Year: 2014

Aging In Place

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The truth is that older women are more beautiful than conventional wisdom would have you admit. Time makes the contours of a face more pronounced. For many, it becomes easier to grow the gorgeous lumps defining the marble statues of idealized women in museums. Veins on hands begin to tell stories with or without a pen.

Most of all it’s the sheer fucking luckiness of having made it, of being alive, that makes older people, and especially older women, more beautiful.

This is convenient for me to say at age 34, when I have become an unmistakable target of the drug store creams to fix the nature. It is growing increasingly clear on Facebook — where pictures replace shared experiences as the currency of relationships — that some of my age peers have begun to use plastic surgery. Seeing this is a struggle.

Like everyone else, I have grown up in a culture where we devalue women who don’t live up to impossible ideals, and then dismiss the women who take extraordinary measures to do so as shallow. Aging presents one of these most classic damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenarios, and from a modern feminist point of view that honors the individual lived experiences of women rather than attempting however earnestly to provide a blueprint that everyone must follow to sidestep oppression, I think I’m not supposed to care about another woman’s plastic surgery. And really, as it pertains to that other woman, I don’t. Making value judgements about someone else’s beauty regimen is one bad jam.

The struggle comes in elsewhere. Like everyone else, I have grown up in a culture where women are encouraged to compare themselves to one another in superficial ways. So seeing all this plastic surgery makes me wonder: Yes, I’m comfortable aging in place today, but will I be tomorrow? I would like to think that when gray hair comes I’ll embrace it. But I say that a time when my appearance gives me no real reason to fear being written off as yesterday’s news. So I am sitting with this ambivalence and uncertainty and honoring it.

The longer we live, the more we know people who have died. If you have made it to a point when aging is considered a concern for your age group, it means that you are supremely fortunate. I wonder why that keeps getting lost, especially for women, and what we can do about it.

Teaching Consent

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary4 Comments

Consent is this empowering, sexy, terrific thing. Your body is yours. It does not belong to your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your dad, your mom, your preacher, your religion, your government. Your permission must not be assumed, implied, or revoked. That body is yours, lady! And it is awesome.

Consent is the linchpin of the life I want for my daughter.

I have been particularly haunted lately with a handful of memories that make me want to go back and give myself a big hug (and spit in a few faces). I had comprehensive sexual education. I knew that no was supposed to mean no, and sadly, that no means yes is a punchline. What I didn’t learn was a good working definition of consent, and how to wield it: Not just how to say no, but how to say yes, and how to insist your own body is treated with the respect it deserves — by others, and also yourself.

There are many negative consequences stemming from the fear of youth sexuality,  as well as the fear of female sexuality. One thing that happens is not teaching our girls about sexuality in a realistic way. Sexuality is more often taught to girls as something to be guarded against as sinful (it’s not) or a source of contagion (an unhelpful frame). As a culture we don’t even teach our girls to accept themselves, much less their bodies, and we certainly don’t teach our girls to accept how their bodies might care to be or not be sexual. Instead we need to give our girls a meaningful understanding of how sexuality is something to be accepted on your own terms.

These days my daughter is young, just over a year old. When I think about trying to do a better job teaching her consent than life taught me, I think about honoring her wishes not to be held or touched by other people when she makes it clear she doesn’t want that, and I think about responding to her nods “yes” and shakes “no” as much as practical.

What have you done to help teach the young girls you know the concept of consent? Respond in the comments.

On Daily Kos Boycotting Netroots Nation In Arizona

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary1 Comment

I attended my first Netroots Nation this year. It was awesome, and I intend to attend future conferences when it makes sense for me. So it is with heightened interest that I consider the announcement by Markos Moulitsas that Daily Kos will boycott next year’s conference over the selection of Phoenix as a host city, given that the SB 1070 racial profiling law is still in effect.

I come to this debate from an interesting perspective; I think where I shake out now is supporting people and organizations deciding whether next year’s conference is right for them. I do have concerns about whether this conference will be safe for activists and bloggers who may be undocumented (or racially profiled regardless) and also about the effect their lack of participation may have on the conference as a whole. One of the most important moments of this year’s conference, in my opinion, was a delegation of Dreamers and other immigrant rights activists getting escorted out of the ballroom for shouting “Stop deporting our families” during Vice President Joe Biden’s address. Many sat silent, probably unsure how to react. Ultimately the vice president told the attendees they should applaud, so most did. That learning moment might not be possible in Arizona. I am actively seeking additional opinions and perspectives that might cause my thinking to shift.

But I also want to add a different concern to the list Moulitsas put together of the three basic arguments for supporting the decision to hold next year’s conference in Arizona, because a gaping one is missing. Who gets hurt the most by a boycott?

The low-wage service workers — housekeepers, janitors, dishwashers — who are largely immigrant and often dependent on tips from travelers to make ends meet. At least, that’s what my late mentor Olga Vives argued to me.

A few years ago, just months after the passage of SB 1070, Olga was living with Stage IV lung cancer in Scottsdale. A small group of friends including myself had planned a visit to see her. With regards to Arizona, our friendship circles tossed around the “boycott” word a real whole lot. Olga was upfront. She said, if you don’t want to come see me, I understand. (I would be remiss to not mention that Olga was undocumented for much of her life and was, among other things, a fierce activist for immigrant rights, helping to cofound the National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights.)

And it was an interesting dilemma for me, because but for the situation of my mentor and dear friend dying of cancer I would not have gone to Arizona. But, I wanted to see her before she died. So I went.

I really wonder what she would have made of the Daily Kos/Netroots Nation situation. Chalk that up to one more conversation I wish we could have.

Video: June 2014 To The Contrary Appearance

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I appeared as a panelist on a recent episode of To The Contrary, and discussed home births, Pope Francis offering advice to have more children, and the World Bank and advancing progress for women worldwide. You can watch a video of the show here or here:

Also, I recently appeared on the awesome podcast Fortnight on the Internets, run by my hilarious and incisive friends Alison the Business Casual and Alpine McGregor. We discussed online misogyny and #YesAllWomen. You can listen to that here.

 

Trigger Warnings Have A Purpose

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary2 Comments

It has become fashionable to bash trigger warnings and the people who use them. Some folks argue that it’s censorship to provide advance warning that difficult content may be ahead. Others just make fun of them, saying it’s silly. Trigger warnings actually neither suppress freedom of speech nor indicate an individual is stupid or a community is unwilling to join ‘the real world.’ They have a purpose. To illustrate further, I’m going to include a trigger warning of my own. After an italicized trigger warning and content you may choose to skip if you don’t wish to read a story that includes eating disorders and depression, I will resume offering my general thoughts on why trigger warnings can be helpful and where we go from here.

TW: eating disorders, depression

In late high school and early college, I struggled with eating disorders and depression. There was one summer, in particular, that was very bad. It was so bad that I accepted I was going to die. My phone would ring, and I would not answer it. I would walk through my parents home wordlessly, moving past them like a visible ghost. What did I have to say to anyone? Insomnia, self-hatred, and sadness. That is what I had.

During these dark days the precious little human contact I had was centered around a message board for people struggling with eating disorders. Though it seems silly to type now, it was, truly, my lifeline to the outside world. Therapy was not a safe place — during a group therapy session, one of the other patients attacked me for being ‘immoral.’ Eventually solo therapy became unsafe as well, and I was kicked out my entire treatment program for continuing to lose weight. I was told that I was a legal liability if I kept showing up, and if I did they would pursue a court order to put me in a state-run facility (by that time they had already hospitalized me three times). Between that and my inability to connect with friends and family, it was this message board that kept me going.

On this board I found other people struggling with the same obsessions and problems I had, and it wasn’t too tragic to speak openly about what I was experiencing. Primarily the board was a place for emotional support. Most of us wanted to get better, and so we used trigger warnings to discuss specifics that someone else might use a blueprint for self-harm. For instance, a trigger warning might set off specific information about restricting behaviors. My eating disorder was so strong at that time that I couldn’t simply read that someone had only eaten x, y, and z all week without using that information to harm myself. I used the trigger warnings like an adult, and I do think they helped me participate safely in the only form of human connection that worked for me during a hideous and dangerous period in my life.

So, it has been with interest that I’ve watched the current handwringing over trigger warnings. Simply put, if someone has chosen to offer a trigger warning before a topic that you have no problem openly discussing — perhaps eating disorders, sexual violence, or abusive relationships — you are not the intended recipient of that person’s additional consideration. There is no reason to bully the person for thinking you are “weak” (they don’t), or for “coddling” others (they’re not). Trigger warnings are good-faith, inter-community signals for people who have had a hard time with something you (thankfully) have not.

Not too long ago, Katy Waldman at Slate attacked Jessica Luther for using trigger warnings on Twitter. She did not bother to interview Jessica to ask why she had used a trigger warning in a tweet related to rape. Instead she dismissed her as ridiculous for not recognizing that Twitter is an open forum. Sure, Twitter is an open forum, but it is also very much a vibrant feminist organizing and awareness-raising space — and in this space, it’s indisputable that Jessica is a leader. I don’t doubt that many of Jessica’s followers appreciated the trigger warning, and I also don’t think Jessica’s wrong to use it. It’s her microphone. (This entire incident had an undertone of l’affaire Keller, in which former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and his wife, journalist Emma Gilbey Keller each wrote columns attacking terminal cancer patient Lisa Bonchek Adams for tweeting the reality of her illness; among the many dynamics, you have those with media power attacking those with social media power for not following their conventional standards of editing.)

I’d also like to address this idea that trigger warnings are “censorship.” I have written before about the frequent charge that feminists attempt to “censor” others. As I wrote then, we need to take consideration of what censorship actually means, by definition, which is “changing or suppressing speech or writing that is considered subversive of the common good”:

In other words, censorship is practiced by governments or institutions for the purposes of control. It is associated most frequently with authoritarian states or religions. It is generally against freedom, which is, again, not where feminism and other civil and human rights movements calling for the emancipation, empowerment and inclusion of more people and more people’s perspectives in free public life are headed.

In the case of trigger warnings in specific, it’s censorship to bar someone from being able to offer a trigger warning. Of course, much of the hullabaloo revolves around various universities that are grappling with student requests that professors offer trigger warnings on their syllabi in order to identify material that may be triggering. Many professors don’t want to do that (Brittany Cooper has an excellent piece on that here) and I support them. I’d also like to be perfectly clear that I do not support banning books and have written before about one mother’s quest to ban Toni Morrison’s Beloved from the public school system after it made her son uncomfortable. Banning books and material is not the same thing as a trigger warning. I’d also like to distinguish between trigger warnings voluntarily adopted within a self-selected community of activists or likeminded people as fundamentally distinct from a top-down mandate within an institution of higher learning.

But I do think, in the case of these students, that we might be better served by asking why so many students continue to feel a need for trigger warnings. The underlying point is that the world remains a difficult, dangerous, and violent place for many, and especially on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and ability. For example, we should look the overwhelming preponderance of sexual crimes in the eye, and especially on a policy level that addresses root causes. Are the students ridiculous for requesting trigger warnings? No. They will probably not get what they asked for, but the requests themselves present multiple opportunities for all of us to grow.

 

The Unsung Heroes Of Mother’s Day: Friends

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary5 Comments

Please pardon me for publishing this about a week late. I am, after all, a new mom.

Friends don’t get enough recognition on Mother’s Day, and they really should. Before I became a mom, I associated Mother’s Day with family. Don’t forget to call mom! Get her some flowers. Say something nice to grandma. But the commercial aspects of Mother’s Day as a biological event only carry us so far.

After all, even before I became a mom, I was aware how painful this day can be for many. For those facing infertility, or loss of pregnancies, children, or parents. For those whose mothers and families have shunned them for their sexual orientation. For those left feeling unrecognized or unappreciated as step-parents, or caregivers, or birth parents. For those who have families that don’t look like the kind that get slapped on the back of a minivan with those little white stencil stickers.

I knew, before experiencing this first Mother’s Day as a mom, that it is friends who carry us through the hard parts of family. What I didn’t know is how much friends could and often would rise to support my journey as a new mom.

During these past 11 months, I have learned how incredibly isolating new motherhood can, at times, feel. There is this crying baby that won’t respond to anything and you haven’t slept or showered in several days and OMG! And then there are those first forays into parenting in front of others. Breastfeeding in public or taking a baby to a restaurant — these are often represented not as personal decisions but something that must be guided by what others think. Being honest can be intimated as a matter of (poor) etiquette: talking about your children is boring, posting pictures of your baby on social media is aggrandizing, discussing the details of birth is TMI. Some people stop giving a shit about you. Some people assume you’ve stopped giving a shit about your career. Sometimes people say judgmental things about your parenting decisions, and it feels like a rusty knife scraping the folds of your psyche.

But the overwhelming truth I have learned is this: Entering into motherhood, like other major life changes, reveals who your true friends are, and sometimes those answers are surprising. People who might have seemed more like casual acquaintances come out of the woodwork, offering support and handwritten cards in the mail. Colleagues and professional contacts who, without prompt, make proactive space to let you know your child is welcome at an after-hours gathering. It has been especially moving to me to see how some of my intentionally child-free feminist friends who really, really, and rightfully don’t like the assumption of a “mother” role for women have noiselessly made space to accommodate a new me, and my little one; and but also how loud-and-proud feminist mothers have welcomed me with open arms and helped me negotiate the complicated feelings that come with being newly beholden to a little one who needs you all the time. Blessed are those who acknowledge that it can take much more time for me to respond to and initiate calls, texts and emails, or make carefree plans to do “adult” things, and value me with patience for what I can give now.

Motherhood is something that we can’t do without support, and usually it’s family that gets the acknowledgement. It is friends, those who are mothers and non-mothers, who are the unsung heroes of Mother’s Day. I was delighted and surprised to learn on my first Mother’s Day as a mom that I would be flooded with love, support and well-wishes not just from family, but from friends. Thank you.

When She Says She’s Not A Feminist

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary12 Comments

Let’s talk about this conversation:

– Are you a feminist?

– No, feminists are (against men/too angry/pick your poison). But I believe in equality.

Variations of this conversation occur in lots of venues: classrooms, media outlets, social settings. But no matter the specifics, it often becomes a psychic wedgie to those women who do identify as feminist. Many will respond with, well, actually feminism is about equality — so you are a feminist. But is that useful? I argue not, and here’s why.

  • Self-definition is an important principle of a modern women’s movement.
    What often passes for “equality” in mainstream venues including corporations, media, and politics these days is one white woman who will represent “women.” This is insulting and troubling for many reasons, not least of which that not all women are the same. Not all feminisms are the same either. If a woman says she is not feminist because feminism means something negative to her, insisting that she is in fact feminist either replaces or piles on the negative view of feminism she had just articulated with one that includes people who don’t respect her authority to speak for herself. It certainly doesn’t communicate that feminism is about respecting autonomy.
  • This gotcha game is largely targeted at women, not men in power, and that sucks.
    Are the 476 men who serve as CEOS of the Fortune 500 routinely asked if they are feminist? What about the male actors and musicians who get magazine profiles? No, they are not. Instead this question is largely directed at those few women who hold power. This sucks so much. Do we really want to give all the men who hold the bulk of the power in our society a free pass to ignore the advancement of women? If a commitment to equality belongs solely to those who hold less privilege, we’re not going to move near fast enough.
  • It’s not safe for everyone to identify as feminist.
    I define feminism as a political/social movement calling for equality and justice for all people, starting with women at the center. It is much more a cultural and political agenda than a form of identity. It is an agenda that requires calling for changes in society, many of which are quite controversial. I have in the course of my career working with women’s rights advocates around the country met women who consider themselves feminists but would never let their colleagues or neighbors know. Simply put, they don’t want to get fired or penalized. Saying you are a feminist can come with real and negative social consequences, and a feminist thing to do would be to respect that.
  • Feminism is not experienced equally by everyone.
    Feminism is a loaded term for many women who do very much care about equality, especially women of color, transgender women, and others whose perspectives are not often centered by the mainstream white feminist-driven bus. Some quite thoughtfully choose to use the term “womanist” rather than “feminist” to describe themselves. It just might be the case that listening to (rather than refuting) the reasons behind one person’s rejection of the term feminist offers a large opportunity for you to grow your own feminist practice.
  • And to my fellow feminists (especially those of you who are women): It’s okay for others to disagree with you, or dislike you.
    Women are especially socialized to think we are awful if others disagree with something we have to say, or dislike who we are. Happiness rarely comes from posturing to please others. In this way, traditional gender scripts work hard against women, our potential, our happiness, and our self-esteem by insisting that we put the perceptions of others before what we find important for ourselves. If a woman says feminists are something you don’t think you are, you can simply say (out loud and/or to yourself) that doesn’t apply to you. And you can move on to fighting for equality. And that’s okay.

The radical right has for decades worked to redefine feminism as a negative identity rather than the positive social and political agenda it is. It’s disingenuous, derailing, and would be better fought not by insisting that individuals define themselves as feminists but rather by holding institutions accountable for treating everyone with equality and justice.

Today’s Young Left Feminists Smeared From Within, Again

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary6 Comments

Katha Pollitt has a new piece up at The Nation taking the left, and in specific “today’s young left feminists” to task for, as she sees it, not considering seriously enough the questions of equality and male dominance when advocating for the rights of sex workers.

I’m sick of this.

Let me introduce myself. I have, throughout my career, been cast in the role of ‘token young feminist’ so many times you would have thought it was the job they really hired me for. It’s hilarious, really, that a certain stripe of feminist will consistently ask where are the young women? while at the same time appearing to blame young feminists for inequality left standing by veteran feminists.*

*See what I just did? That was unfair. I didn’t mean it. I wrote that to prove a point. Veteran feminists are not to blame for ongoing inequality.

A diversity of demographics, experiences, and viewpoints among feminists is not to blame for ongoing inequality. In fact these things are assets to the movement.

Even more, blaming women for oppression we experience is pointless.

There are a number of provocative points for discussion and consideration in Pollitt’s piece. But the inclusion of those four nasty words operate as a practical ‘stay away’ command to anyone who might be identified anywhere near the ballpark of “today’s young left feminists” (tellingly, a category that I’ve heard many feminists in their 40s and beyond identify with if only because they don’t feel in whole or part accepted as members of the overwhelmingly white group holding the paychecks and/or publishing power within the movement). We are, in this case, described as ones who “don’t want to think about” these things. Instead of joining the discussion, we are, with limited time and energy, left to defend ourselves and maybe our right to be a part of it.

Sadly, “don’t want to think about” is pretty nice compared to what usually happens when charges like this are leveled. Usually we’re just “wrong” or “naive.” As many of you know I used to serve in a leadership position in an old guard feminist organization. Things would happen, like the time someone spoke audibly after my turn to speak, asking if I was an intern. Mind you I was 30 at the time and had spoken confidently. Another time I read a recommendation letter for an intern applicant from a women’s studies professor who blamed younger feminists leading slut walks for cementing inequality for women and girls.

Wrong targets, not cool, cut it out.

Video: Abortion Is A Life-Saving Act

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I recently appeared on The Square Circle, and toward the end of the show panelists are given an opportunity to speak to what they believe is an underreported story from the week. Imagine my surprise when the woman before me offered up a story about and her opposition to an art display at the University of Michigan that celebrated abortion as a life-saving act.

While I had not heard of the story previously, I felt compelled to respond immediately:

Opponents of legal abortion should never be given the opportunity to take the high ground. Their anti-choice positions are fundamentally against basic human rights for women. You should not apologize for supporting abortion rights; further, you should not let anti-choicers make you feel ashamed or immoral. State your support for legal abortion with pride. The moral high ground is, in fact, yours.

If you would like to watch the entire program, the link is here.