginia Woolf or Andrea Dworkin or Liz Phair. I’m not a woman.
But I’ve found a few good role models. I see pro-feminist things in the men around me that I can emulate, even men who don’t identify as pro-feminist. And really, many things that women feminists do are totally appropriate for men to do: defying gender stereotypes, calling people out on sexism, spreading information about sexist events as they happen around us.
One of the best recommendations I think I’ve gotten from women feminists is that I should be constantly checking my privilege. That whenever I am doing something or expecting someone else to do something I should think about what role privilege played in making it easier or harder for us.
The trouble is: I’m a white, straight-acting male, and that simple fact makes me blind to a lot of things. I’ve never had to think about whether people thought I got a job because of my gender. I’ve never had to try to reverse that, and until fairly recently I wasn’t aware that some women and minorities have to worry about that. Not every woman and every minority has to worry about it, but I’ve certainly benefited by the fact that I was born into a group of people who is categorically exempt from that concern.
To make this job easier, a number of “Privilege Checklists” have been fashioned, to help people see privileges that might be invisible to them:
Update:
Average Sized Privilege Checklist
Able-Bodied Privilege Checklist
Obviously, it’s useful to read those checklists that apply to you. But the ones they don’t apply to you (because you’re a person of color or queer or female or transgendered) might be worthwhile to look at too. Because maybe there are privileges you enjoy that others in your gender/orientation/race do not. There are privileges on the Straight Privilege Checklist that apply to me, and privileges that don’t.
I kind of feel like these things are important to know.
Note: Sorry if you tried to comment on this post earlier and couldn’t. Comments should now be available.
Yesterday on I Blame The Patriarchy, Twisty asked provocatively: what if all heterosexual sex were deemed a criminal act perpetrated by the male? What if “consent” was irrelevant, and all it took to get a man thrown in jail for rape was proof that he had had sex with a woman and testimony from her that it was rape?
You can almost hear the collective sharp inhalation coming from the lungs of men all over the world. I certainly had the immediate “what about false accusations?” reaction when I first read her post. “Think of all those poor innocent men in jail!”
But I held my tongue and trudged on through the hundreds of comments. It was a comment from “Cunning Allusionment” that started to convince me that there was some sense in Twisty’s Law:
That raging injustice you [men] feel about this hypothetical situation? That’s how women feel about the real situation. And given the fact that we’re [men] the one’s with massive institutions of oppression behind us, maybe we can afford to give up a little of that privileged security they don’t have.
In other words, yes it opens the door for injustice against men, but the current legal system so ridiculously favors men that said injustice is a small price to pay for the, presumably, massive gain in justice which will result from empowering women to convict their rapists much more easily. The number of rapes that go unpunished under the current system is disgusting.
[A minor aside: Cunning Allusionment is a man. Why is it that all the female arguments seemed less than reasonable to me, but his argument got through my thick skull? Is it that I subconsciously give men more credibility, or is it just that because Cunning is a man, he knows which parts of the argument men have a hard time with and is, because of his experience having a penis, better able to speak to those?]
So I am pretty open to entertaining even the strongest version of Twisty’s suggestion. What’s frustrating to me about the comments on IBTP is that people keep asserting that Twisty is making a much weaker proposal: that men should bear the burden of proving consent, rather than the courts requiring a woman to prove that consent was not given. That’s not how I read Twisty’s post. After all, she did say:
I grasp that, technically, the plan criminalizes all male participants in heterosexual sex.
That means even sex with a consenting woman is criminalized. Any evidence of consent, other than the testimony of the woman, would be irrelevant in the courtroom. It seems like almost half of the commenters on IBTP aren’t grasping the radicality of Twisty’s proposal.
But I think those who do understand the full radical proposal are also being short-sighted when they suggest that Twisty’s Law would not change the behavior of men who are already adequately mindful of consent and of their female partners’ real, genuine desires. Twisty herself says in a comment, “this law would change nothing for dudes who don’t go around raping women. Their lives would remain exactly the same.” (bear in mind Twisty’s definition of rape is far on the liberal end of the scale).
I don’t think that’s true. Risk assessment involves considering both the probability of consequences and the severity of consequences. If a man trusts a woman deeply and has clear verbal consent which was freely given, the probability of him being accused of rape is very low. Under Twisty’s law that doesn’t change. What does change is the severity of consequences if she does bring charges against him. Under current law, armed with evidence of consent he’s almost certainly not going to jail, and under Twisty’s Law he almost certainly is. And on days when such men are feeling risk averse, they will walk away from sex, even if a woman is asking for it, out loud. So even men who hold this standard for sex, which is the only decent standard under any law, will change their behavior. And the woman who wants to sleep with him will have to find something else to do with her time.
The one critique of Twisty’s proposal that really makes good sense to me from a feminist stanpoint is this comment from “Repenting”. She points out that the notion that women are incapable of giving consent equates women and children, and is strongly anti-feminist. You can read Twisty’s response for yourself, but the jist of it is that she never said women were incapable of giving consent, she just said that consent shouldn’t be the litmus test for rape trials. She seems to be saying that consent is a good thing to communicate between people, but consent doesn’t give a man the right to have sex with a woman. It’s her sovereign body, no matter what agreement she makes with a him, and it’s her choice whether his penetration is rape or not.
And again, the longer I dwell on that idea, the fairer it seems. But damn, that was a painful thread to read.
Dear Men,
Here’s what needs to happen:
We need a massive fucking male uprising. We need to take to the streets and demand an end to the sexist oppression of women. We need to stop our work and commence studies of the pay distributions in our organizations, and we need the gaps to be closed. We need to stop dominating the women around us, physically and psychologically. We need to tear the ads of objectified women off the wall, throw the magazines in the trash, turn off the TV.
We need to tell the woman around us how brilliant they are, how good they are, how fun they are, how great they look. We need to actively dispel the myth that we want them to starve themselves for us, or squeeze into shoes that maim them and clothes that make them feel powerless. We need to realize that they are as capable as we are and that they know we know it.
We need to learn to see the world as women do, to see the threats they see that are invisible to us. And we need to understand the threat they see in all of us. We need to change our behavior in ways that allow them to worry less about being assaulted, and worry less about being discriminated against.
We need to treat the women around us as equals, so our sons will treat our daughters as equals. We need to encourage our boys and girls to be active but not violent. Energetic, playful, and assertive but aware of their power to be destructive, and strong enough to prevent it. Boys need to see their dads check their own power. We need to do things traditionally reserved for women so our children know they can do whatever they want to, whatever their gender. We need to restructure their education so the girls are excited about engineering and the boys are excited about crafts.
We need to have healthy sex lives, based on our mutual horniness, not male domination, and we need to talk about them. We need to let our kids know that they’re OK whether or not they have sex, no matter who they want to have sex with, and that they were born complete people and they don’t need to be anything in particular to be OK. We need them to know that if they want to be sexually active, their opportunities will come and that patience is sexier than desparation and far sexier than losing your self respect.
We need to learn to recognize the undercurrent of domination and submission in our sexualities and to reprogram ourselves without it. We need to learn to see the desire to “own” women in ourselves and the men around us. We need to see those desires as the seeds of sexual assault and stop them before they mature. We need to recognize in ourslves the language and “guy talk” that portrays women as things to be dominated and stop them before they come out of our mouths. And we need to stop such language in the men around us, without turning them off with our own aggression.
We need to stop assaulting women, physically and emotionally. We need to stop pressuring them to do things we know they don’t want to do. We need to take the first hint of a no as a no. Women have a right to be treated this way, but it honestly benefits men too. If the women in our lives trust us more, they’ll want more sex not less.
We need to teach our boys that if they treat women like human beings, if they cultivate honesty and understanding and patience and passion, that women will like them and they won’t die alone and a virgin.
We need to reach out in particular to our boys and girls who have been abused or neglected. We need to show them how valuable they are before they slip irreversably into a life of violence, domination, and lust for power.
We need to treat womens’ bodies as their possessions, not ours. We need to learn to see environments that are more hostile to women than men and offset that imbalance by being extra careful to make sure that women feel safe and welcome, particularly in the workplace.
Most of all, we need to get mad, and we need to get serious, and we need to work our asses off tearing down and rebuilding male culture until women’s rights are a central priority of every man and feminism is built in to the definition of what it means to be a man.
Love,
Erik
This happened way back in Feburary, but it’s still a shining example of awesomeness, so I’m posting it as the second entry in my series on Awesome Things To Do In Life. Dan Zwonitzer, a republican state representative from Wyoming, stood up against a bill that would prevent the state from recognizing civil unions. By doing so, he risked thorough political retribution from his party and his constituents, and that’s awesome. Even more awesome is his speech, which made me tear up a little due to its awesomeness.
Here’s the speech:
Thank you Mr. Speaker and Members of the Committee.
I am not going to speak of specifics regarding this bill, but rather talk about history and philosophy in regards to this issue.
It is an exciting time to be in the legislature while this issue is being debated. I believe this is the Civil Rights struggle of my generation.
Being a student of history, as many of you are, and going back through history, most of history has been driven by the struggle of man against government to endow him with more rights, privileges and liberties to be bestowed upon him.
In all of my high school courses, we only made it through history to World War 2. It wasn’t until college that I really learned of the civil rights movement in the 60’s. My American History professor was black, and we spent a week discussing civil rights. I watched video after video where people stood on the sidelines and yelled and threw things at black students walking into schools, I’ve read editorials and reports by both sides of the issue, and I would think, how could society feel this way, only 40 years ago.
Under a democracy the civil rights struggle continues today, where we have one segment of our society trying to restrict rights and privileges from another segment of our society. My parents raised me to know that this is wrong.
It is wrong for one segment of society to restrict rights and freedoms from another segment of society. I believe many of you have had this conversation with your children.
And children have listened, my generation, the twenty-somethings, and those younger than I understand this message of tolerance. And in 20 years, when they take the reigns of this government and all governments, society will see this issue overturned, and people will wonder why it took so long.
My kids and grandkids will ask me, why did it take so long? And I can say, hey, I was there, I discussed these issues, and I stood up for basic rights for all people.
I echo Representative Childers concerns, that testifying against this bill may cost me my seat. I have two of my precinct committee persons behind me today who are in favor of this bill, as I stand here opposed, and I understand that I may very well lose my election. It cost 4 moderate Republican Senators in Kansas their election last year for standing up on this same issue. But I tell myself that there are some issues that are greater than me, and I believe this is one of them. And if standing up for equal rights costs me my seat so be it. I will let history be my judge, and I can go back to my constituents and say I stood up for basic rights. I will tell my children that when this debate went on, I stood up for basic rights for people.
I can debate the specifics of this bill back and forth as everyone in this room can, but I won’t because the overall theme is fairness, and you know it. I hope you will all let history be your judge with this vote. You all know in your hearts where this issue is going, that it will come to pass in the next 30 years. For that, I ask you to vote no today on the bill. Thank you.
Awareness courtesy of Alas, a blog who got it from Pandagon.
In case you hadn’t guessed, I found my camera! It turns out I left it in Stephanie’s car after the reading at The Rubber Rose… which was awesome, by the way. It was a sort of book release party for The IHOP Papers, a novel by Ali Liebegott. I think it was part of some kind of LGBT reading series they have there. Attached to the “sexuality boutique”, The Rubber Rose has this community space where a lot of performance art and gallery showings happen, and it was packed with Ali’s friends and appreciators. People from many different parts of her life (students, partners, publishers) all read from her book, and it was amazing to see someone accomplishing something so cool with such great support from her community. It was obvious Ali had given a lot to those people and that they’d given back.
So. Valentine’s Day.
I wasn’t even really thinking about Valentine’s Day until I stumbled out of the lab at about noon and realized that campus was awash with dapper young men with bouquets of roses and sorority sisters dressed up in tiny little matching pink polka-dotted dresses.
And I felt a twinge of sadness that I would have no Valentine this year, that I would probably not even get a Valentine’s Day card or phone call. It was a depressing thought. But then I thought, why do I deserve a valentine? I hadn’t given any, why should anyone give one to me? I hadn’t asked anyone to be my valentine, why would I expect to be in any other position?
So, I tore down some faded red flyers that were posted, ran back to the lab, found a pair of scissors and made some valentines for my lab mates and other loved ones. It’s awesome to get your creativity on, it’s awesome to salvage materials from the trash, and it’s awesomer to turn minor depression into cause for adventure.
I left them on keyboards and delivered them in person, and it was really nice to see people smile. Brynn gave me a big hug. I still didn’t receive any valetines, but I felt pretty good about my love Karma.
My Valentine’s evening was to be a quiet night at home and at the laundromat. I cooked up some Rapini, which is a really intensely flavored leafy green, sometimes known as Broccoli Rabe. It comes in our food box, and I’ve been stir-frying it, but this recipe came right from our farmer. She said to sautee it in olive oil with garlic and raisins and then squeeze lemon juice over it. Basically, you put it in with a bunch of other super-intense flavors and they miraculously all stand up to each other. It was delicious.
I added cashews for some extra protein, but the cashew flavor, which is normally pretty detectable, was totally dominated by the other flavors. They provided a nice crunch though.
That said, by the time I had eaten dinner and sat in the laundromat until 9:30pm, I was again thoroughly depressed that no one was thinking of me this Valentine’s Day and I had no one to think of. My mind wandered to all of my friends out there spending the evening with a lover or a friend. I trudged home with my folded laundry feeling sorry for myself. At the apartment I joked a little about it with Kerry and Gina, but then they left and I was alone in the apartment again.
I peeked my head out the window and saw that my neighbor Carrie had her light on and her door open, so I poured a glass of wine and went down to say hello. She could totally see in my eyes that I was feeling down, and she immediately said we should get a drink at the Tractor Room.
To make a long story short, it was just the nicest possible end to the day. Carrie and I had a great chat about all kinds of stuff… romance, the fact that she prefers tropical beaches and prefer New England lakes, self-empowerment, the crazy tasty drinks we were being served… I don’t know, it was just a great conversation.
It’s funny how we find things in unexpected places. I think of Carrie as an awesome neighbor more than a best friend, but this is the second time she’s just come along at the perfect time and picked me up a bit.
And that’s what friendship is. That’s what love is. Stepping outside of your own day-to-day concerns, looking into someone’s soul, and reaching a hand out to them.
And it’s a nice feeling.