Snowed In

My friend Katt sent me a message on Facebook about something awesome Teresa Valdez Klein did.  Fed up with ads like this:

.. which pray on our fears to try and squeeze money out of us, she started posting ads like this:

Teresa points out that you can pay as little as $5/day and reach thousands of people. If you want to buy some ad space, go here.  Teresa pointed her ads at the web site for Love Your Body Day.  If you post one yourself, I’d love it if you leave a message in the comments or link to this entry from your blog so we can all hear about it!

Thank you to Teresa for being awesome, and thank you to Katt for passing along the love!

I just found out that Sazz, a radical feminist whose blog I read periodically, is pregnant, and blogging about her experiences with pregnancy and the medical establishment. I didn’t realize this, but she’s been studying reproduction as a Ph.D. student for two years. It looks like it’ll be a fascinating series to follow.

My mom told me a while back that her feelings about childbirth changed a lot after watching our cat Tod¹ give birth. Tod gave birth in a box in our closet, and she was purring the whole time. My mom said it was kind of a revelation: that birth isn’t a medical emergency, it is a normal thing that women are naturally equipped for.

Update: Thinking back, I think I misrepresented my Mom a little bit. I don’t think she said anything about medical emergencies or normalness or naturalness. I think she just said that she realized it doesn’t have to be a terrifyingly painful thing. That it can be calm, and manageable. I should ask her what she really said though.

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:

White Privilege Checklist

Male Privilege Checklist

Straight Privilege Checklist

Non-Trans Privilege Checklist

Update:

Being Poor

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.

The US Supreme Court has decided that workers have 180 days after their salary is set to file a complaint about unfair pay. After that, it’s too late. Your employer gets to keep the money they failed to pay you.

Now let’s imagine a woman, call her Jill, discovers 12 months after being hired that Jack, a man who is doing the same job as her and was hired at the same time as she was, is earning 10% more than she is. I know, it’s hard to imagine such a crazy scenario, since on average, women usually actually earn 15-40% less than men, depending mostly on their race and education level. But bear with me.

Jill decides to file a complaint, asking to be paid the difference between what Jack was paid and what she was paid, given that they both did the same work.

What say you, Supreme Court?

Justices with penises: We can’t put unreasonable demands on employers. She should’ve done her homework and filed a complaint within 180 days.

Justice with a vagina: How is a person supposed to figure out that she is being underpaid when salary information is unpublished, learn about her rights, navigate workplace politics, and file a complaint within 180 days, while under the stress of learning a new jo…

Justices with penises: Shut up, we’re the majority.

This harkens back to the recent decision in which the penis-wielding judges decided that the safety of a woman should not factor in a doctor’s decision to provide a woman with a late-term abortion. Again, Justice Bader-Ginsberg was the unheeded voice of reason:

“the Court’s opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.”

We can thank George Bush for creating the most anti-woman court in modern history.

Correction: I originally wrote “Justices with vaginas” above, remembering a time when there were two women on the court. I forgot momentarily that there is only one such justice today. 12% of the court, 50% of the population. That’s because our president only appoints the most qualified folks for the job.

*vomit*

Camille and I went to Ray’s Tennis today to buy tennis skirts. We’re going to play tennis with Kensy and Katie after dinner coop on Thursday and we wanted to look the part. Camille found a sweet classic pleated skirt that she liked. I tried on a bunch of skirts, trying to find one that felt right. The skirts with pleats, slits or more of an a-line felt too girlish for me, but the straight skirts were awesome. There’s an inherant femininity to a skirt, but a tight straight skirt feels to me like it takes some ovaries to pull off, and ballsy feminine is sort of the gender I was feeling this morning (with a little bit of terrified dude mixed in). The straight skirt also shows off my nonexistant hips, whereas a wider skirt on men’s hips just looks like an empty sack.

So, we bought skirts. And they are pretty sexy, and totally hilarious. Camille and I are stoked for next Thursday.

The punchline happened as we were checking out. The older lady who rang us up was pretty quiet as she was taking my credit card. As she handed me the skirt, she said “What is this for?”

Camille and I stared blankly at her, not sure what she was asking.

“Are you going to a costume party?”

*blink*

“Uhh, we’re playing tennis.”

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

Today I found my friend Emilie’s amazing blog, The Conscious Kitchen. Seriously, amazing. Everything looks delicious, and lots of fun stories about food experiences.

One of Emilie’s creations. Is this even legal in the state of Massachussettes?

Her post from Monday, Simple Pleasures and Guilt, really resonated with my recent food experiences. She talks about reconciling her punk ethos with her passion for, if I may use the term “the finer things.” It got me thinking about my ethics and how they interact with my diet.

We’ve got all these choices, right? We choose vegan. We choose Arkansas Black apples and Lindt chocolate. We choose saffron.

But most Americans aren’t even at liberty to choose vegetarian because they don’t have any cultural support for that choice. You can’t become vegetarian without a big chunk of knowledge, a decent amount of free time, and a healthy helping of confidence or social support. Many American’s don’t have time to spend with their children, let alone time to spend making seitan from scratch.

And so I’m starting to think that when I’m choosing between squash gnocchi and provencal tomatoes stuffed with herbed rice, maybe there’s a third choice, which is choosing to devote my energy to giving some of these choices to people who don’t have them.

But I’m not entirely sure what that means. I’ve been thinking about trying to implement dinner coop in such a way that it can benefit people with fewer resources, instead of just us rich college kids. And in my dietary changes, I’m always thinking “how can I make this cheaper?” and “how can I make this easier?” with the hope that maybe someday I can write a book that will help people eat healthier and more ethically, even if they have no money and no time.

And this mirrors my experiences as a feminist man. I can choose to go for a run alone after midnight. I can choose to look disheveled every day. I can choose to be outspoken without fearing that I’ll lose respect. I can choose to be sexualized, and I can choose not to be. And in many scenarios, many women don’t have those choices.

Does that create an obligation? I kind of feel like it does.

Pro-war folks often say that pulling out of Iraq would be defeat. That the terrorists would win and we can’t let them win. My response was always of the form “no way… we’ll still win because of X,” where X was more international support, the strength of the Iraqi police force, the removal of big hairy targets (US troops) from Iraq, etc.

But today I had the thought: What’s wrong with defeat? Why are we so obsessed with winning? Why not accept defeat, bring our troops home, and let Iraq try to heal itself? Why not voluntarily be the losers?

And there are good answers to those questions like, “if we lose, we’ll have created a haven for terrorists.” But I don’t think most Americans are thinking that far into this. I think they’re thinking “Defeat? Heck no! We’re America!”.

That was certainly a component of my thinking. I think it’s a component of a lot of men’s thinking, and it’s one of the channels through which the patriarchy influences American politics. I should be more mindful of my competetive nature and how it clouds my ability to see things clearly.

There is a great post over on Women’s Space/The Margins (which is fast becoming one of my favorite blogs about women’s issues) about Seung-hui Cho’s family. I just posted a somewhat tangential comment over there about US global construction/reconstruction efforts and the patriarchy* and I wanted to repost here:

Thank you for doing this journalism… this post was an eye opening, provocative read for me.

I just wanted to comment that I don’t think “reconstruction” is a good thing. The US government and contractors like McNeil are a loosely connected but carefully aligned operation. They have two strategies:

1) Saddle countries with loans (from the World Bank) for building infrastructure that countries don’t need. Make sure the loans are too big for them to repay. and make sure the contracts specify that they have to use US contractors like McNeil. After all that money gets pumped back into the US economy, and the recipient country inevitably defaults on the loans, force the countries to make political concessions. This is how US companies got drilling rights in Ecuador against the will of the people.

2) Bomb the shit out of them. Send in US contractors and “protect” their “reconstruction” rights with US troops. Build all kinds of infrastructure that they don’t need. Saddle the new government you create with the debt, or just add the tab to the trillions of debt the federal government already holds.

I read most of this in John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The prologue is online, and is a great read. I heartily recommend the whole book, it really changed my perspective.

And I never thought about it this way until now, but maybe it’s really about how the patriarchy works on an international level, where entire countries are being subjugated, instead of gender/sex/ethnic/cultural groups.

* I’m still a little uneasy about the term patriarchy, but for now I defer to the wisdom of the feminist community. They’ve been thinking about/using the term longer than I have.