A Reading List

2008-09-15T22:51:00.001-05:00

swiping this from a friend and adding in a few excerpts for good measure:

this is your nation on white privilege, tim wise

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll “kick their fuckin' ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.
...
White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.
...
White privilege is being able to fire people who didn’t support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt. 

[etc.]

i guess i like it when someone takes all my disjointed frustrations and incredulity, and gives them a good shake, and they all fall into the little notches of a framework i've fallen away from because i've gotten too bogged down in the smallness of my life and of manufactured discourse. the pieces were all there in my head but i let self-absorbed political narrative, and annoyance with it, crowd out the capacity to take a step back and see what's really going on.

however: i am still frustrated that palin's children, her oldest daughter especially, have been so aggressively made into ciphers for everything about her.

2008-09-11T22:50:00.000-05:00

i was just talking about this shit with my friend jennifer

(pasting half of it)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. government employees received improper gifts from energy industry representatives, and engaged with them in illegal drug use and inappropriate sexual relations, according to a report issued Wednesday.

A report says government officials accepted gifts from oil and gas company employees.

The report was issued by the Interior Department's inspector general after a $5.3 million investigation "uncovered recreational marijuana and cocaine use" by "a handful" of Interior Department staff, and found two federal employees "engaged in brief sexual relationships with representatives from companies doing business" with the department.
Two Interior Department employees "received combined gifts and gratuities on at least 135 occasions from four major oil and gas companies with whom they were doing business -- a textbook example of improperly receiving gifts from prohibited sources," Inspector General Earl Devaney says in a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne accompanying the report.

...

you're an adult at twenty-one

2008-09-10T22:49:00.000-05:00

DOB xx/xx/1987

pt's husband was killed in a car wreck, their child now lives w/ a disability b/c of wreck. Fixed income. --sb, 9/10

or in other words...

2008-09-10T22:48:00.000-05:00

I oppose Sarah Palin because she is John McCain's running mate. John McCain, the man who laughed when one of his supporters called Hillary Clinton a b*tch. The man who has promised to nominate extreme right-wing judges to the Supreme Court. It doesn't matter what Sarah Palin stands for (though in fact she stands with McCain on these issues), because you wouldn't be voting for Palin for president, you'd be voting for McCain.
-Janet L., 44, Palo Alto, CA

i hesitated to link to the website, actually, because it is counter to all the things i was trying to say in my last post about how i swear i'm not gonna rant about palin. but this contributor summed it up well. it's still about the platform.

summer of 68- forty years thence

2008-09-08T22:48:00.000-05:00

Voice over loudspeaker: 'I would like to introduce to you Dr. Ralph David Abernathy -- the mayor of Resurrection City! Yeah!'

stuff i have been meaning to post for months now. excerpts pasted to persuade you to click through. enjoy:

Resurrection City

Rev. King had the vision to bring together poor people of all races to make visible the plight of poverty. It was not to be a sit-it, but a live-in. They built "Resurrection City" on the mall on Washington -- and the legacy of this city's rise and fall lives today.

Dr. Bernard Lafayette: I got a call from Martin Luther King. This was in '67. He said, 'I need you to come down to Atlanta and to move here and work full time. This may be my last campaign and we're going for broke.' And when I got to Atlanta, he appointed me the national coordinator for the Poor People's Campaign. Now the idea originally came from Marion Wright Edelman.

Marion Wright Edelman: I was Marion Wright back in 1968. I had been working with Robert Kennedy on poverty in Mississippi, and he told me to tell Dr. King to bring the poor to Washington. To make them visible.

Lafayette: And the idea was that we would bring those people in front of the folk who make decisions and build this tent city and camp out until you get what you want. The two of us, we're talking, so I said to MLK, 'Well, you say this is a PPC. Well, black people aren't the only ones poor -- are you talking about getting Hispanics involved?' He said 'Yes!' 'What about Native Americans?' 'Yes!' So I was getting to the final question, and that was the poor whites from Appalachia... He said, 'Are they poor?' He said if they were poor then this was their campaign.

and

MLK Memorial Statue dispute

Members of a powerful federal arts commission expressed satisfaction yesterday with changes to a memorial statue of Martin Luther King Jr. after the architect smoothed away wrinkles in King's brow and reshaped the mouth to impart a hint of a smile.

forty years after the poor people's campaign, king's assassination, and the riots that left swaths of many american cities, including the neighborhood next door to mine, burned out and barren, this country is still fucking up our responsibility to authentically remember a man who looked at the state of things and was not satisfied -- let alone our responsibility to authentically confront injustice.

2008-09-08T22:47:00.000-05:00

let's stop talking about sarah palin and how sexily horrifying she is

let's get back to talking about why mccain sucks, and how his vp pick's horrifying-ness is basically a symptom of his own horrifying-ness

because it's really annoying to read about convention bounces and obama "becoming the underdog" because everyone wants to talk about sarah palin and somehow in contrast mccain seems well-intentioned and not batshit crazy.

focus, people!

2008-09-04T22:47:00.000-05:00

the following was written by lynn paltrow, who heads the national advocates for pregnant women. i have wanted to work with them since the day i heard about them -- last january, when they were organizing a conference in atlanta drawing together abortion clinic staff, midwives, obstetricians, and advocacy groups like the center for american progress... alas, apparently they operate on a shoestring and hire only lawyers. anyway, here you go:

An Open Letter to Gov. Sarah Palin on Women's Rights

By Lynn Paltrow, National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Posted September 4, 2008.

Dear Governor Sarah Palin:

Many Americans agree with your position regarding abortion -- they do this as a matter of faith, ethics, personal experience and sometimes politics. I am just wondering though, if you have thought about what would happen if you succeeded in getting your position -- that fetuses have a right to life -- established as the law of the land? Did you know that it not only threatens the lives, health and freedom of women who might want or need someday to end their pregnancies, it would also give the government the power to control the lives of women -- like you who -- go to term?

Your last pregnancy, the one that has become the topic of widespread discussion and speculation provides an important opportunity to demonstrate how this could be true.

According to press reports your water broke while you were giving a keynote speech in Texas at the Republican Governors' Energy Conference. You did not immediately go to the hospital -- instead you gave your speech and then waited at least 11 hours to get to a hospital. You evaluated the risks, made a choice, and were able to carry on your life without state interference. Texas Governor Rick Perry worried about your pregnancy but didn't stop you from speaking or take you into custody to protect the rights of the fetus.

After Ayesha Madyun's water broke, she went to the hospital where she hoped and planned to have a vaginal birth. When she didn't give birth in a time-frame comfortable to her doctors, they argued that she should have a C-section. The doctors asserted that the fetus faced a 50-75 percent chance of infection if not delivered surgically. (Risks of infection are believed by some health care providers to increase with each hour after a woman's water has broken and she hasn't delivered).

The court, believing like you that fetuses have a right to life, said, "[a]ll that stood between the Madyun fetus and its independent existence, separate from its mother, was put simply, a doctor's scalpel." With that, the court granted the order and the scalpel sliced through Ms. Madyun's flesh, the muscles of her abdominal wall, and her uterus. The core principle justifying an end to legal abortion in the U.S. provided the same grounds used to deprive this pregnant and laboring woman of her rights to due process, bodily integrity, and physical liberty. When the procedure was done, there was no evidence of infection.

According to the press reports, instead of going straight to a hospital you chose to get on a long airplane flight back to Alaska.

When Pamela Rae Stewart, allegedly, didn't get to the hospital quickly enough on the day of her delivery, she was arrested in California on the theory that she had violated the rights of her fetus.

When Laura Pemberton chose to give birth at home in Florida, a Sheriff came to her house. Doctors believed that she was posing a risk to the life of her unborn child by having a vaginal birth after having had a previous c-section and were in the process of getting a court order to force her to have a c-section. The sheriff took her into custody during active labor, strapped her legs together and forced her to go to a hospital where an emergency hearing was taking place to determine the rights of her fetus. She was "allowed" to represent herself. A lawyer was appointed for the fetus. This woman, who vehemently opposes abortion, nevertheless believed in her right to evaluate medical risks and benefits to herself and her unborn child. She was forced to have the unnecessary surgery and when she later sued for violations of her civil rights, was told fetal rights outweighed hers.

You chose to continue working throughout your pregnancy -- even during your labor. Until 1991 women who worked in high paying blue color jobs that provided health benefits were being fired based on "fetal rights" policies that claimed if the woman became pregnant she would expose the unborn child to workplace health risks. Eventually, the Supreme Court said employers covered by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (the PDA) could not do this. But, millions of American women work part time or for small employers who are not covered by the PDA. If your political position on abortion is accepted -- all of these women could be forced to give up their jobs because an employer, family member, or state agent believed it necessary to ensure the health and rights of their unborn child.

Governor Palin, you have led an extraordinary life, balancing work and family, public service and private family obligations. We hope you know though that your freedom relies on exactly the same legal principals that guarantee that American women can choose to have an abortion when they need and want one.

Sixty one percent of women who have abortions are already mothers. Eighty-four percent will be mothers by the time they are in their forties. As a proud mother of five beautiful children, we hope you will recognize that the issue isn't abortion -- it is ensuring the lives, dignity and freedom of all pregnant women and their families.

Lynn Paltrow
Executive Director
National Advocates for Pregnant Women

heh!

2008-08-15T22:46:00.000-05:00

my coworker emily's status message on gchat says:
the revolution will not be funded *, but your abortion will

*see here or here

someday i'll write about both of these things for real

back to the database

2008-08-08T22:42:00.000-05:00

hotline operator notes: pt was homeless, but then moved in with this guy. 11 days later he got arrested for grand larceny and drugs. The police say that they are going to try to get her in trouble for it too, because they shared a room. Being evicted due to BF being arrested. Her ex has her two kids, but if he finds out about any of this, he'll try to stop her from seeing them. Her job hasn't been giving her any hours because they found out about all this. -er

?

2008-07-23T22:41:00.000-05:00

notes from call to hotline: pt also mentioned that some people around her (specifically, an older 'spanish' woman), suggested she take a lot of aspirin + boil beer to induce her abortion.

monday morning depressing cases

2008-07-14T22:40:00.000-05:00

clinic writes: patient has had 12 live births but only 4 children now living; husband is incarcerated.

clinic writes: patient's teen daughter is pregnant and she is divorcing her husband, will help her daughter raise the baby, cannot afford her own pregnancy due to becoming divorced soon.

7/15 RA called to check on appointment process, found out that pt is going to "keep the baby. We couldn't afford [the procedure], so we feel it's god's doing."

argh.

more snips

2008-07-03T22:39:00.000-05:00

But it is seeming to me that race (together with racism and race privilege) is apparently constructed as something inescapable. And it makes sense that it would be, since such a construction would best serve those served by race and racism. Of course race and racism are impossible to escape; of course a white person is always in a sticky web of privilege that permits only acts which reinforce ("reinscribe") racism. This just means that some exit must be forced. That will require conceptual creativity, and perhaps conceptual violence.

Marilyn Frye, "White Woman Feminist", 1992. it's quite brief and you may as well read the whole thing.

Once I became aware of the privilege afforded to me by white racial classification, the question that came immediately to mind was, How ought I to act with respect to white privilege? This section is presented as a philosophical narrative on this question and summarizes how I've gradually come to understand privilege as a resource rather than as a dilemma.

My initial, admittedly unreflective response to white privilege was to explore ways of dissociating myself from whiteness and thus from the privileges that acompany it. If privilege is generated by injustice, I reasoned, I should consciously seek out ways of divesting myself of white privilege. After all, I didn't ask for these privileges; I was just born into a social/political system structured to benefit persons who appear to be white people. If these privileges are made possible by oppression, then I don't want them; I want to divest myself of them. But suppose divesting is impossible. Well, maybe there are responsible ways of using white privilege that do not perpetuate the institutionalized racism I want to demolish. Or, maybe all white privilege is by defition so toxic that it poisons everything with which it comes into contact. Or, perhaps there are varieties of white privilege I can use safely.

Alison Bailey, "Despising an Identity They Taught Me to Claim*" in Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections (ed. Chris Cuomo and Kim Hall), 1999.

(*this is a play on a 1980 title by Michelle Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Claim. I have not read that one.)

that collection also has a couple of other things i really want to post and think about, essays that complicate the idea of race with the possibility of "being" a race you don't "look like" and vice-versa. what is misrepresentation? what is authentic? for that matter, what is authenticity? there don't seem to be any stable answers. i'll try and get those posted later, but i want to share such a big chunk of them that it's no longer really excerpts and more like outright stealing.

snips

2008-07-03T22:38:00.001-05:00

They were doing men’s work in the field while raising two families—theirs and their masters. This may not be the ideal definition of feminism, but black women were doing more work than white men and white women combined, and they were doing it while being black.

Carol Chehade, Big Little White Lies: Our Attempt to White-Out America, 2001.

[After 9/11,] many in my Arab American community are surprised when we are treated un-White. We figured that if we played by the racial rules of this country, we would be bypassed in receiving some of the bigotry that Blacks routinely receive.
...

I am less disappointed in how my ethnic group has been signaled out [sic] and more disappointed in how we have been pathetically courting the very White privilege that has the power to decide which group will be signaled out. We need to be completely honest as Arab Americans and ask ourselves whether or not we have been models of anti-racism.
...

Our temporary exile from Whiteness should serve as a wake-up call as to whether we want to be re-instated into a racial hierarchy that wields so much unearned power.

Carol Chehade, Arabs and the Racial Lessons of 9/11, 2002.

(but she also says some things like "If Black Africans instead Arabs had brought terrorism to our shores, there would have been a race war in this country." this i find hard to wrap my head around. but you know what? so much has changed since 2000 that i can't really remember what it was like for anti-arab sentiment not to be a major and expected current. maybe she's right.)

(and on a bitchier, syntactical note, she also says: "If we are to be positive additions to the United States, then we have to strengthen what makes us weak, and one of the biggest things that weaken us as a nation is racism." it is too snarky of me to say something like really? we have to strengthen racism?, but i just did.)

anyway, just stuff i found interesting. the first reading led me to the second, and that latter stuff is certainly food for thought in my endless attempt to work out where i stand when it comes to race. for example, i find it interesting that someone close to me who is very, let's say, US-oriented for lack of a better phrase likes to tell me don't kid yourself, you're not white, and on the other hand someone close to me who shares my perspective on most cross-cultural and third-world issues likes to say, don't kid yourself, you are white.

entering notes while on the phone

2008-07-02T22:38:00.000-05:00

pt states: "the man who's supposed to be helping me out, it's so difficult with him right now. He keeps saying things like he's gonna beat the hell out of me, beat the baby out of me, it's just so hard right now."

ETA: at 7pm, pt's fifth phone call- "i am so thankful for you all. i don't know you, but i love you." i didn't write that in my database notes, but it will be nice to remember it later.

i have had one long-ass day.

ETAx2 (1:40am): one really long-ass day.

morning case review

2008-07-01T22:37:00.000-05:00

6/28/08: Patient was raped and cannot get outside assistance from family or friends because they are anti.

sigh. what kind of world is this.

reviewing my cases

2008-06-30T22:36:00.000-05:00

hotliner notes: Local fund is helping with $175. Domestic Violence- man stole all her money, broke her phone. phone is still broken, can only leave messages -- then she will locate another phone to call back on.

your daily dose of substituting the public for the private

2008-06-27T22:35:00.000-05:00

cuppa joe, morning news

The government has ruled that a pregnant 11-year-old who was raped by a relative can have an abortion in Romania. Twenty Christian Orthodox church groups have threatened to press charges if the government allows the girl, who is 21 weeks pregnant, to have an abortion in the country, where abortions are illegal beyond 14 weeks of pregnancy unless the woman’s life is endangered. But Theodora Bertzi, a Labor Ministry official and a member of the committee that ruled on the case, said the government had to respect the rights of the child, who told doctors that she had been raped by her 19-year-old uncle. He has disappeared. The position of the church groups was in contrast to the official stand of the Romanian Orthodox Church, which said the decision should be left to the family.

food math

2008-06-26T22:34:00.000-05:00

1 onion chopped + garlic and ginger minced + 2 tbsp vegetable oil
sauteed til translucent
+
white pepper, ground mustard, smoked chipotle tabasco, etc
+
2 large carrots diced + half an aging apple chopped + stem parts of bok choi + 2 cubes of vegetable bouillon + a gallon of water + two bay leaves
brought to a boil, simmered for an hour
pulsed briefly with a hand blender
+
2 potatoes cubed + two handfuls of bok choi leaves and mustard greens torn into bites
simmered another 20 minutes
+ salt to taste and optional slip of olive oil
=
vegetable soup, tasty hot or chilled; or, wednesday dinner and thursday breakfast and thursday lunch!

also

two kinds of blue cheese on a cheeseboard
+
shallots, peeled and roasted with balsamic vinegar
+
rye and caraway crispbreads
=
light and beautiful dinner that looks and tastes like i planned it ahead of time; or, a way to use up kitchen remnants in 30 minutes on a hot thursday night.

data entry at work, the lighter side

2008-06-24T22:33:00.000-05:00

clinic writes: "pt don't work or recived any food stamp or cash from f.I.A." [all sic]

filling out my call log

2008-06-23T22:33:00.000-05:00

patient asked for names of local funds to which she can donate when she is "in a position to give back" - yay!

data entry at work, pt 2

2008-06-19T22:32:00.000-05:00

Wanted to continue preg. but b/f incarcerated for 17 years. Now she is homeless. (clinic notes)

data entry at work

2008-06-18T22:31:00.000-05:00

clinic writes: pt's partner admitted to poking holes in the condoms they used.

2008-06-07T22:29:00.000-05:00

wow, people suck:

SARASOTA — An anti-abortion group [the American Life League] has broken up a deal between Planned Parenthood and Habitat for Humanity by blasting out 10,000 e-mails to Habitat supporters.

Planned Parenthood is building a 23,000-square-foot regional headquarters on Central Avenue, and planned to sell Habitat the land next door for a token $10 to build three below-market-cost houses. The deal benefited Planned Parenthood because the city required the clinic to put up buildings as a buffer between its parking lot and Cohen Way.

"We could have put up any building we wanted," said Barbara Zdravecky, president of Planned Parenthood. "We wanted to donate the land so Habitat could build more attainable housing."

But after Habitat donors learned about it and complained, Habitat International told the local board to drop it. The local Habitat board dropped the deal Tuesday night, less than a month before it was set for a final vote by the city.

Tony Souza, director of Habitat for Humanity Sarasota, said it was the pressure from donors -- and not a philosophical stance -- that caused Habitat to back out of the project. "It was a lot of pressure on Habitat International," Souza said. "When donors start pulling out, money talks."

...

there's a couple more paragraphs after this, but that is the basic plot.

just a plug for my favorite site of late

2008-05-26T22:28:00.000-05:00

i always forget that i love to read jezebel -- until someone links to a post there, and i read it, and then spend the rest of the weekend reading the rest of the site. i'm not very aware of website "families" and organization and politics, but i guess jezebel is owned by gawker media, most of which is "progressive" but casually misogynist (especially the commentariat) and most of which i never stick around to read for very long. but jezebel's pretty awesome, and sometimes i wish these crazy ladies, who came out of nowhere to tell funny stories and critique shitty media and say all the things that i wish i had heard people say when i was younger*, were people i knew and hung out with. but failing that, it's nice to know they exist out there.

*like this. this post is pretty much 100% how i felt about myself, sexually speaking, for several years (before my libido plateaued, so i'm gonna say 2002-2005 maybe?), but at the time i never heard anyone talk this way and felt alone and weird. i guess it didn't help to go through a couple relationships where my sex drive or my sexuality was implicitly fingered as a cause of the relationships' fatal problems. even in college i felt kind of weird, since most of my friends were virginy (for lack of a better word) and even the virtual communities of learnlink weren't all one might imagine. until senior year the only forum that came close was JUGs, and that was kind of conservative comparatively; i sometimes got the feeling that i was either the horniest or the most oversharing participant on there, even though all my experiences were pretty vanilla at that point. then senior year there was GINAs, and i was blown away that there were women who wanted and had more sex than i did, not to mention kinkier. but by then i had already sort of leveled out in terms of activity and also in terms of insecurity, and isolation, and thirst for knowledge about other people's experiences.

the amazing thing? they make posts like that all the time. what i at first thought i'd stumbled upon just the once, as a singular anchor of comfort in a crazy cruel misogynist madonna/whore internet, turned out to be their normal, workaday output.

i think at one point that may have been my dream job, but let's face it, my sex life is way too boring now. ha. that's probably a good thing, considering.

eta: plus, diablo cody (screenwriter of juno) is a reader and commenter. that's kinda cool, right?

more from the abortion files

2008-05-24T20:09:00.005-05:00

so i spent about half an hour yesterday, and half an hour the day before that, on the phone with a woman who was early in her pregnancy and broke but determined to have an abortion as soon as possible. C's house is in foreclosure; she relies on others for transportation and her phone is being shut off this weekend. she shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, but fears her ex would somehow use an abortion against her in custody court if he found out, so she can't ask him for financial or practical support. the dude involved in the pregnancy is her on-again, off-again sexual partner, but more importantly is her friend of 13 years; he helped C raise her daughter for two years when things were bad with the ex-husband. he's said he can loan her some money for the abortion because she has none. she has lived in her town, "in the suburbs, but in the boonies", for a year and doesn't have many friends. all of this she told me on thursday. we hung up with the understanding that she would call her friend to find out how much money he could loan her and then call me back.

on friday when she calls me she is crying and panicked. the dude, her friend, is being weird. he told her to stop calling him, that if she kept pushing him he wouldn't give her any money at all, that if she called him at work again he would break her legs. he has never spoken to her like this before. she tells me he's patching things up with his ex-wife, who would leave again with the kids if she knew about his relationship with C. apparently C tried some ill-advised blackmail: "i don't know why you're making this so difficult, all i have to do is make one phone call [to tell all to his ex-wife]". he responded with "you try that and we'll see what happens to you". she says that if it weren't for having to depend on him right now, she would call the police, and she doesn't want to speak to him ever again when this is over. but she needs him to drive her the 25 miles to the clinic. at the end of their argument, she says, he suddenly became cooperative, saying "ok, i'll drive you there, sure". she is worried he's going to leave the clinic while she's there and never come back. i'm worried she's not even going to make it to the clinic. is he going to show up and beat her? try to drive her off a bridge? she mentions maybe he's thinking of pushing her out of the car to cause an inexpensive miscarriage.

i'm about to ask C if she can tell someone of her fears, maybe the neighbor she's mentioned, when she says that she has already made plans to tell the neighbor where she's going and with whom, and then to drop it into conversation with the dude that someone will be checking for her return. we come up with more plans: of the two hundred dollars she has told him he must come up with, she's going to reserve fifty for a cab ride home in case he doesn't show up. i will send the clinic a pledge covering the rest. and she's going to call me when she gets to the clinic, whether from her doomed cell phone or the clinic's front desk. both nervous but not sure what more we can do, we hang up.

i go out for a very late lunch and come back to find a message from her: "what if he wants to come in and pay the $200 himself, then how will i be able to pocket the cab fare?". good question. i call the clinic, explain the situation, ask if they can set aside the fifty from their payment if the dude does come in to pay. they are surprisingly quick to understand, don't act like i'm asking something weird of them: sure, we can put fifty in the safe with her name on it, she can come back and ask for it if he splits; i'll make a note of it in her chart right now. so i call her back, she doesn't pick up, i leave two messages because i'm nervous. thank god i'm working this saturday, i can be at my phone during her appointment.

so today is saturday, her appointment is at noon. she calls me in the morning and i tell her the clinic is cooperating. she says she'll call me when she gets there, as per the plan. then she doesn't. it's noon, one o'clock, three o'clock, five o'clock. no C. it's past time to go home. the building is closed monday, it's national don't go to work day. i'll call the clinic tuesday and see what they can tell me then. maybe she's fine. i turn off the lights and leave.

a car is idling in the parking lane in front of our building's entrance, a woman with short hair is holding a camera in the rolled-down window, she sees me see her and looks. looks at me some more when i look at her some more. i'm confused, worried, but there are a dozen floors to our building and my employer is on just one of them. she could be taking pictures for anything. our front desk "security" is crap though. i tell myself not to borrow trouble.

catch-up: feedback

2008-05-24T20:09:00.004-05:00

Counselor met needs: yes -
Would recommend Hotline: yes -
Other comments: last august my boyfriend killed himself and i lost my job and my apartment, and spent months and months in depression. i only just started working again about a month ago and it feels great to be doing something with myself, but i found out i was pregnant from the only messy one night stand i've had in all that time and i didn't know who to turn to or what to do about paying for an abortion. having the baby was never even an option, i can't even take care of myself! you people seriously saved my life. i owe you everything.

wondering if i should delete this entry or somehow make it private. leaning slightly toward yes right now but i wish i weren't, because i also would like to share patients' words more. but they're not mine to share, are they? i'll give it more thought soon.

catch-up: talking shop

2008-05-24T20:03:00.002-05:00

so a friend emailed me recently and said hey, how have you been doing by the way, i don't really know what you're up to.

good point.

since january i've been working at a national pro-choice organization. it's a professional organization for providers, a policy and lobbying group, a coordinator of research and medical education, and a resource for women seeking information about abortion, sexual health, and a good variety of related things.

the latter function is under the scope of an assistance hotline, where i work as a case manager. my department recently received a significant gift of money, all earmarked for helping women pay for abortion care. this is why i was hired. it used to be that one case manager was sufficient for the tasks of (a) usually telling people "no, funding isn't really what we do", (b) determining who was most needy of a "yes", and (c) administering the very small amount of money we had. but the hotline has become a real funding resource since then, and as of next week we will have a total of five case managers to manage the demand (i was the third).

it's great to be able to say "yes" so often. it makes me wonder about all the women who called for prices when i worked at the clinic; how many of them simply gave up? when people inquired about financial help, we had to begin with the shitty stuff -- "have you asked your church group for help? can you go see a loan shark? do you have anything you can pawn?", knowing that some women might already be selling their food stamps or selling sex -- and then tack on, "and if you get pretty close to your goal, there are organizations that may then be able to give $50 or $75, but they can only do that a couple times a month, so call back and talk to our manager and maybe she can talk to them for you". now that shitty stuff is the last resort, for after we've promised as much money as we're allowed to. it's still not a perfect system, but i'll certainly take that over "no, we can't do payment plans. but we do accept credit cards...".

in fact, we say "yes" so often to so many women that we've delegated a lot of that to the hotline operators, so that case managers can spend more time on people who need more support than just the money. in a way that makes it harder, of course; you feel like you fail more often, because there are still people that, no matter how hard you try for them, don't make it to their bus ride across the country or have too complicated a medical history to be seen by anyone at this stage in the pregnancy, etc. i had to give up on a woman with paranoid-schizophrenia and a pregnancy that may or may not have been the product of incestuous assault because she would only contact me, via payphone, every two weeks, was unwilling to fax the clinic the police report or the medical report that would have established legal grounds for the procedure (or even her previous sonogram so they could tell her the length of pregnancy and the cost and set her an appointment), and had been sent home from a previous appointment elsewhere after having a freakout and making a nurse there feel unsafe. one of my colleagues had been working with her as early as january, and by the time she was too far along to have an abortion she still hadn't gotten it together.

of course these are the people that you want to work hardest for, because they're having the most trouble getting what they need. but there's a certain point where i can't do more -- can't go to her state and get her out of her father's house and drive her to colorado and escort her through the weeklong appointment -- and even if i could, maybe i shouldn't. the hardest thing for me has been sussing out whether a woman really wants to go ahead with an abortion and is just encountering obstacle after obstacle, or is inwardly ambivalent and hoping that one of those obstacles might stop the events in motion. it happens. i've done that myself, about mundane things like going to a movie i didn't really want to see, or accepting a job i didn't really want to do: "i'm so disappointed, i was all set to do it but then i got sick / had a plumbing emergency / had conflicting family plans", whatever. it's important that women still be able to own their decision, such as it is -- if you can help it, you should avoid being in a position to blame something important, like having or not having a child, on things beyond your control -- and i am struggling to find the best way to support that. once someone apologized to me when she said she wouldn't need financial assistance anymore because she had decided to carry to term. i don't want you to be sorry. i just want you to to be able to do what's best for you, and you know best what that is.

i'm glad that i am still working with a client population, even if it's only over the phone; i know i quit my job at the clinic saying i wanted to do lobbying or communications or something of the sort, but this job offer came right at the time where i was starting to question that, and i think it's mostly been a good thing. i'm still thinking i'd like to do policy research sometime soon, but it makes me sad to think about sitting alone in an office not actually talking to the people i'm hoping to be useful to. how can you know you're on the right track if you don't listen to your clients? but anyway, there are so many things i want to do sometime soon that i don't know which one will be soonest. go to school so i can just get a masters' out of the way, travel, live in my hometown for a spell, change jobs four hundred times, write some kind of food book? sure.

anyway, so that's what i do, sort of. i'll try to update more soon.

catch-up: foodblog, sort of

2008-05-24T20:02:00.001-05:00

the chocolate birthday cake i made last night (and brought to the beach today, with a bottle of milk i grabbed when we stopped for gas) was probably my best attempt yet. i've made it in cupcake form several times before and the cupcakes always came out a little over-moist, like they would stick to the roof of your mouth, even when i tried to overbake them. not sure why it worked so much better in a single eight-inch round, but i'm not complaining. recipe pilfered once again from the amazing orangette; my only creative input was to third the recipe, since i had neither 3 cake pans nor 3 oz of chocolate left. (also, i've been going through chocolate bars REALLY quickly ever since deciding to confront my baking demons.)

i like how quickly i can put together a baked good nowadays, at least after i've made it a couple times. it's nice to have a feel for something, to remember what a particular batter is supposed to feel like, or whether it's supposed to be dull or shiny on the whisk, flat or bubbly in the pan, how high it should rise in the oven.

more cooking notes. dinner last night was a baffling series of disasters. baffling because each component seemed like it would be simple and quick, and instead was difficult and time-consuming and a wreck. the brussels sprouts that should have "caramelized" turned a really beautiful green and them promptly burned. the tilapia kept falling apart when i turned it, and patches of it were still floury when i plated them. and the part of dinner that i was most looking forward to -- a beurre blanc, a sauce made of white wine and lemon and butter that is smooth and amazingly flavorful -- came out the absolute worst: the reduced wine and lemon juice seized up into browned clumps, probably bound to burned milk solids from the butter, and sank to the bottom of a bowlful of clear yellow oil. basically i had clarified butter dotted with flavor-chunks. fuck.

i think what happened was that the cold butter should have gone into the sauce to melt but never have gotten actually hot. the recipe's technique was to lower the heat to low before the whisking-in of cubed butter, but i probably should have removed it from the heat entirely. see, i did exactly as the recipe said, but the recipe probably didn't know that i use a shitty electric stove, which heats up and cools down a burner WAY slower than a gas flame would. so now i know. but i'm two sticks of butter (i know!) poorer for it.

all that said, i think the meal had a lot of potential and might come out perfectly if i tried again. by the last fillet i certainly had the hang of the pan-frying technique, and the brussels sprouts might just need a little tinkering -- non-virgin olive oil, or a tiny bit of sugar in the pan, to get the right kind of browning -- and maybe the only problem with the sauce was the heat issue. so i feel bad for wasting people's evening, but not too bad about the disappointment in and of itself.

the one thing i can recommend without all the caveats would be what i did with the fettuccine (or was it linguine? doesn't matter), which was simple and subtle and flavorful: bit of extra-virgin olive oil, splash of cream, grated lemon zest, ground black pepper. the end. anyone can do it, everyone should.

that's more than enough from me in one night. someone please remind me to start using my camera again. off to crash, goodnight.

catch-up: foodblog 4?

2008-05-24T20:01:00.000-05:00

today was cold and rainy. i made the mistake of agreeing to go out of the building for lunch, figuring the rain was safely down to a mist by then, and of course on the way back it suddenly poured and four blocks later i rejoined my coworkers looking like a drowned rat and had to sit another four hours in an office chair, soggily squishing in my cold wet pants.

anyway, between the weather and it generally being a very monday-ish monday (which seemed to be going around today in a big way -- i had office space quoted to me a couple times, even), i didn't really feel like cooking but i also wanted to eat something comforting and warm. and ended up throwing together a surprisingly good soup out of not much. i'd like to claim i'm brilliant but actually the following is just a slapdash version of this recipe. thanks, clever vegan lady, for giving me something tasty to unceremoniously deveganize. i'm sorry.

yellow split pea soup

nonstick spray (i.e. pam or something)
1 medium/large onion, chopped
2 tbsp light olive oil (i.e. not virgin or extra-virgin, those burn too fast)
1 tsp mustard seeds
2 tsp ground coriander
chunk of ginger (about a 1-inch cube), minced
2 cloves garlic or more, minced or smashed
2 tsp garam masala
a bag of yellow split peas (about 3 cups dry), rinsed -- and checked for pebbles!
chicken stock (and/or water)
a bay leaf
1 can sweet potatoes, drained
2 handfuls of mustard greens, torn up
salt, black pepper

spray the bottom of a big pot with the nonstick stuff. this sounded totally weird to me too, but trust me. it actually kept the onion from frying/burning much better than regular oil does.

on med-low heat, sautee the chopped onion until it gets soft and translucent, around 5 minutes. according to the clever vegan lady, you should then scoot the onions to one side of the pot -- i did that and then also scooted the pot halfway off the heat -- so that you can drop in the mustard seed and a little oil. the seeds should pop, with a jump and a noise, but they don't always -- they didn't tonight -- so if they pop or if they start getting dark, you can move on to the next step.

add in the garlic and ginger, stir, add more oil if needed, stir, add the coriander and garam masala, stir, add the spit pleas and stir again.

pour in lots of chicken stock (or water), enough to cover the peas by at least a half-inch. stir, add the bay leaf, cover and raise the heat to bring to a boil. then turn it back down to simmer the soup with the lid askew for about an hour, or until the peas are as soft as you want them. make sure to check on the water/stock level now and then, and add more if the soup is starting to dry out or look burny.

toss in the mustard greens and the sweet potatoes. replace the lid and cook on low heat until the greens are at your preferred texture -- for me, 5 minutes got them soft but not soggy. salt and pepper to taste. (salt is really critical to the soup not tasting like bland mush punctuated by sweet mushy chunks.)

i ate mine over some fridgified rice that wasn't going to be good for much else. it was quite satisfying. i like how (relatively) quickly split peas cook.

the original recipe called for kale, which i like but didn't have, and real (i.e. fresh) sweet potato, which gets cubed at the very beginning and tossed in to boil with the split peas, and "mild curry powder", which may or may not be what i used (?), and cumin, which i accidentally replaced with coriander before realizing it. yes, i'm sure cumin made more sense in the curry-powder context of the recipe. but it still came out tasty my way. i hope someone else tries this and tells me how it came out / what other changes you made / etc.

i'll try and write less-mundane things sometime soon. there's just been so much going on in my head lately, it's hard to talk about any of it. with anyone i mean. so don't take it personal, internet.

catch-up: banal misogyny is everywhere

2008-05-24T20:00:00.002-05:00

"but how will we get people to read it?"

i mostly just wanted to point out the poor sad sexy depressive crying on the curb that they chose to illustrate the headline -- "sex: cure for the blues?" -- which incidentally is not what's in the actual text of the article (as happens all too often in all manner of reporting on studies and experiments -- thanks, lazy editors!). apparently sex is no cure at all for the blues, since "depressed women have more sex" but evidently remain in the "depressed" category of the sample population.

(nitpick the third: do "couples" only count if they're hetero, or do you think the social scientists in question remembered the lesbos? i am just curious, cause the article doesn't make any mention one way or another.)

(i am not even gonna go into the bs "women are probably having sex to get that closeness and security" interpretation, because after all this is just a stupid "life&style" article from australia, and australians as we all know are smelly.)

catch-up: newsy news

2008-05-24T20:00:00.001-05:00

HOUSTON (AP) -- Police in Houston say a 14-year-old girl who delivered a stillborn fetus in an airliner restroom on her way back from a middle-school field trip will not be charged with any wrongdoing.

Homicide investigators say they interviewed both the girl and a 14-year-old boy believed to be the father.

Police say that prosecutors decided not to pursue charges against the girl. The fetus was found in a waste can on a Continental Airlines flight that landed at Houston after a flight from New York.

Authorities say the girl told police she didn't know she was pregnant. Preliminary autopsy results indicated the fetus was stillborn and not viable.

The girl's name has not been released.

headdesk or cry? so hard to choose.

catch-up: quotey quote

2008-05-24T19:58:00.000-05:00

Behold the neat trick. First, you make women act like simpletons, broodmares, janitors, mannequins, and sex slaves before you grant them social approval. You call this behavior “femininity” and explain that it is their essential nature, and that any deviation from the program will be punished. Then you infantilize and ridicule the ones who get it right, and vilify and abuse the ones who get it wrong (you can also vilify and abuse the ones who get it right, because, let’s be honest; the world is your oyster).

...but then, twisty faster never minces words. anyway, the rest of the post is about "pink" marketing, etc -- though if you've read "the beauty myth" it's basically the same idea, particularly the second half. then again i guess it's even more directly "the second sex", in case that snippet didn't make it obvious.

ok well. i was gonna write a real post -- about "cops"! -- but i slept poorly this weekend and want to make it up to myself before i wreck my week.

a missed anniversary

2008-03-05T22:13:00.001-05:00

the last time i removed hair from my legs.

i cut out the transaction confirmation number, and i was about to cut out the dollar amount too, when it occurred to me to go ahead and leave it there, because it's one of the reasons i decided i wasn't going to be doing the salon regime anymore. to be fair, ninety dollars covered more than just a lower-leg wax (i never did see a reason to bother with the fine hairs on my thighs) -- i also got a brazilian wax that day, if i recall correctly -- but still. ninety dollars every however-many weeks (supposedly six, i tended to stretch it out to tennish), for the privilege of an hour or so of ripping out something that was just gonna come back and wasn't really all that noxious to begin with, seems both too embarrassing to reveal and yet precisely also legitimate grounds for grievance that do a lot to explain why i stopped.

sure, i could have continued shaving, but (a) lazy and (b) grows back spiky and (c) have to do it all the damn time. the leg wax had actually been an attempt to establish a compromise between the constant maintenance of shaving vs not doing anything at all. but in the end not doing anything at all won out. over time i noticed something neat, which was that for the first six months it grew and then sort of plateaued at what i considered a perfectly decent level of fuzziness -- and then grew again and became the full-on hairiness that i'd initially dreaded. the other thing that surprised me is that the only really dark-and-hairy part of my legs is my shins, specifically the insides; all the rest is pretty unremarkable.

is it worth noting that i in fact continued to get brazilian waxes (this means my vulva, everybody) all the way up til i moved cities, and even once this past november on a trip? or that, after a long winter hibernation in pants and stockings, my hairy legs once again make me a bit self-conscious and i'm wondering whether i should wax them just once more so that they'll be no worse than downy until summer ends? or that i still take twenty seconds to shave my armpits every couple of days and don't foresee quitting? so it's not like i've really sorted all this out (and by "this" i mean "stuff that falls under the broad category of body hair, other appearance issues, &c").

to be honest, my motivations for depilating the armpits (they get way less sweaty and smelly) and the pubes (i orgasm more easily without a soft carpet impeding friction) still seem reasonable enough to me. but i think the insecurity about my hairy legs is just something i'm going to have to get over. it's been over a year, after all, and i weathered last summer just fine overall, even with the swimming at the lake and the constant wearing of skirts. maybe it helped that i spent most days in an explicitly-feminist environment that also had a lax dress code: it's stupid, but now that i can't wear sweatpants or sneakers or even jeans to work, i wonder a lot more about whether my body hair might make me seem unkempt somehow. and that shocks me a little; i think that's a stereotype that i hadn't even realized i'd have to de-internalize (ugh, what a word).

i don't know, i guess these are just some random thoughts on the subject, on the occasion of sifting through old bank records and realizing i'd missed the first anniversary of my last "lawn-mowing" (as my sister calls it) ever. i could say some pissier or more obvious or more political things about it, but right now i'd rather have a conversation.

more mlk day fun

2008-01-22T01:14:00.000-05:00

epilogue 1: gil-scott heron, 1972

A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon.
I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon.
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still while Whitey's on the moon.

The man just upped my rent last night cause Whitey's on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey's on the moon.
I wonder why he's uppin' me. Cause Whitey's on the moon?
I was already givin' him fifty a week but now Whitey's on the moon.

Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
The junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
And as if all that shit wasn't enough:

A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain't no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.

Ya know, I just about had my fill of Whitey on the moon.
I think I'll send these doctor bills
airmail special
to Whitey on the moon.

epilogue 2: twelve myths about direct action

what was that dream about?

2008-01-22T01:11:00.000-05:00

have you noticed this? to believe politicians and pundits and our educational system, martin luther king, jr., only ever wrote one speech, and it was only a few lines long, something about little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls, and today his dream is a reality. i'd like to draw attention to the many other things he actually wrote and said, things that aren't mentioned when our leaders are trying hard to de-fang and co-opt his leadership.

these leaders would have us forget that king's legitimacy came from the grassroots, not the government -- some in hopes of absorbing that legitimacy for themselves (cf., in chronological order: romney, mitt; obama, barack; and clinton, hillary); some trying to erase the real, revolutionary liberation he spoke of, to reduce the risk that the oppressed masses might try to envision it and get ideas in their heads; and some to paint him as a polite friend to the status quo, praising his strategy of nonviolence and implicitly, by contrast, condemning the "bad" black leaders like malcolm x or huey newton. at least this year that asshat dinesh d'souza (i link reluctantly) was more honest, admitting he preferred booker t. washington to w.e.b. dubois -- the same exhausting narrative, from a hundred years earlier.

but these people all are simultaneously missing king's point and making it for him. he spent a lot of energy calling out unfulfilled promises and empty talk. i think that's worth remembering when people want to tell us about so-called colorblindness (or its more contemporary versions, "we're all just people"/"i'm a humanist"/etc and disparagement of "identity politics"), assert that "equality" has long been achieved, or promise that the Man will make things better as long as you are patient, play nice, and don't "alienate" any "potential allies". so here's some of the rest of that speech, for starters:

America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

"i have a dream", 28 august 1963

and here's some from another:

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never."
"letter from a birmingham jail", 6 april 1963

and here's some more -- you start to notice he says a lot of things that today's agenda-setters don't like to bring up:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
...
In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.
"beyond vietnam", 4 april 1967

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.
"why i am opposed to the war in vietnam", 30 april 1967

Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America "you are too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name."
...
We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Early in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation, as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's ability and talents. ... Now we realize that dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will.
...
The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated.

Now our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth.
...
And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
...
A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them -- make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, "America, you must be born again!"

"where do we go from here", 16 august 1967

general thanks for bearing with me, and sorry if i repeated stuff you already know. i just think this stuff is worth keeping around and reading from time to time, lest the de-fangers and co-opters start to regain ground.

foodblog: almost-flourless chocolate cake

2008-01-21T03:12:00.000-05:00

ok, the recipe. i got it from a wonderful blog, Orangette, which has re-inspired my recently-flagging desire to cook and learn and cook more. so all credit is to her and those she credits, but here is the pared-down just-recipe text:

gateau fondant au chocolat, or almost-flourless chocolate cake

ingredients

7 oz good dark chocolate (i used 3 oz 100% and 4 oz 60% of ghirardelli baking chocolate; it isn't valrhona, but it's not hershey's either)
7 oz. good butter (this means european/high-fat, and unsalted; i used plugra, others in this category are lurpak or i guess president)
1+1/3 cup white sugar
5 large eggs
1 tablespoon flour (can substitute good cocoa powder to make it gluten-free and to add depth to the chocolate flavor)

pre-prep

this is seriously the most complicated part of this recipe, i.e. everything else is a snap. you need an 8-inch round cake pan (usually this kind of pan has a straight vertical edge, not sloped like a pie crust) and parchment paper. the parchment will keep the cake from sticking to the bottom of the pan and allow it to slide out in one piece.

preheat the oven to 375 F. butter the pan. trace a pan-sized circle in the parchment with a knife, and put this circle of parchment in the bottom of the pan. then butter that paper circle, too.

prep-per-se

cut the butter into cubes and chop the chocolate small. melt them together in a bowl -- you can be fancy and do it in a double boiler on low heat, or not and do it in the microwave. either way, just make sure to stir frequently and don't burn it. add in the sugar, then the eggs one by one, then the flour, stirring well after each addition.

cookery

pour into the pan, bake at 375 degrees for 25 minutes or just a little less. take it out when the cake is barely jiggly, if at all, when you give it a shake. sit the whole thing on a rack and cool 10 minutes.

post-prep

this is the second-most complicated part. put a large piece of foil across the top of the pan; then put an upside-down plate on top of that. hold pan and plate snugly together and flip the whole thing, so that the cake plops (gently) out of the pan and is sitting upside-down on the now foil-lined plate. peel off the parchment paper if it's stuck; then take a second plate and do the flipping thing over again, except this time without the foil and be careful not to smush the cake between the two plates (can use a finger between them to make some space).

serve

orangette says to wait til it's cool or preferably til the next day, since age actually improves it; she even made them for her own wedding reception a week in advance, keeping them wrapped in the freezer til the day. anyway i and others have been nibbling at this since it came out of the oven until almost a week later, and it's been great at every stage.

it's good alone with a glass of milk, or with a dollop of heavy cream that's been whipped up with a small amount of sugar. barely sweet, mind. and though you can use a plain old fork for the entire recipe, don't bother trying it for the whipped cream. a whisk might work if you have patience, but since i expect my accompaniments to come together as easily as my main dish did, i would only bother if i had an electric beater.

old fogey

2008-01-21T03:11:00.000-05:00

my birthday week has been very good, for reasons both related to my birthday and not.

a) sunday i made a cake. it was easy as pie (haw), tasted difficult, and ages wonderfully. recipe to follow. i also went to the italian store and bought myself some prosciutto, sopressata, pate de campagne, and truffle mousse.

b) monday we made a charcuterie plate out of the stuff from the italian store with capers, cornichons and toasts. that was nice. also i mail-ordered myself a pair of flannel-lined pants. i've wanted some for years but they were always too expensive, and i figured i didn't live in a cold enough climate that i couldn't just tough it out for a few freezing days instead. but i caught them on sale, very sale, and i am after all in the frozen tundra of just-north-of-virginia now; so i got them and they came right away and i am feeling very self-congratulatory. the high today was 25 degrees, and i didn't need to wear three layers of pants like i used to do.

c) tuesday i had an interview downtown and it went shockingly well. details in a future post wherein i muse about service, work and stuff like that. also jennie was in town overnight for a conference and we met up for a quick dinner and drink, which was a great surprise.

d) wednesday we took advantage of "restaurant week": josh and melissa and sarah and i got a last-minute reservation at ardeo, a vaguely contempo-mediterranean, semi-fancy restaurant. the idea was 3 courses for $30. i had a deceptively boring-named "beet salad" (tiny cubes of golden beet, tiny cubes of a golden gelee of something citrusy, halved tiny tomatoes, and micro-mache i think, with balsamic vinaigrette), a veal meatloaf with wild mushroom gravy, potato puree, and wild broccoli (i'm sorry to say that i broke from my don't-buy-veal habit in order to try 'wild broccoli', but happy to report that wild broccoli is kind of awesome), and an underwhelming dessert of raspberry sorbet that tasted lipglossy but was cradled in a very competent brandy basket and (surprisingly, unseasonably) fresh blackberries and strawberries. everyone else's food was very good too, maybe better than mine -- the fish especially, it was so impossibly tender it almost didn't seem like fish but rather some kind of fish-tasting velvety substance, like the concept of microsuede.

d2) also wednesday sarah mail-ordered me a selection of goat cheeses and a bamboo cheese board. a beautiful gift. so far we've tried the classic chevre buche (mild and creamy and addictive), the chocolate mini buche (cocoa through and through, but not sweet; simultaneously intriguing and offputting, so only small bits at a time), the blueberry mini buche (only on the outside; very nice, though i think the concept works better with cranberries), and a firmer, stinkier round whose name i forget (nothing compared to a camembert, but still, very pungent for a goat cheese, and i've been averse to pungent cheese lately, mostly because of the way it lingers on the palate). three more to go, all harder types.

e) thursday josh was going to be away all day so he booked me a really long massage at the four fucking seasons. unfortunately it snowed all day and the place was in georgetown (i.e. poor public transit access) so i ended up calling a cab. didn't cost as much as i'd worried. the massage itself was amazing and left me soft and pliant, this sounds weird but i felt like i had ocean-fresh calamari between my shoulderblades instead of the guardedly tough flesh i usually keep there. the massage therapist was great too, so kind and knowledgeable, i wished we could be personal friends so he could give me massages and advice and goodbye hugs all the time. afterward i septn about 45 minutes in and out of the steam room, which was filled with eucalyptus or something, almost too much of it, and wished it didn't feel rude to go completely naked. i drank cucumber water. josh picked me up and we ate sushi that was both fresh and cheap, a rare find.

f) friday i found a new coffee shop with jim. it's small and maybe not so good for being talkative, but comfy and warm and they make the only good "chai" i've had in months, and by chai i mean the tea-spice-latte concept, which i would like if people didn't try to sneak lethal doses of sugar into it. but this one is only slightly sweet.

g) laura has been visiting us this weekend. tacos, bookstores, empanadas, a disappointing hookah bar, blueberry pancakes, the smithsonian - natural history, a lot of driving, more cheese, and getting updated on office news. each of these is a sub-topic in its own right. it's been so good to catch up / hang out with her. also, which would you give up if you had to choose between cheese or oral sex?

g2) new books: "the color of violence", eds. incite! women of color against violence; and "media control", noam chomsky. stuff that got added to my list for later getting: angela davis, more patricia hill collins, arundhati roy's nonfiction (yes! she is twice-famous now), the revolution will not be funded (also by incite!, has been on my list but they were sold out of it this time, have been thinking about it so much lately), a people's history of the u.s. THE MAP BOOK (yes of howard zinn fame - also has been on the list but rather costly), and stuff by tim wise if i can find it. the bookstore is busboys and poets (named for langston hughes, who was both), it's a pretty good place. i think this forthcoming post i mentioned will also bring up my reading list. maybe.

i'm forgetting things too, i think. the bad part of this week: worried i'd be late to get laura from the airport, i rushed onto the first southbound train that came by, which turned out to be green line and not yellow, and didn't realize the problem until well past the last chance to switch over -- not until after i'd crossed the anacostia, even. shit, embarrassing. had to go back north, switch over, then go south again. also: saw an irritating poster in the (wrong) train car that i was in. also: despite bundling up, my gloved fingers felt ready to fall off in today's windy cold. face too. but not my legs! so basically, not much to complain about.

"martyr to the coalition", thinking about nonprofit work

2008-01-14T15:17:00.000-05:00

[in reference to the altitude at the 1981 yosemite women's music festival where she was speaking:]

I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing...

That is the nature of coalition...It is not to feed you; you have to feed it. And it’s a monster. It never gets enough. It always wants more. So you better be sure you got your home someplace for you to go to so that you will not become a martyr to the coalition...None of this matters at all very much if you die tomorrow—that won’t even be cute. It only matters if you make a commitment to be around for another fifty more years.

-civil rights activist/historian/musician/etc bernice johnson reagon, via brownfemipower

trying very hard to sort out what i'm doing, where i'm going, my relation to the work i say i want to do.

had a long conversation with a bitchy patrick to complicate things. might post parts of it later, or actually try to write stuff if i'm not a lazy ass. but i'm tired and depressed again, so not just now.

plagiarism, gastropods

2008-01-12T23:38:00.001-05:00

a faffing-on-his-blog poem by tao lin (author of a book called "Eeeee Eee Eeee" and a book of poetry and some other things):

i started reading eeeee eee eeee in bed and i read 70 pages and felt appreciation for myself

some parts i thought were really funny

i felt 'impressed'

i have read those 70 pages like 400 times or something if you include reading them while editing them

reading my own thoughts

the brain processing thoughts the same brain thought

i feel like a snail trying to masturbate but unable to touch itself

like it's moving muscles inside of itself to somehow masturbate

like a pile of hummus trying to masturbate

the end

thank you

sadly and wonderfully, i can't rid my mind's eye of those images.

lazy musings

2008-01-10T02:29:00.001-05:00

"If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished." - ehud olmert, at the annapolis conference on palestinian peace in late nov / early dec (from bbc)

so i know it was a month ago, but it's like i blacked out that week and keep finding more things i gotta catch up on. so, does anybody else think that's a fucked up thing to admit -- that you're not sure how long your apartheid setup will last, and you're worried you might have to concede equal voting rights? doesn't that tell you something about the nature of your endeavor?

why haven't i slept, man. i can't, too much to read. this is gonna be a weird week.

ps memo to self, edit your blogroll tomorrow. you've been reading too many good blogs to lose track of them again.

24 hours of excess, and finally foodblog 3: cider-braised pork and leeks, or "new year's braise"

2008-01-05T12:59:00.001-05:00

new year's eve turned out fun. i went with my boyfriend and our friend melissa to an acquaintance's party, which was very civilized (we played set!), then metroed over to the fancy bar where our roommate jake works, just in time to grab more champagne, count down, and toast the new year. no, really: hustling down the block from the station we passed one bar whose door guy was shouting "three minutes til midnight! come on in!", and indeed, it was 11:58 when we made it to our bar stools.

we spent a good few hours at the bar post-midnight. the drinks were high-end and free, and they definitely caught up to me after i'd finished downing them. eventually we tried to go home but this involved a long wait in the cold, waving at cabs as they zipped past us. so we ducked in next door at a 24 hour wings-n-other-food place and got our new year's black eyed peas. then started walking home, and a few blocks in finally caught a cab. before bed we stayed up a while with jake's new lady-friend. i like her a lot, and she likes cheese a lot which makes me like her even more -- but she tried to share her fancy cheeses with us and i had to give mine back. i felt like a fraud but it just wasn't settling right after the booze. funny that the peas went down fine, though.

so yes, all in all a decent evening, complete with a pre-midnight voicemail from a friend in india, which was really nice. but i'm finally getting to the important part of this post: new year's day dinner. after christmas jake showed up with two pieces of cast iron cookware, a dutch oven and a skillet. you need two hands to pick these things up. we were both excited. so on the 30th we decided to try out his dutch oven with a technique neither of us is that familiar with: braising.

braising involves simmering something in a small amount of liquid until it's tender and fragrant. you can do it with lots of things, including fish or vegetables, on the stove or in the oven or both. dutch ovens are heavy, relatively wide pots, good for braising large pieces of meat because they hold in heat evenly and have fitted lids that prevent the steam from escaping and drying out the meat, while cast iron is good for oven use because no amount of kitchen-level heat is going to damage that shit. and a fatty, tough piece of meat is best: hours of low heat melt the fat into the meat and will break down the connective tissues. jake likes pork, and i like leeks, and we thought apple cider would go well with pork; and that's how you start building a recipe. so we decided on pork shoulder, which was cheap, too -- we went to the store on the 31st and got 8 pounds for 8 dollars, albeit bone-in. anyway, it turned out delicious and very pat-on-the-back-worthy. in case anyone's interested, here's my free-form "recipe" for how we made it:

prep: buy a large cut of pork, like pork shoulder or butt -- ours was 8 pounds of shoulder with a big bone in the middle. discard the gross packaging, rinse that pig in cold water, put it on a cutting board or big tray, pat it dry with a paper towel, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. note how one side of your pork shoulder is covered in skin and you can make out the pig's wrinkled armpit; contemplate tickling it. say a prayer for the late julia child, who on pbs once heaved a whole pig upside-down onto her counter and declared "i believe we ought to know where our food comes from". ahem. also turn two carrots into small dice, two leeks into half-rounds (rinse well after chopping!), 3 cloves of garlic into a rough mince, and one stalk from a fennel bulb into small bits too. set all these veggies aside.

macabre: with a sharp knife and a fair bit of pressure, score the skin and fat in a cross-hatch pattern. then cut slits in the muscle, slice 2-4 more cloves of garlic, and push a piece of garlic into each slit.

brown: now over medium-high heat, warm up a couple tablespoons of vegetable oil, like canola or safflower, in the dutch oven -- don't use olive oil, it'll burn, even our "extra light" olive oil specially for cooking made a lot of smoke. ease the meat into the pot and brown it for about 15 minutes, turning it every few minutes so each side gets a turn in contact with the bottom of the pot. then move the meat to a plate.

sautee: turn the burner down to medium-low. toss in the aromatics -- the carrot and fennel and leeks and garlic -- that you chopped up earlier. stir and cook down for maybe 10 minutes; everything should get soft and/or translucent, golden is ok, but avoid crispy.

liquids: pour a couple bottles of hard cider (we used woodchuck "dark & dry", it was fine, i bet granny smith would've been good too) over the softened veggies -- it'll sizzle for a minute -- then raise the heat to bring everything to a boil. once that happens you can turn it back down to a simmer until you have half the liquid you started out with. then add some chicken stock (ours was homemade and frozen by yours truly several months ago) and two bay leaves. bay leaves add a nice warm flavor AND reduce the scummy stuff that floats up when you cook meat in liquid. season to taste -- we favored fresh-ground white pepper and i'm not sure what else.

oven: when the broth tastes right, put the pork back into the pot. the liquid only needs to go halfway up the meat, so if you have too much, remove some and save it for later. move the whole thing to the oven with the lid on. cook for an hour at 350. then take the lid off, baste the meat by spooning the juices over the top, and put the lid back on. turn the heat down to 275 and leave it to cook another 2-3 hours. over this time the meat will get soft and falling-apart.

more veggies: 30 minutes before you're ready to pull it out of the oven, slice the bulb of the fennel into big pieces, brown them a little in butter on medium-low, and throw them into the pot with 6 whole peeled carrots. now prepare 2-3 whole leeks: cut off all but two inches of the green leaves, slice down the middle til you're an inch from the base, fan out the layers and rinse all the grit out from between them, then push it all back together and slice off the bottom quarter-inch, including the root. throw those in with maybe 15 minutes to go (we put ours in at the same time as the carrots and fennel and they got mushy).

finish line: check to make sure everything is tender enough, and if so pull it out and turn off the oven. have your awesome roommate roast potatoes with herbs, sautee brussels sprouts with shallots and bacon, and pot together a bbq-style sauce out of pureed cooking juices and molasses and brown sugar. put out the two potholders he sets on fire. sit down to dinner with several friends. be proud of yourself.

happy new year

2008-01-03T17:51:00.000-05:00

ghost of a post

2007-12-28T04:04:00.000-05:00

just wanted to jot down (or the electronic equivalent of jotting down) part of something i read, i'll probably come back to this and edit/expand at some point, but right now i'm in between packing and sleeping and really ought to get on with that. so i guess mostly this is for my own future reference but there's no harm in leaving it on the coffee table for whoever else might like to take a look. (come to think of it, that's how i've felt about a lot of what i post lately. is that a sign of something bad or something?) well anyway:

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

(second-to-last section in bertrand russell's "why i am not a christian", 1927, link for full text)

oh comedians, you silly things

2007-12-24T16:53:00.000-05:00

also, from a while ago: "See, we're lucky here in America. We live in a free society. Think of it as a ladder. No matter what rung you're on, you have the exact same opportunity to get to the top. Sure, you might say that some folks have less distance to climb than others, or that many of the lower rungs are slippery because they're covered with garbage and your high school didn't have an AP Ladder Climbing Class and the rung right above you is out of order and your landlord keeps saying he's going to fix it but he never does and all the while the guy who hangs out on the corner of your rung is constantly trying to get you high, and you're wondering if maybe you could get a little help up this ladder? Well, Mister, all the help you need is at your fingertips, if your fingertips are touching your ankles. I'm talking about bootstraps."

to be selfish about it, the up-side to the writers' strike is that i'm not missing any colbert report while we don't have cable. (the downside is, of course, the creation of new and ever-stupider "reality" shows and that horrid lie detector gameshow.) (just kidding. mostly.)

in a related vein, that quote and a recent post at pandagon (whence the sarah silverman video) has me wondering again whether comedy is a "legitimate" way to put anger (!) to action or whether sitting around shooting the shit with other privileged people about things that are a shame is only a way to feel that you're "doing something", i guess by speaking up and stuff, but isn't really doing anything. of course there's also the possibility that comedians don't really seek to be "doing something", or maybe even don't especially care about the issues they harp on in a given performance, that the only point is to find funny things to say. but i don't really buy that, at least not for the ones i've watched lately -- colbert and jon stewart, silverman, margaret cho, wanda sykes, tina fey, david cross, eddie izzard, dave chappelle certainly; it would be a pretty far-fetched argument. i think a lot of comedy, sometimes great comedy, is born of anger or frustration or incredulity -- it's a way to connect with kindred souls out there over the absurdity of things. some absurdist stuff, like maybe monty python or kids in the hall sketches, seem not to have a particular "target" they're taking the piss out of; on the other hand i'd argue that even some of the sillier bits in "holy grail" do take shots at various conventions and myths. not sure, have to think about this part more.

i don't think i'm just saying that "the comedy i like makes a political/social statement". even really terrible attempts at comedy are not typically apolitical (i'm thinking right now of "the half-hour newshour", which is funny in its unfunniness -- entertaining, in a sort of painful way, precisely because you can see how the jokes are trying to be funny but they just don't get there, e.g. do they really think liberals defend pedophilia*?, or whatever -- but i don't think that was the kind of humor they were trying for). and that can also be true even if they don't bill themselves as political per se -- jimmy kimmel**, larry the cable guy ::shudder:: -- you can make violent jokes about trannies and that's political, you can ridicule the working class and that's political. humor can also fail even if i share its political bent, of course: "lil bush" pretty much sucks, for example.

and then there's carlos mencia, for example, and i don't get why he's so fucking unfunny. i've been told it's a multiply-ironic thing, and i guess i see how it could be a sort of play-the-jester-to-mock-the-court sort of thing, in the vein of "bamboozled" or other takedowns of black minstrelsy and white expectations of black entertainment, but if it's that then maybe it's just poorly done. feels too much like an actual do-the-colored-fool-dance in honor of racist conventions, even though i get the vibe that he's pretty angry himself, and i guess it weirds me out when his (largely white) audience doesn't seem to know the difference either. kinda like when chris rock's "i like black people but i hate niggers" bit was embraced by conservative white people far and wide as some sort of admission of what they knew all along (that there's good black people and bad black people, and good black people are "articulate" or "clean" or any number of other backhanded compliments), and further as permission to go around using a racial slur and invoking chris rock's name when challenged.

there's also sascha baron cohen, who is sort of a whole nother can of worms; i think where both he and sarah silverman anger people is in firing the "satire" gun indiscriminately and in the process sometimes burying/reinforcing ugly conventional tropes instead of unearthing/subverting them -- silverman really turned me off with the my-homeless-friend episode of her show, baron cohen with the pointless antisemite-vamping in between candids in "borat" (ostensibly to further the movie's "plot" and borat's characterization as an anti-semite, but i think most people were more interested in his interactions with others and his solo interludes were mostly uncomfortable or flat or annoying). all of this is to say that in general political or angry or aggressive humor can be really effective and dead-on funny, but comedians like sascha baron cohen or sarah silverman are like bulls in a china shop and occasionally overplay their "making fun of racists" schtick to the point that it's not distinguishable from uncritically making fun of race -- they sort of stop being snipers and start shooting at flies with a bazooka, or something. my metaphors are mixing.

all of this is why i think comedians are both brave and reckless. it's often said that humor can't be cautious of stepping on toes, humor is transgressive, humor is about taboo. but mocking that's funny is made at the expense of the Man; mocking at the expense of those worse off than you is usually not only wrong but unfunny. maybe it's very difficult to know where the line is when you're onstage, which would be scary because i think most of us day-to-day know where the line is and don't want to be in a position to cross it against our own values, say something terrible and hurt a lot of people. but how is it a "line" that you cross, when the two territories to me seem to be kind of opposed and not actually adjacent? i'm really just not sure. surely it's not the intentions that are adjacent, but maybe the jokes that come out of them -- the phenotype, if you want. my first impulse is to think that your intentions about a joke should be enough to contextualize the joke, but of course i know that frequently intentions aren't that apparent and that anyway intentions aren't really what matters when people are hurt or oppression is reinforced.

so this has turned out to be a really rambly list of paragraphs that may or may not have a point to it. i guess between various conversations and thoughts of the last day or two i've had a couple of ideas bubble up about all this. maybe if i come back to them later i'll be able to make a little more linear sense out of them. ok, out.

*the funny thing is that i doubt most pedophiles are liberals, either. if i had to wager, i'd put money on most closet fuckups being republicans, for the same reason that a lot of fuckups join the priesthood -- instead of seeking treatment, run away, hide, deny. actually what's sad is i think the priesthood is also a soul-eating sort of refuge for closeted gay men, in that it's an "excuse" for not getting married and producing grandchildren. social conservatives tend to erase the difference between non-straight sexual orientation and sexual disease/abuse, which i think is why they lump together out-and-proud lgb people (who are much more likely than those in the closet to have progressive politics) with sick individuals who harm themselves or others (who i've just posited are more likely to hide from themselves by being conservativer-than-thou). whee, long rambly footnotes!

**HOW is this guy dating sarah silverman? he's so much more of a douchebag than she is, even comparing his better moments with her worse ones. eugh.

dear sarah silverman: more hit and less miss, please

2007-12-23T17:24:00.000-05:00

h/t amanda at pandagon for posting it there first. fucking great:

edit: gah, ok, it looks like the embed feature isn't working with blogger, so check out the video here. sorry for the crappy ad thing.

reminds me of her older bit, "i agree with 24-hour waiting periods: sometimes you need to think it over. the other day i thought i wanted an abortion -- but it turned out i was just thirsty." or something to that effect. the general concept she's satirizing in both (Women Who Have Abortions [whatever that means] enjoy the process / are frivolous or capricious or otherwise stupid) is sadly very much in play in the non-satire world. anyway, not to get all "wider implications" or anything, i just found that really funny and wanted to share.

tough calls, or "so what do you do for a living?"

2007-07-11T15:16:00.000-05:00

so a coworker and friend of mine posted something on her journal today and it moved me and made me ashamed, because i don't write in here even a quarter of the things i feel i ought to. it's not like i feel ashamed that she posted more than me or better than me, but that she was brave enough to look at the whole lot of it and push through the fear that it would take hours and years to explain it all from the top and went ahead and said what she wanted to say, and i should do that more often. too often i get home and don't know where i would start, so i don't. but okay.

yesterday i had what was probably the most difficult phone call of my six months at this job. it didn't last very long at all, less than ten minutes probably, and yet at the end of it i felt like something inside me was exhausted and broken and i had to go sit on the floor of the sonography room and bawl. and i'm not even the one with the problems.

this woman was barely keeping it together even when i first said hello. she shakily asked me how much an abortion would cost, and when i asked her how many weeks pregnant she was she told me "today makes nineteen weeks" and something in her voice was breaking. when i told her the cost she cried outright and told me, eventually, that she had no idea what to do. i feel really weird going into the details now that i'm trying to do so, but as she cried and tried to talk, the gist of her situation became clearer. she had been pregnant with fraternal twins, but her relationship situation is "kind of abusive", and he hit her in the stomach and she bled. she miscarried, lost one of the two. there was no doubt at all to me that she had wanted to carry to term and was now grieving. she wanted to keep the remaining pregnancy but "he doesn't want to have it anymore" and that's why she was calling us.

so far i'd never been in a situation where i thought that what i said would undoubtedly make or break a woman's decision. in general i feel that my role is to provide the clearest, most accurate information i can so that people can input that data into their established decision-making process and come up with the output, a decision. of course that's not strictly or always the case, but for the most part women have a pretty good sense of what they want to do, or at least they've already decided that "if x then y, but if u then v". i can't tell anyone to have an abortion or not to have an abortion; they know their lives much better than i do. but this particular woman needed something outside of those parameters. and this is where the misunderstanding of what we do is really salient. if our job were to "sell" abortion, as so many antis allege, i would have told her that in her situation of course an abortion made sense and jumped right into scheduling an appointment. and on the other hand, if i worked at a crisis pregnancy center, my job would have been to tell her that even if she was being abused her baby surely still wanted to be born, or to tell her to go home and pray for the best and choose adoption if things got too bad down the line. but our job is to provide women with information and support to make decisions for themselves. she wanted to deliver twins but her violent boyfriend made her lose one and asked her to get rid of the other? she has two major problems, not one. the first is getting rid of that boyfriend; the second is caring for her health and then deciding whether she can and wants to carry to term. an abortion would only have addressed one of those issues, as well as possibly aggravated her emotional state.

the rest of our conversation was about referrals to domestic violence resources in case she feels she needs them; about getting medical care, which she needs whether she decides to have an abortion or not; about finding money and a supportive environment, which she also needs whether she decides to have an abortion or not; and finally about her family, who are far away and don't know what's going on, but who she thought might be supportive if she called them. i can't remember how many times she told me "thank you", but it made my heart ache every time. i felt so pathetic for being on the verge of tears myself when this woman was going through so much and still trying, to the point of desperation, to satisfy others and spare them inconvenience. of course i hope everything gets better for her -- she said she'd call us back if there was anything else she needed -- but i'll probably never know.

did you know that murder is the most common cause of death among pregnant women? whereas among the general population (of all women "of childbearing age") it is only the 4th most common cause. and a recent analysis of the numbers in maryland (federal reporting is still fairly new) concluded that a pregnant women was twice as likely to be murdered as a non-pregnant woman. i challenge you to find an explanation for this that won't anger and depress you even as you tell it to me.

i'd like to share some of what my friend wrote but i'm going to check with her first. if she'd rather not then i'll try and contextualize some of what's been going on at work myself, but she really did a great job already. i don't know what else to add right now. goodnight.

mleh

2007-07-02T21:08:00.001-05:00

what did i say about bandwagons?

from my fair home state of louisiana, 27 june 2007:

A bill to enact a state ban on a specific abortion procedure won final legislative approval Tuesday when the House passed it 104-0. The same bill cleared the Senate on Monday 36-0 and now heads to Gov. Kathleen Blanco for her review.

The measure, House Bill 614, would make it a state crime for physicians to perform what critics call partial birth abortions. ...Under the bill, physicians who perform the operation could be imprisoned for up to 10 years, fined up to $100,000 or both.

On April 18, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law that banned the procedure. Rep. Gary Beard, R-Baton Rouge and sponsor of the bill, said earlier that the state needs its own ban so that it does not have to rely on federal prosecutors to pursue doctors who violate the law.

[http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/politics/8197542.html]

love those fucking unanimous votes. an entire state completely taken in by medical misinformation and misogyny. also, i thought it was interesting that they passed a state version because they didn't t trust federal prosecutors to be zealous enough for their liking, basically. and finally, i want to note for the record that this is yet another law that criminalizes the performing of an abortion but not the seeking of one -- the rationale being, surely, that even though we live in a society of thinly-veiled misogyny it's still not popular to actually throw women in actual jail -- but if the public truly thought abortion was murder, they'd want the seekers of abortion to be prosecuted as vigorously as parents who pay hit men to take out their born children (i saw it on law and order!).

breaking it down

2007-05-09T21:53:00.000-05:00

this week at work we got a phone call from a woman who had just discovered that her wanted pregnancy is threatened by a severe fetal anomaly. she wanted to know whether an abortion could evacuate her baby intact so that they could see it, hold it, and have a service for it.

according to the supreme court's recent decision, the answer is now uniform nationwide, and it is "No." the answer is "Unfortunately by law our only option is to take apart your baby inside your uterus and remove it in pieces, because the law deems this process objectively less brutal than the alternative you are seeking. Short of international travel, your only other option is to let the baby die and decompose inside you until you have a miscarriage or go into stillbirth labor. We're so sorry for your loss, and for this added bad news."

the anti-choice movement would have you believe that this woman is the "extreme hypothetical," the "mythic sob story" of abortion politics, and yet here she is. these are real women people blather on about, as though their lives are simply theoretical. i'm so angry.

meh, a bit of dumb stuff

2007-05-08T23:00:00.000-05:00

[this was just something i needed to cross-post for completion's sake because i'm feeling anal. i don't know how to backdate though.]

okay, no cheating until you've used up your three guesses... which self-described feminist do you think said the following about the shooting deaths of 30-plus people at virginia tech last week?

The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.
Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again.

got that, girls? you -- and i mean all of you! -- are to blame for pretty much everything, including shooting rampages perpetrated against strangers. (there's more, but i lost the transcript of the whole thing and really it's not going to get any more decent from here, so i am not going to bother, maybe later though.) brilliant analysis here, and thank god, because i wasn't about to spend any more words on it.

a sad day for women and the people who love them

2007-04-20T19:45:00.000-05:00

so i'm still upset and still exhausted and i have a really long day ahead, but i wanted to make a note of this before everybody went back to not caring. but since i'm upset and tired for now i'm just going to paste in a few things i wrote wednesday evening.

brief background: on wednesday, the supreme court finally ruled on a drawn-out case challenging the constitutionality of a congressional law banning a particular kind of abortion procedure -- what the law calls "partial birth abortion", which is a medical non-entity but for now we'll let that slide. it was the first case on whether congress can make a law concerning not whether but how to perform abortions. it's also the first time that justices have presumed to overrule physician consensus with their own opinions on medical risks. in a 5-to-4 ruling, the court upheld the law. anyway, here's the paste, edited as well as i could manage at the moment.

our server crashed overnight. we kept hoping it'd be back up but eventually gave up hope and resorted to doing all our appointment-taking on paper. so the schedule is a big fucking mess and we're going to have to take people at their word that they did indeed make an appointment with us and did indeed get the damn script read to them at least 24 hours in advance (which people have actually tried to bullshit us about, which is scary for us since it's the law and all).

and it also meant we didn't have internet, and the waiting-room tv doesn't have cable, so we found out that the aclu and planned parenthood lost their case against the congressional "partial birth abortion" ban, but then couldn't find out anything else about it because the news networks felt like talking about american idol instead of the supreme court. our manager had to go to kinko's to look up the text of the decision. and when we did figure it out the conclusions were fucking depressing.

the most obvious effect of the ruling is to let the ban stand. and, well, the ban itself is one thing -- a pain in the ass because clinics will have to scramble in the next 25 days to make sure they're doing things legally, and worrisome because its inept wording may extend to techniques beyond what's commonly described as "partial birth" abortion, and dangerous because sometimes the particular procedure people are het up about banning is much safer than the alternatives. but the wider effects are farther reaching and personally devastating; the text of the opinion puts to rest the entire contention that my health is important. kennedy basically tossed out the precedent that restrictions on abortions couldn't be detrimental to a woman's health.

my clinic doesn’t usually do intact dilation and extraction (IDX - the procedure that most closely maps to these assholes’ shitty excuse for a definition of “partial birth abortion”, and i wish people hammered that point a lot more), but when they do, it’s often because of something like fetal hydroencephaly -- a waterlogged skull -- and if they were to perform the standard, less-contested technique of dismembering the fetus and collapsing the skull before removal from the uterus (how that’s less “brutal” than the gory descriptions of IDX, i don’t know, which is another thing cluing me in to the utter disingenuousness at work), the water pouring out of the skull could rupture the uterus.

but forcing a woman to suffer such an injury is constitutional, because the woman is still alive. forcing a woman to go nearly blind) would likewise be constitutional. infertility, nerve damage, long-lasting blood pressure problems, no big deal. hemorrhaging? well, but you’re alive today, aren’t you?

also, in case anyone’s wondering, your options when fetal hydroencephaly is discovered are IDX, early csection, or uterotomy; the first allows a woman to have children at a later date if she wants to, the second makes it unlikely that she’ll be able to maintain future pregnancies (rupture again), and the third makes her so vulnerable to unstable and unsafe pregnancies that she’s advised to avoid pregnancy forevermore. prolifers are clearly in favor of lives, eh?

oh, more on "life". although the "health exception" is gone, the "life exception" (as in, still legal if it will save the woman's life) is still in place, but -- as both kennedy and, in her dissent, justice ruth bader ginsberg, recognized -- it doesn't really mean much in practice. if you have to prove to a judge that your life is in danger in order to obtain a waiver to protect the doctor who could otherwise be jailed for two years for performing your life-saving abortion -- or if you just fucking have to find a doctor who'll perform it, because they've all stopped doing so, might be rusty at it, haven't been passing on the skills to new doctors, etc -- you're probably going to die before anything gets accomplished. obviously. (speaking of medical training, did you know that only a third of medical schools in the country teach abortions of any sort?) yes, kennedy recognized this reality in his opinion -- and dismissed it because, in his estimation, it will affect a small number of women.

i feel afraid about it. and kind of sad, because of something paula (an older coworker) said; she said "if i were you all i'd be out in the streets right now". but nobody actually cares, i doubt most people even heard; so nobody's out there (and, you know, neither am i). and you know, short of a physical revolution, there's nothing that can be done: the supreme court has the final say on the law of the land, after all.
the only good thing about this situation is that the decision didn't get rushed out before november and we dont have an insane republican congress capitalizing on the outcome as soon as possible. at least not at the national level. but there's no telling what will happen in the states, and i'm scared.

of course it’s good to keep up hope, but some of the damage here may be irreversible (or inasmuch as stare decisis applies, which admittedly, judging by kennedy's explicit dismissal of precedent on wednesday, might not be much): the effects of this decision were much broader than just to allow the particular congressional “pba” ban to stand. it dismissed the “not if it threatens a woman’s health” caveat in the guidelines on abortion restrictions, meaning this case can easily be used to justify lots of other restrictions on abortion that don't technically cause death, i.e., used as a wedge to break up abortion rights in many other cases. my big fear is that plenty of states are going to jump on that bandwagon right away. (yay metaphors.)

one more thing, related but not really

2007-03-06T22:03:00.000-05:00

there was another bit in one of the comments that caught my notice: Personally, I find it ridiculous for a microscopic clump of cells to be considered equal to a human being, and I find the majority of abortions abhorrent and unnecessary.

if the majority of abortions should be considered abhorrent and unnecessary simply because they fulfill a desire, then i guess i've already said what i think about that. on the other hand, i think that most people have a very vague picture of "the majority of abortions" and i don't generally find much use in vague hand-waving at "the bad kind". this sort of thing, along with several other sorts of things, have over time impressed on me the general need for actual knowledge about what abortion is like and what abortions are like.

so this is a good occasion to say that i've been wrestling with the idea of starting a set of "abortion clinic diary" posts. if i can sort out the various confidentiality issues involved, i might do this. as much as i really do want to share with many people my experiences of how abortion can be both much more mundane and much more urgent than people think, i've never tried this before and i have to make sure i don't bite off more than i can chew. so i'll start once i figure it out, and i hope it goes smoothly or i'll just take those posts back down i guess.

catch-up from "blog for choice day"

2007-03-06T21:54:00.000-05:00

so, let's write a little post.

i've had so many things going at once, all worth trying to write out, but i guess i should finish what i started. my last post was short, it was to mark the anniversary of roe v. wade and i admit i dashed it off to post before midnight, just for form i guess. anyway, i was busy then and i'm busy now, but i got two responses there [at the livejournal page] that i wanted to address really quickly.

the first started off:

The problem with the abortion debate as it is currently framed lies in the juxtaposition of incommensurate elements. On the one hand are the screaming Christians: Life at any cost! On the other are the screaming feminists: Our bodies, ourselves!

What neither side seems to understand is that the other is not listening. To be sure I find the (stereo)typical feminist-abortionist position, on the whole, to be morally vacuous; their argument is predicated on a hypostasization of the Self, and indeed an apotheosis of this Self into some kind of transcendent moral absolute.

...on the whole it is the abortionist-feminist point of view that is far more damaging [than the "trust god with the course of events" crowd] for society in the long run... there is in the abortionist-feminist agenda a pronounced manic desire for control. The entire argument proceeds from the notion that, somehow, for some never-fully-articulated reasons, it is right and good that human beings should choose and control every aspect of their lives. Why this is particularly desirable, and indeed whether this is even possible, is never actually questioned.

Redacted for length but the gist is preserved. a lot of criticism of the very idea that we should want anything or that we should try to achieve things we might want. it even appears to criticize the desire to lay claim to one's own body. i have to say, i think this is absolute bullshit, because you aren't going to sit there and tell me you haven't wanted things in your life and haven't followed up on those wants. tell me where you are in life and explain to me how you ended up there by simply going with the first option-for-living that you saw at every turn. tell me your whole, own body was not your engine of action. it's bullshit because nobody can divest themselves of all desire or life aspirations (yes i know, except yogis in the mountains), and because it's not many people's belief that anyone should have to, and because if you think that christian dominionists and the like aren't using means to achieve their ends just like everybody else then you're dead wrong. there are few people in this country ready to abandon their life goals or hopes for the future, and the forces described here as better "for society in the long run" than the "abortionist-feminists" are constantly using their faith as a tool to shackle others, and anyone who forgets or denies that does "society" a disservice. if nothing else, i'd like to be shown how the desire to control what one can of one's own life is more pernicious than the desire to control others' lives.

so that was point 1. point 2 will be brief i hope: somewhere along the way the comment includes an apropos that if you take a pro-abortion stance to its "logical" conclusion, you'd have to agree with Singer that infanticide is justifiable as well. i just want to disagree with that really quickly because that's only true if the standard for legitimate life is "can sustain/care for itself". that's not the real standard, to me; as i see it, the important thing is that whatever the organism may be -- even if it is a "legitimate" life -- no person should be forced to give over his or her body to supporting that life. i have the right to refuse my body to anyone at all; i can refuse to donate a kidney to my ten-year-old child, and no matter how wrong you might personally find that refusal, hopefully you'd agree that for the state to force you to acquiesce is far worse. bodily integrity is a crucial part of human dignity, and establishing inviolable respect for it is important in protecting dignity from encroachment. i personally wish roe v. wade had been decided on a basis of the human right to sovereignty over one's own body, because "privacy" is murky, easy to erode, and frankly not far-reaching enough. i don't support the right to bodily integrity because i need it to support the right to abortion; rather, i support the right to abortion because i believe it's within each person's rightful purview to decide what happens within her or his body.

okay. the second comment consisted of:

there is one point that i've been trying to point out to various people for the last five years or so on which I completely agree [with the other comment]:
"The problem with the abortion debate as it is currently framed lies in the juxtaposition of incommensurate elements...What neither side seems to understand is that the other is not listening."

The idea that the two sides are talking past each other--it's a rather disturbing notion that the definition that can't be agreed upon is the definition of human life--basically makes the entire debate unable to be rationally and decisively decided. I mean, it comes down to questions of faith, which at least the pro-life brigade has the honesty to bring to the forefront. They think this way because Jesus told them to--sort of(an oversimplification, but I think it all comes down to this, at least for American Christians).

so i have a problem with this because it ignores a couple points that seem very important to me, but i'm not surprised because many, many people make the mistake of ignoring those points. yes, it's true, the definition of life is often in contention; as you said, it's so far a question of faith. but as far as i can see, what credit the christians pro-life movement might garner by being "honest" that it is about religious tenets to them, they more than lose by continuing to press for laws restricting abortion -- and, let's be clear, not just abortion but also contraception and sexual practice and sexual orientation -- as though jesus christ were any reason to be meddling with civil laws. i don't think that the majority of americans favors a theocracy, and i am sure that the constitution does not; if christian anti-choicers were interested in being "honest" more than in politics, they'd be trying to sign people on to a full-fledged christian republic.

and the second point goes back to what i said above, about kidneys and such. i personally know a few people who are sure that the product of conception is a life at some point or at another point before birth (they disagree on when), and who are nevertheless pro-choice. why? because to them, their beliefs about the start of life are not enough to justify forcing someone else to give use of her organs and systems to a third party; these people say that even if there were medical proof to back up their own beliefs, the personhood of the embryo or fetus still would have to cede to the personhood of the pregnant woman if push came to shove. my own rationale is something more along the lines of, "i am not sure -- who can be sure? -- but it doesn't matter to me as much as the woman in question being sure, one way or the other. i would much rather protect any person's right to choose for herself than to let a mass of strangers choose for her. there are very few reasons for making another rational person's decision for her, and a whole bunch not to.

in sum, i doubt it's true that we're not listening to each other. i, at least, am listening very closely. it sounds to me like i want the government to stay away from my decisions concerning medical endeavors i undertake -- this includes preventing pregnancy, initiating pregnancy, terminating pregnancy, maintaining pregnancy, and delivering as well as any other non-womb-related endeavors -- because i see this as part of protecting individuals' bodies from the state and from the majority; and like "they" want the government to interfere with those decisions so that i will make the ones acceptable to "them", because they perceive the autonomy of the individual as less important than the majority's prerogative to regulate behavior according to their personal beliefs. obviously you ask one of them and you'll hear me demonized for being so selfish that i want to be able to "deliver [my] living baby, puncture its skull with scissors and suck out its brains" in between leaving my castrating-bitch corner office at 5 and making it to my pedicure at 6 (ah, the myth of "on demand"), or then again perhaps for dragging vulnerable women into abortion clinics to steal their babies from their wombs because i (as a member of "the abortion industry", because no one can support it who isn't part of "teh industryz") personally profit from doing so. at a certain point "listening" is not the problem; if you've heard each other and identified that your central goals apparently conflict, then what?

ok, that's all for that i guess. i've had a big old essay brewing on this stuff, but i will probably never post it because it's grown unwieldy and unfinishable.

1/22/07: Blog for Choice Day

2007-01-23T00:27:00.001-05:00

since today is the anniversary of the decision of roe v. wade, the left/feminist blog world is having "blog for choice day". i've long been brewing what i have come to think of as the "huge-ass pro-choice post of doom" (it's written that way on my mental to-do list), but sadly it looks like the day of its wrapping-up will not be this day. so i'll keep this brief.

i'm pro-choice because i don't think anyone can know better than me what decisions are best for my life, and i have to accord that reverence for self-sovereignty and bodily integrity to others; that means i trust women to be moral agents. i value women's lives and have realized what can happen to them when they are prevented from choosing for themselves whether, when and how to have sex, to be pregnant, to deliver children, and to parent. crucially, i believe that states and private interests continually attempt to assert a prerogative to commandeer women's bodies in their wars, whether social or military, and i believe that this is deeply, fundamentally wrong. i believe that, as my friend laura says, reproductive justice is social justice. the existence of a second-class citizenry is always unacceptable, and reproductive inequality is a significant mechanism in the oppression of women, as well as of racial minorities and the poor.

update: some similar, better posts from others
laura's (different laura) at notafeministbut
amanda's at pandagon
jill's at feministe -- filled with a lot of topical reading suggestions, to boot
and finally, a link round-up, which i'm still reading through

even in gender-based crime, misogyny goes un-remarked-upon

2007-01-08T19:44:00.000-05:00

my sister is pretty awesome, and for christmas she gave me a subscription to bitch magazine. this is great because i can rarely bring myself to pay the five whole dollars for a single issue, and never can bring myself to buy an entire year's subscription of anything. anyway, i was reading the winter 2006/07 issue this afternoon and one of the shorter articles before the features reminded me of one of my own posts from a while back (and related op-ed by bob herbert).

since i am so bad about writing what i really want to write about, i am going to focus on this for now. i'm posting the piece; read it if you like. it centers on two things i tried to mention before: (1) that these should have been widely recognized as hate crimes and they were not, except at feminist blogs; and (2) that the role for men who do recognize and call out gender-based violence when they see it is pretty complicated, because as women and activists we* are grateful to find comprehension and support, and yet we also wish we could be heard without male interpreters. andi zeisler writes:

[Mike] Hendricks, in his October 6 column, noted that he’d found only one article on the Amish school massacre that described it as a hate crime, and pointed out that “Had [Roberts] singled out and shot 10 black men or 10 Jews or 10 gays or 10 of almost any other group, we’d be calling it a hate crime, whether it fit the legal definition or not.” Instead, he noted, the press was mostly concerned with whether Roberts had a beef with the Amish.

it's not so much these particular school killings that i am stuck on, but rather the sense i keep getting that nobody even ever thinks about violence against women. they don't think about it -- it's just normal background noise to the million other things that happen to "people". (people who are not women, is what that means.) lest you think that we should simply chalk it up to people's tendency not to think about things that don't happen to them, here's a short blog post (by stan goff for huffington post), which you definitely should read, about men's attitudes toward rape, which are then complicated by men's attitudes toward rape of men. the men in question -- i don't know them, they're just commenters on an npr report about incarceration -- make dubious claims of exceptionalism for prison rape, of how "no, rape is much worse for a man"; to me the various rationales for that claim really stink of sexism so pervasive that it's in the air we breathe and most of us just don't smell it. from goff's commentary:

I note in the metafilter discussion how the men try to find anything to make this different than what happens to women... women are not locked up by the state... rape doesn't generally happen "in the ass"... and on and on and on. The avoidance is visceral, desperate. I can't be a "catcher"! We have to stop PRISON rape... oh yeah, and all other rape, too. (as an afterthought) [...]

And if we want to get to the root of homophobia, then we have to understand that the behavioral expectations that underwrite it are based fundamentally on women's subordination. [...]

What does it tell us that men's most terrified reaction to the idea of prison is the fear that women experience all the time? What does it tell us that the worst punishment is to be made like a woman?

really, give it a quick read.

*(obviously, i find this "we" thing complicated too, but that doesn't need too much explaining.)

MORNING-AFTER PILL, stock up for free today only

2006-12-06T13:27:00.000-05:00

public service announcement:

planned parenthood is giving away emergency contraception for free today, and i'm planning to go get some because you never know when you might need it, or a friend might call you in a panic, or whatever.

for friends in town: i am going there really soon. i'm heading toward campus to pick a few friends up, then we are all going to pp. if you want a ride with me call me. or if you want to go on your own or meet me there, they close at 4.

for friends not in town: find a center near you at http://www.plannedparenthood.org/findCenterProcess.asp#Linkdiv0

yay!

repost from the livejournal last night

2006-11-08T14:14:00.000-05:00

please go vote. please do it. you still have a couple hours.

reasons why your reason for not voting is not good enough:

1) you might think it's too hard or too complicated, but it's the state's responsibility to make it as simple as possible for you to vote. if you don't know where your polling place is, go to www.canivote.com. what do you need to bring with you? just something that says who you are and where you live: your license, your apartment lease, your school registration, a power bill, a sharper image catalog mailed in your name. my license had the wrong address on it, so i brought that plus the alumni newsletter from my high school, which had the right one. no problem at all.

2) you might think your vote "doesn't count", but it does, or at least it counts just as much as any other one person's. it makes me sad when lots of people stay home because they figure somebody else has somehow already taken control of the vote.

3) related to that is that maybe you think your vote "doesn't count" because the elections are probably rigged. i'm not going to dispute that because i believe it. but i think you should still vote. i did. say you want democrats to win but you figure the vote is probably going to be defrauded in favor of the republicans. (by the way, the republican party is currently issuing "talking points" to its supporters addressing exit polls, and why exit polls don't always match actual vote tallies. to me this sounds like preparation for explaining their "win" tomorrow morning when they ought to have lost, and i'm worried.) but listen: the fraud can't be TOO noticeable; if the discrepancy between exit polls and the republicans' preferred vote outcome is too large, they'll have to be much more cautious about tampering with the vote. that's important.

4) you might have a preferred candidate that you think will lose anyway. but i say, you still should go vote. i'd have gone to vote for a democrat even if polls showed a 70% majority for the republican opponent. i'm tired of the republican party being wildly successful at getting out the vote -- i swear to you, it's all the old people and CEOs and housebound southern-baptist wives who have tons of time to mosey on down to the polling station -- and democrats not making it to the polls and letting the winner get away with claiming a "mandate" because not enough people voted for the other guy and that makes the other half of the electorate look pretty easy to steamroller. i didn't vote for george w. bush, but i'm still one of his constituents. i want him to know that i did not want him to be president. i want democrat politicians to know that there's support to be found among liberals and progressives if politicians would only start acting like liberals and progressives. i want other liberal citizens to know that they're not alone. my vote is just one vote, but so is everyone else's. they add up. duh.

this also applies to you if you want to see a multi-party system. if that's what you want above all, then go vote for a third-party candidate right now. don't sit around and bitch about how the two big parties don't represent you. you have to do your part to send the message that third-party politics is what you want, and that you'll support a worthy third-party candidate. otherwise nobody tries, nothing changes.

this leads us right into...
5), which i've put off addressing because i hope to god that none of you really believe it this time around. please, for the love of little baby jesus, do not kid yourselves that "they're all the same". they are not "all the same." this is not the proverbial douchebag and turd sammich. and it wasn't last time, either. fuck south park, seriously, fuck them for giving apathetic people one more dumb, ill-informed quip to throw out to justify their laziness. i've posted about all this before. a lot of things have happened because of the current all-republican government that almost certainly would not have happened otherwise. the "war on terror" dragged us into iraq for NO reason, killed as many as six hundred thousand (that's a lot) iraqi civilians and three thousand americans, has made terrorists more numerous and more dedicated, and has made your life as a traveler hell (yay!) -- and remember afghanistan? we're still there, too; new orleans is still a wreck; abortion rights and even the right to contraception are at risk; the government is in unprecedented debt and has tried to cut social spending so they can spend more on war, all while the vast majority of citizens are already getting poorer; "no child left behind" has made schools even worse than they were before; abstinence-only sex ed has proved to cause a rise in teen pregnancy and std infection; racist, sexist, and homophobic bigotry and discrimination are coming back out into the open.

but hey, even if you like war, fema failures, forced birth, poverty, stds, and bigotry -- which i don't -- you still should know that your government is fundamentally failing you, in unconstitutional ways. unconstitutional! many of your elected officials are corrupt, secretive, and above the law, and they're not stopping one another from stealing your money, fucking over your district, or shredding your rights. we've had a rash of corruption scandals on K street, which i guess at least people are resigning, but cheney's still blocking investigations of the energy corporations, and the white house has outed a cia operative for revenge, and the president is surrounded by people who tell him they, and him, are above subpoenas (cheney) and the geneva conventions (gonzales); one and possibly two elections have been stolen, y'all, that doesn't sound too democratic; our government has eroded the separation of church and state, the separation of powers (that's checks and balances, remember?), and the right to habeas corpus, has bribed journalists and condemned newspapers for doing their job, and has retroactively legalized torture. in case you need a summary: not only is this government ineffective and dangerous; it is also undemocratic and un-American in the most positive, constitutional, admirable sense of the word american. to my mind, this isn't just about partisan politics but about the legitimacy of this republic; if there's one thing public education does really effectively, it's raising kids to love democracy, but democracy is being turned into a charade and we've been letting it happen. we need a fucking change, and when the greater of the two evils is THIS FUCKING EVIL, let's not kid ourselves that it "doesn't matter who wins," alright?

and i don't care if you're "protesting the system". now is a TERRIBLE time for "protest" (i.e. taking your ball and going home), and the vote is a terrible way to do it, and not voting to protest is totally indistinguishable from not voting out of that complacency you say you're not engaging in, and you'll only "protest" on election day if you actually prefer republicans in power. if you don't, you'll vote today, and you'll get out into the street tomorrow.

oh, and the possible
6) "but i don't know how i should vote". well. far be it from me to tell you what to think or believe, much less whom to vote for... but i would like it if you voted democratic in the close races. like i said above, we really need to get congress the fuck out of republican hands. right now congress is not doing its job, which is to check the power of the executive. if we had a democratic congress and a split government, at least that could slow down the pace at which the white house is steamrolling over civil liberties and grabbing for unwarranted power. if you're pissed about any of the stuff i described in #5, just please consider voting for a democrat. like i said, we can talk about third-party strategy til the cows come home but i am afraid that if republicans win this election, there is not going to BE another opportunity to make our vote actually count. if this one even exists. so let's just get them out of office, make the election process safer and more reliable, and THEN think about better constitutional setups.

but hey, you don't have to listen to me. i'll understand. if you want to educate yourself really quickly before heading out, go here: http://www.vote-smart.org/. facts about candidates' voting records, positions on issues, campaign finance, and how they rate with various interest groups. my endorsements are partisan, but the links i'm supplying are not, so don't worry about that.

i'm sorry for being such a blowhard. i hope i've covered everything. we still have a few hours. go to canivote, find out where to go, find your id and get your ass out there. please. if you see anything fishy going on -- flyers supporting one party or candidate, machines that aren't working, poll workers asking for more documentation than i mentioned above -- call 1-866-OUR-VOTE, a nonpartisan oversight group that will try to straighten out problems and document irregularities.

nicaragua, pt 3: just a few pictures.

2006-11-01T03:00:00.000-05:00

say it loud, say it proud: i like abortion rights!

2006-10-28T01:37:00.001-05:00

i wrote an email to patrick today, and initially i only intended to share a link with him but then i got carried away on a little rant, and i thought i'd continue those thoughts here.

i'm gonna just paste it and then go on with a few more notes from there. so sorry if you read this twice, patrick.

yay abortion!
or rather, yay more abortion rants from me. but then again, yay abortion, too. i'm damn glad it exists and that sentiment prompts me to send along another zoe williams article, which is also prompted by aforementioned sentiment.

it looks like she is doing a multi-part story on abortion, actually, on the occasion of the 39th anniversary of abortion rights being recognized in britain. i really liked the language-oriented stuff of hers that i read earlier, about irony and about the word "cunt", so it makes me happy now to read that she seems to be smart about politics as well. and to be clear by "smart" i didn't mean "agrees with me"; i'm honestly really happy to see HOW she's agreeing with me, which is in exactly the way that i happen to think is right. so yeah, maybe i just mean "agrees with me a lot". haha. but anyway i'm still happy to read these; it's really rare to get to see someone in a mainstream publication call lefties and moderates out for fearfully conceding to anti-abortion-rights people that abortion is "regrettable" or a necessary evil. i don't think it's evil and i'm tired of having to start that far back in the "debate" terms, or to just concede the damn thing and be pissed of it. like, isn't it *unwanted pregnancy* that's bad and maybe traumatic? i really disagree with the entire idea that abortion has to be that way too. in fact, the women who've had abortions mostly report that it isn't. by and large, the few women who say their abortions were traumatic were forced or pressured into the abortion by parents or partners. the rest are women who wished they didn't have to have the abortion -- they wanted to keep the pregnancy but knew they couldn't afford it, or found out that it would result in health risks or birth defects or stillbirth. those ARE awful and traumatic situations; but it's not the nature of abortion that makes it so. and if anti-abortion-rights activists really meant it when they said their aim in hyping up "post-abortion syndrome"* was to reduce the trauma visited upon women, then instead of doing that they'd be working to make it easier for women to keep the pregnancies they do want. they'd be voting to make healthcare more affordable and accessible; they'd be voting to increase assistance to poor families rather than shaming "welfare queens"; and they'd also be adopting disabled, chronically ill, or non-white children at a rate sufficient to fulfill their promises that every unwanted pregnancy can be solved by adoption. but they don't do any of these things, and their claimed position of wanting to protect women is very weak.

*there is no such thing as "post-abortion syndrome," it is not in the medical diagnosis handbooks, and very few women report depression or mental illness after abortions. post-partum syndrome, however, is very real, and it is figured to be one of the most common health problems afflicting women after childbirth.

update on nicaragua, and thoughts on anti-oppression politics

2006-10-28T01:36:00.000-05:00

[cross-posted to the livejournal.]

well, the nicaragua bill to ban all abortions, bar none, was passed unanimously in the legislature. it'll probably be signed into law soon. i am really upset that this is what reality is like.

this blogger has a disturbing take on it. her analysis chalks this up to using religion as a cover for plain old misogyny -- which sounds about right -- but also throws in something i'd never thought of, or even heard of:

I don't believe for a moment that people in Nicaragua are so pious as to need to have a theocratic government in place. It's more like this is the way they defend the institutional mysogyny that allowed them to laugh-off one of the biggest scandals to come out of the underbelly of the Sandinista revolution : Zoilamérica Narváez, stepdaughter of Daniel Ortega, the former sandinista president of Nicaragua, accused him of making her his sexual slave from the age of 11.

narvaez alleges that ortega abused and intimidated her sexually for years. leftist leaders in the country, and in the region, have said little to nothing about it. that's the spirit of emancipation for you. it's distressing, and so is ortega's strong support for the abortion ban, which appears to be in the service of his electoral interests; but i guess finally i'm also not surprised. i've done a little reading about the sandinista movement and the revolution years and it seems that women contributed a great deal to the fsln, in both support and combat positions, and in return were excluded from the leadership and were told time and again that "women's issues" were not an immediate concern, were a distraction from the revolution, were divisive or counterproductive for solidarity within the movement, and would be dealt with after the revolution had succeeded. women were fine to have along as long as they wanted to help, but their interests did not count in party decisionmaking. this may have been because the leadership genuinely were willing to step over anybody to reach their political goals, or it could be that the narrowly-defined definition of "the goals of the revolution" were simply an excuse for continuing the sexism. the sandinistas are certainly not alone in this; this has happened in lots of leftist revolutionary movements. we should not make the mistake of assuming that all those who fight for equality mean the same thing.

in the same vein, i often see liberal boys and anarchist boys get a free pass on their misogyny, or give themselves one, because they "really care" about progressive politics. this happens a ton in high school and even college but of course the interwubs is filled with assholes too, and it's hard to know if they are prevalent in the general population as well. if you follow Democratic political blogs, you might know about one called DailyKos, considered one of the biggest players in the "netroots" and run by a guy who does campaign consulting for Democrats. i saw the exact same dynamic play out there, repeatedly, when Kos essentially told readers concerned with women's rights in politics or with sexism on the blog itself to go fuck themselves because he "[didn't] care" about dissenting opinions (i find it hard to believe he acts that way professionally) and thought the "bitching" was the same kind of "divisive" shit that loses elections for liberals. i had to paraphrase most of it because i can't remember all the details, but that was the sentiment.

anyway, i just wanted to update the abortion ban post, but while i'm at it i think i'll reiterate: we shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that all those who fight for equality mean the same thing. fighting class oppression is worthy and brave; but if you have to use sexism to assert your masculinity in this fight, your fight is wrong. fighting sex and gender oppression is worthy and brave; but if you argue that allowing the "feminine vote" will help counter the "pauperism, ignorance and degradation" of immigrants and former slaves*, your fight is wrong. fighting racism is worthy and brave; but if you resort to religious scapegoating to prove it's not you who is the enemy, your fight is wrong. and so on. i strongly believe that feminism, at its best, impels us to care about the rights of all people, and to stand against all kinds of oppression.

liberation is not a zero-sum game. i wish people would think on this more often. when we treat it like a zero-sum game, we end up politicking against one another for social advantage and polarizing potential allies, instead of supporting one another in opposition to all oppression. it's truly sad to me that members of all groups seem to want someone left underneath them to shit on, or alternately feel they need to shit on someone to get ahead.

*which one group of women's suffragists did do, i read, after being disappointed by their abolitionist allies' supporting the fourteenth and fifteenth amendment's giving the franchise to blacks and not to women. those words were elizabeth cady stanton's. she and susan b. anthony had both been close with abolitionist men like frederick douglass and took the decision quite bitterly. by the same token, of course, their abolition-movement friends had sold them out, too, accepting the feminists' help but not reciprocating in the clutch. same story.

2006-10-24T13:32:00.000-05:00

[cross-posted from my livejournal, as usual. still trying to get a feel for blogger.]

this bbc article reports that nicaragua's legislature is considering banning all abortions. what this translates to is removing the “life of the mother” exception on its already-existing abortion ban. currently nicaragua, like el salvador, allows abortions only when it would save a pregnant woman's life; and el salvador is no fucking picnic. recent articles i've read, and this post at pandagon, about the law in el salvador report that when a pregnancy is discovered to be ectopic -- "in the wrong place," usually meaning located in a fallopian tube rather than in the uterus -- still nothing can be done until the threat to the woman's life crosses over from certain-and-impending into clear-and-present. what this means is that the pregnant woman is ordered bedrest, monitored daily and hourly until her fallopian tube ruptures, and only then operated upon to remove the now-dying fetus.

that is how doctors have to follow the law in el salvador, and i would not be surprised if the same law in nicaragua is yielding the same results; it's hard to get details because national studies report that legal abortions are rare, but they estimate that illegal abortions number 36,000 yearly and are one of the biggest causes of women's deaths. this is all bad enough, but what is devastating is that nicaragua is now considering doing away with even this one tiny concession to women's wellbeing. the new version of the law would not even pretend to consider women and their fetuses as being of equal value, which to me is already insulting enough and deadly enough. this new version would make the categorical statement that women are LESS important than the fetuses their bodies might support. i still find it absolutely incredible that ANYONE would seriously entertain such a blatantly woman-hating idea -- let alone that the congress will probably pass it, and one of its supporters is legislator daniel ortega (current leader of the leftist FSLN, the party of the 1979 revolution) is backing it. sometimes, reading the news makes me cry.

as if that wasn't bad enough, yesterday i read some more about it, and apparently the individual who provoked this consideration, starting in 2003, was a nine-year-old girl raped in costa rica, whose parents took her home to nicaragua to request an abortion at a government hospital. public handwringing ensued on the part of many of the country's ministers, half of whom announced their hope that the abortion would be refused; president bolanos, later accused by his health minister of not being sufficiently opposed to the abortion, convened a panel of medical experts, who issued an ambiguous ruling that acknowledged that a pregnancy might kill the girl. finally her parents withdrew her from the government hospital and she obtained an abortion elsewhere, whereupon the catholic bishops of nicaragua announced that "everyone involved with the abortion" was excommunicated. (and you know, i'm actually surprised; i thought the Church was at least better than this.) those who wanted this girl forced to carry the pregnancy to term effectively wanted her sentenced to death. you'd think the public furor would have been over the fact that nicaraguan children face trauma and possibly death thanks to adults raping them. but all that i read about this horrifying part of it was that "a 22-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of raping her" -- but, as far as i could tell, neither excommunicated or nor threatened with death. god damn it.

i said, god damn it. what does it take, in this world, to be more valuable than the multiplying stem cells living off of your blood? in a case like this, not even a misty-eyed shout-out to "the innocence of children" can explain why a potential-mother should be less worthy than the non-sentient creature depending on her: this potential-mother was a child, and an already-born, living one at that, and yet this nine-year-old's right to stay alive caused furor in nicaragua, because it was not considered as important as the "right to life" of the "child" inside her. is a fetus truly more important than a nine-year-old because the latter has had nine years to sin? or did i miss something about "original sin"; does it not take up residence in your soul until the moment of birth?

or is it something to do with the tarnishing nature of sperm? anti-choice assholes tend to frame pregnancy as something that you shouldn't get a do-over on because you fucked up: you already made your choice and that was to have sex, you were a slut who couldn't keep her legs closed, you're irresponsible, you shouldn't be allowed to shirk your obligation now. but let's face it. when some assface raped this girl, she made no such "irresponsible" choice, and the catholic church still thinks she isn't worth saving. a spermed girl is a used up girl, and "sanctity of life" will not restore her hymen or her market value. cut your losses and save the pure, unborn seed of the child's rapist.

of "man-hating" and "misandry," part 2

2006-10-21T00:23:00.000-05:00

a while ago i made a post [in livejournal] about men lashing out against feminism as "man-hating". in it i wrote,

i don't know. is it possible to "reclaim" the word man-hater? because if we can realize "man" is just a construct, and define "man" as an embodiment of culturally-sanctioned masculinity -- a sexual egotist, a chest-thumper, blind to his privilege, an abuser, a rapist, the boss, the master, a power-slut, someone who takes what he wants without asking, someone who can't talk about feelings, someone who sees others as objects for his use -- then i definitely hate "men", and i would think that all forward-thinking people should. hell, real-life men ought to be revolting against "men", too. not by attacking women who challenge the conflation of construct and reality, not by calling someone hateful or crazy for putting patriarchy on a stage, not by expressing outrage at the depiction of violence against women in a way that disparages a man -- but by expressing outrage at actual violence against women, which frankly is committed, and justified, in all men's name, and gives men a bad name. if you don't like that, stop condoning it. can't you believe that it's not this playwright who is making you out to be all these things, but the patriarchy? i have a feeling the real offense is that you are used to the patriarchy also giving you moral blessing, and the playwright does not.

[fast-forward sound effect.] yesterday i read a post by amanda of pandagon, and today one by the happy feminist, addressing the "man-hater" accusation and its illogic.

amanda writes about the dixie chicks song "goodbye earl," about a woman and her best friend killing her abusive husband who can't be bothered with restraining orders, and men in texas karaoke bars who "kid on the square that it's man-hating" every time:

This makes me a little nuts, as you can imagine. How is it man-hating, unless you think both that all men beat women and that women should be complacent, or even worse happy, with this? They go to a lot of effort to establish that it’s Earl, a wife-beater, who has to die. At best, this song is wife-beater-hating. I wish they’d be more clear and just say women have no right to self-defense.
The phrase “man-hater” is more an insult to men than to feminists. Anyone who uses it generally means that the person thus accused is a rapist-hater, abuser-hater, sexist-hater. And when you call someone a “man-hater” who is actually hating on sexists, abusers, and rapists, you imply all men are these things. And they are not. So who are really the man-haters when that phrase is being wielded? It’s not the feminists; it’s the men implying that hating rape or hating abuse is the same thing as hating men.

and that about exactly sums up what i was trying to say in my previous post.

HappyFeminist distills the analysis even further:

If you take male dominance as a given that is beyond question, then feminism comes to seem as a rebuke to men, a statement that they aren't doing a good enough job. In fact, feminism is only a rebuke to those men who believe in their automatic right to dominance, not to men in general.
Another common belief is that feminism is an effort to render men unnecessary or superfluous. Again, this belief about feminism only makes sense if you believe that a man's role is to be in charge of women. The distinction that is missed is that feminism only renders traditional roles superfluous, not men themselves. That distinction is easy to miss if you identify men with their traditional roles so thoroughly that you cannot see a value for men otherwise. In fact, feminism is about getting rid of arbitrary roles so that we can all, male and female alike, be seen as necessary and valuable for the individual abilities and characteristics we bring to the table.

amanda also talks a bit about this very common word among a certain subgroup of feminism-backlashers: "misandry". she calls bullshit on it, arguing that to make a word that sounds like the mirror-image of misogyny is fine, except that nobody hates men like women are hated. she refers to the two school shootings in one week, quite recently, in which men told boys to leave the classroom before molesting and/or killing the remaining girls. these incidents are something i've wanted to say something about for a few weeks now, and i just haven't been able to. but bob herbert wrote an op-ed about it for the new york times, and although it's timesSelect (i.e. hard to get to) i think it's worth a quick read, so i'll make a separate post with the text in it: read it here.

anyway. and some dude in the comments argued with amanda that yuh-huh, some women do too hate men. and she argued quite succinctly that there was nevertheless no equivalence between misogyny and what some people call misandry. and she responded "There are people who hate men, notably anti-feminists who think very little of men. However, attempts to equate the two will get you returned to telling me when someone sent the girls out of the room to rape and kill the boys." i thought this was a succinct and solid response, but the dude thought otherwise. then i tried to explicate her comment with a comment of my own, which produced more or less the following:

amanda already acknowledged that "there are people who hate men, notably anti-feminists who think very little of men." there are women anti-feminists who do this, too, so there is your man-hating woman. anytime someone is trying to sell you “boys will be boys,” they are hoping that you’ll think little enough of males to not hold them to a standard of human decency. and that sucks. but, in case you haven’t noticed, such people — men and women — tend to restrict that “hatred” of men to dismissing their humanity and potential for goodness. that is, though they may "hate" men thusly, they still do not go around singling men out for assault, rape, enslavement, or murder.

so there you have it, the "man-hating and misandry post roundup".

update: this topic is making the rounds in the blogs i read, and shakespeare's sister writes about what it is like to talk about sexism in a relationship with a good-intentioned man; reviews sara robinson's post on the subject of male violence, disenfranchisement and our modern, "toxic" culture of manhood/manliness; and addresses what a positive movement for redefining men might be like: "...if nothing else, it would provide that long-absent framework that men who are already interested in such an endeavor have been missing, the tools to finally begin extracting what defines manhood according to men from what defines manhood according to a patriarchy. They are very different things indeed." good stuff.

foodblog 2: butternut-lemongrass soup!

2006-10-20T02:13:00.000-05:00

ok also last week, i purchased a butternut squash. now, i've done a lot of things with acorn squash, i guess because they're of a manageable size compared to butternut squashes. people say they're interchangeable in recipes, and that's mostly true, but they do each have their own taste, and i usually prefer butternut. anyway, i happened to find a smallish butternut and so i bought it on impulse. butternut squash makes one of the tastiest soups ever. before last night i'd had it two or three different ways, and all were good; the one i made last night was yet another distinct soup, and i thought it was pretty delicious. in the past i've had it spiced with nutmeg or sprinkled with pistachios, heavy on cream or heavy on butter or swirled with sour cream. i decided that since i already knew the basics of making squash soups -- twice before: one cost patrick a sliver of thumb skin, and the other got tossed out on account of an unpleasant amount of nutmeg -- i would try to make something a little different from all of these. the upside from the failed too-much-nutmeg experience was that i learned to properly roast a squash to get the best flavor from it; unfortunately, most recipes just say to boil the squash straight off -- which means you have to cut it up, and slicing through the tough raw skin is where you might injure yourself -- or (eek) to microwave it, 'nuff said. anyway, i roasted it in the oven til it came out smelling caramelized. the cool thing is that when it was raw, it smelled just like a melon. i suppose they're all in the same family, squashes and melons, but it was still surprising how light and fruity this
one was. so imagine that, then mellowed out by the deep warm smell of browning sugar.

anyway, i'm getting a little carried away describing my butternut squash when i want to get to bed. so imagine a light, nearly-fruity version of butternut squash that echoes the melon smell with a little bit of apple, but supports the autumny side of squash with a few robust vegetables (carrot, celery, onion, garlic) and chicken stock. on impulse i threw in some lemongrass to bridge those two sides, and after a little more thought grated in some ginger. is this sounding good to you? i promise, it was good.

after a long simmer, i blendered and salted it. i decided i wanted a smooth soup, so i ran it through a sieve. set it in shallow bowls. topped it with cracked pepper and green onions, just like for a black bean soup. then i decided to try something a little different. i wanted an extra starch for the meal, so i piled a few spoonfuls of soft, short-grained rice into each bowl (i had to be careful not to let the rice fall into the soup and drown, but it helped that it was a bit sticky). and then, instead of sour cream or heavy cream, i pulled out some coconut milk (the unsweetened kind). just a spoonful or two, directly on top of the rice. it was a subtle taste but really pulled the dish together, i think. i am happy i made up a recipe as i went along, found it really simple, didn't have any accidents or emergencies, and pulled off the balance i was hoping to get quite well.

took pictures. the light underneath the microwave was on, it turned out, and i think that's why there's that gleam on the soup. it certainly wasn't congealed like the reflections seem to suggest. anyway, here are two. yay.

foodblog: pickles!

2006-10-20T01:23:00.000-05:00

so last week i made pickles. i used okra and small cucumbers (not the teeny cocktail cornichons, but still smaller than regular ones; maybe from my wrist to my middle knuckle in length). by the way, if you've never had okra pickles, you're missing out. anyway they came out crisp and pretty delicious, but next time i will make them a little saltier. and i think i figured out how to reduce the sliminess the okra naturally have, so that goes in the "success" column. i also came home with $20 worth of spices this weekend, partly because i was excited to try adding things like dill seed and mustard seed to my pickles (and partly because i restocked on aromatics for winter cookie baking, as well as more turmeric so i can try making chicken penang soon-- except i forgot the star anise!). anyway, pickles. i thought the jar was quite pretty after i finished filling it, so i took a few pictures.

well, none of the pictures came out that great. it was evening when i tried, and i had a terrible time getting the light in the kitchen to a) be strong enough that i didn't have to set the shutter speed really low, and yet b) not look horrid and garish. but anyway here's a picture.

freaky queer weirdos are your friends

2006-10-12T02:48:00.000-05:00

so today, i hear, was National Coming Out Day. the occasion has given me some additional thoughts on coming out, sexuality politics, and coping as an Other. i thought i'd try to put them together here.

i've heard a lot of people say things like, "i don't have a problem with gay people, but why does [lgbt person] have to talk about it all the time?", or "i hate it when people wear their sexualities on their sleeves like that", or "every time I hear someone identify as 'gender queer,' i.e. 'LOOK AT ME I AM SPECIAL,' I want to claw out my eyes". and i think it's easy to say these things if you've never felt your freedom or happiness threatened by hetero-normativity or by the sexual hierarchy.

because i don't have direct experience with non-heterosexuality, my understanding of this comes in two indirect forms. the first is through people who identify as queer or as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans-. some of them are writers whose project it is to make others aware of their existence and rights, and others are just friends of mine who happened to help me learn along the way. i don't want to claim to represent all or any of them or their experiences. i just want to lay out something pretty personal, which is how i've come to be more perceptive of my heterosexual privilege and more receptive to the desire some people have to make "coming out" a whole project, or to identify as "gender queer" or some variant, or to live their sexualities in a way that seems loud or insistent compared to how easy it is for straight people to live ours. the second avenue i've had for thinking about this is through my experience of being female. i know that you can't just map one oppression onto another, but realizing how my experience has been shaped by being a non-default, and an Other, in matters of sex and gender has supported my understanding of heterosexuality as being a default and a privilege too. so, onward.

heterosexuality means that when i choose a romantic partner, i don't worry that my choice will cause me alienation from my family or friends, the verbal and physical assault of strangers, the loss of employment, or legal obstacles to sharing property and having children. these are things that i pretty much never have to think about when i make deliberate choices about my love life, much less every day of my life. i'm immensely privileged in that respect. i recognize that these are concerns which could not only weigh heavily on one's mind but also lead one to chafe fiercely at such marginalization.

i also don't have to work too hard for potential sexual partners to make themselves available to me. that is, i'm a woman and if i'm interested in men i don't have to do very much to signal to men that i am interested in men. they just assume it. if i were interested in women instead? not only would it be way more difficult to have to actively signal to women that i consider them potential sexual partners, you can bet i would also have to find strategies to deal with the men who would assume they were in the game. i am privileged in this respect too. i recognize that if you're not straight, it might not always easy to "be subtle about it" and still pursue a romantic life.

these are very tangible threats to happiness that non-straight people might have to deal with all the time. another is the psychological strain engendered by being a peg with a hole cut out for you, one that defines the way you'll live your life, based on the genitals you pop out with at birth, and not liking or feeling at ease in that hole. for example, "penis and balls > will have sex with women, will support a family, can throw a punch, doesn't cry." a lot of the aspects of these expectations have slowly been weakened, but not all of them and not everywhere. making this one or that other one ("vagina and ovaries...") the only two available options in society -- and anyway, at birth you are simply assigned just the one -- can cause terrible pain for the rather significant number of people who don't feel comfortable with them, and sexual orientation is one those aspects.

if these things have never been a threat to you -- because you're straight, or you're financially comfortable, or you're surrounded by people who happily accept all kinds of sexuality, or you don't mind being hit on by the wrong people, or you're a relatively femme-y girl or studly guy, or something else -- then maybe it's never occurred to you to play with sex- or gender-role expectations, other than perhaps as a novelty among friends. but if your everyday life involves being aware that you're oppressed by norms of sexual orientation and gender, then wanting to revolt makes a lot of sense.

it could be said that i talk about feminist issues, and about being a woman in a patriarchal world, all the goddamn time. it's because i've come to see that it MEANS something, to be a woman in a patriarchal world -- it has an effect on your identity and your situation and your opportunities -- and i'm pissed about that. so, yeah, gender both exists (and is real and worth talking about) and is a construction (and is wrong and worth taking apart), and i think that answers why people can be against sexual discrimination but use their sexuality to define themselves. so i talk about how being a woman matters AND about how it shouldn't matter. and because i'm pissed i want to revolt fairly often and i can't blame others for being brave enough to try. i care about this shit -- and yes, having a stake in it, feeling personally threatened by patriarchy, pushed me into the realization that it's wrong -- and consequently i talk about it a lot. maybe it makes people want to claw their eyes out, but i can guarantee it's not frivolous or forced, which is what gender-fuck and vocal lgbt-identification are often dismissed as. i'm not big on physical accessories of femininity, for example makeup or heels (which in my life are for playing dress-up), but i've considered dropping altogether the ones i do indulge, like shaving or certain kinds of clothes, and i know that that would brand me in some people's eyes as "trying too hard" or "too strident" or "wearing it on my sleeve" or something like that. but i think it's a worthy idea, and the people who would make such judgments probably haven't had occasion to understand why the personal might be so political.

i am not going to argue that everyone who considers themselves lgbt needs to come out and do it loudly, or that everyone who has a problem with traditional gender roles needs to start gender-fucking. i pick my own battles and decide what strategies i'm comfortable with, and you do the same. lord knows i'm not that much of a rebel myself, when it comes to this; the best i can manage is to look dowdy. but, from the perspective of someone who hasn't chosen that route, i nevertheless want to make a defense of it. we are all aided by people who are willing to be really loud about how they are not cut out for the hole society says is theirs. these people are someone to look up to: they are brave and they are committed to their selves and to the truth. have you read about the Stonewall riots, and the early gay pride parades, and the radicalism of people shouting "we're here, we're queer, get used to it!"? do you remember the eye-rolling that attended our parents' mention of those crazy Gays, the ones who made it orders of magnitude safer for those after them to be out, whether loudly or quietly? i see this as more of the same. these people frustrate the attempts of society to say that they, and others in their boat, don't exist. the fight against that kind of identity fascism is not going to be won for all of the world's Others if we all adopt the strategy of saying "really, we are just like you!". as someone noted about the movie "guess who's coming to dinner" (a white couple struggles to accept sidney poitier as their daughter's boyfriend), "really, black people are just like us!" is both true and not true, and it does everyone a disservice to acknowledge only one side of that coin. you can't just statement-away oppression, so saying "we are just like you" is only half of the battle. it's true, in that no human being has more intrinsic moral worth than another; it's false in that society's prior judgments to the contrary have created two different ends of the oppression stick, and two (well, very many) different experiences of life.

the point is that for the people *i* can think of who have chosen to identify as some kind of queer, the motivation is that life is getting too difficult, or too nonsensical, having to be "feminine woman who likes men" or "masculine man who likes women" when they don't feel themselves to BE one of those things. it's not about making a fashion statement or getting attention or gaining cool, edgy friends; it's about already BEING something "queer" (that is, not-being something "normal", by society's own judgment) and finally fucking calling yourself that. it's no skin off my back, and in fact i see it as a positive social/ethical act, for me to support the validity of that kind of choice.

porn, and a pandagon reading assignment

2006-10-06T17:45:00.000-05:00

note: i am cross-posting this to my livejournal, since i just set this blog up and i'm not sure how i feel about the format. i'm going to try it out and see if it's worth making the switch. so i'll be posting the same entries in both places for the next short while.
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there is a post up at pandagon about pornography as an idea, the violence and misogyny in porn as it actually exists, the divide between feminists who consider themselves for or against porn, and a possible middle ground to bridge that divide. it's a very good, very thoughtful post, and it addresses almost all of the things that i consider important points about porn. i would really like it if people read it.

it does omit a few things that i do think are worth considering about porn.

1. currently a lot of porn hurts women in its production. i don't want to make it sound like by "a lot" i mean "100 films, which is too many, but thankfully not a majority." if you use porn and it isn't drawn or written, there is a good chance your porn is NOT "eco-friendly," so don't kid yourself. deep throat, arguably the most mainstreamed porno ever, involved rape and abuse, not just in the economic-dependence and emotional-pressure sense but complete with gunpoint and beatings, in case you are the type that needs to see non-sexual violence to convince you of sexual violence. i would hazard a guess and say that MOST porn involves some degree of coercing women, abusing women, and/or taking advantage of the prior abuse of women. MOST porn, for sure, involves a certain degree of exploiting women financially, in that they are generally paid peanuts compared to the profits and are sometimes lied to about the money they will receive. so even if you think that porn consumption has no negative effect on women, porn production very definitely has a negative effect on women. if you boycott shampoo that is tested on animals, you should probably be avoiding pornography.

2. the psychological effects of porn aren't limited to reinforcing misogyny, entitlement and resentment of non-submissive, non-acquirable women -- which amanda does a good job of covering. there's also that really obvious effect, something that i think the conversations i have tend to skip over these days because it's practically passe to talk about this, but anyway i'm talking about the false expectations it creates even in people who aren't outright misogynistic. it feeds ridiculous expectations of what women's bodies are like, of course, and this is something we talk a lot about with respect to advertising and young girls and such; but it affects older women too, and not just our ideas about our weight. breasts, of course, are a big one when it comes to porn; tons of actresses have fake ones, but even the ones on cinemax that might not be fake never--freakin--move, which is nuts because i know MY boobs jiggle when i run, not to mention fuck, so what is the deal exactly? but it's not just breasts; for example it freaks me out that there are cosmetic surgeons out there making big bucks on changing the appearance of women's vulvas, but i guess given that not a lot of us see other, unmodified vulvas that often and that playboy-style porn is becoming more and more mainstream, it's not that surprising that so many women are so insecure about their genitals. i know when i first took a look at mine i was horrified, and how are you supposed to figure out what's "normal"? in the days before all grade-schoolers had internet, that was pretty much impossible. unfortunately my introduction to the internet didn't help right away, either. i found the smooth, pink, bald, rounded versions of girl-parts BEFORE i found the wide variation that actually occurs in nature. way before. i used to worry that the first guy who saw my crotch would be horrified, too. and what if my asshole wasn't pink? i wouldn't even know!

anyway, but it's not even just the weird expectations about what we're supposed to look like. porn shapes expectations of what SEX is like, and how we're supposed to *behave*. was i really supposed to wail like a siren or shout obscenities during an orgasm? was i really supposed to have an orgasm as soon as a guy shoved his cock in me? was i really supposed to have an orgasm, at all, from penetration? it didn't feel orgasmic when i put a finger in my vagina; actually i didn't feel much of anything in there.. ohmigod was i DEFECTIVE? etc. was i really supposed to get rid of my pubic hair? was i really supposed to go THAT far down on a guy? if i didn't do any of these things, would i be weird -- or would i be letting somebody down?

it's pretty apparent to me that my first sexual relationship included some expectations, or at least strong suggestions for desires, that came straight out of porn. i never said anything -- because what are you going to say? -- but my suspicion put me in a weird position, because i silently felt that if i didn't fuck/suck/pose/whatever like a porn star, sex would be a disappointment. and i didn't want our sex life to be disappointing, did i? i think the exposure to porn (and the absence of honest mentoring about what sex IS like, but that's a whole other post) played a big part in neither of us actually knowing what else to expect when we got around to losing our virginities. this is not to say that the entire sexual relationship was ruined; only that as a young woman i would have been better off not internalizing what pornography suggested women are like in bed ("bed" being almost 100% metaphorical, of course), with my sandbox for finding out what sex is really like already colored by those same suggestions.

3. similar to that, i think porn stunts your sexual imagination. i think the repeated use of porn limits your own, organic capacity to imagine what sex could be like. you might think that it gives you new ideas, but even when it's doing that in terms of verbs ("i've never seen a girl do THAT before!"), it's drawing a line around "what sex is like", that is, in terms of adjectives, in terms of dynamics. the biggest thing is that pretty much all porn, to a greater or lesser extent, replicates or exaggerates male domination, transfering it onto the sexual encounter in ways that become an unquestioned basis rather than an added element like all the others. and arousal and orgasm are powerful feelings that basically reward whatever you did to get there (not that different from pavlov's drooly dogs); so even if you don't think you are getting off on the patriarchy of it all, you kind of are, on a chemical level, and after repeated reinforcement that is going to have an effect on what gets you off. maybe this is a different point from "stunts sexual imagination," i don't know.

all of this is not to say that i am positive pornography can never be acceptable. i'm not. i think in a much better, much less misogynistic world porn would not be so harmful, though i am not sure if it would be free of all of the various things that make it harmful. i'm open to the possibility, although in the meantime the whole industry is very, very fucked up and i'm not convinced it's worth holding out hope for. amanda's post contains a theory about why it's so fucked up when the majority of men we know do not appear to want to rape women or ejaculate on their faces or fuck them in the ass until they cry.

agh, i have to shower and do some productive things, it's gotten really late in the day. i'll try to come back to this later but i think i've hit the big ones. anyway, i hope you've already clicked on the link above and read the pandagon post, but if not, please do.

UPDATE: oh yeah, i remembered #4. amanda sort of glosses over what exactly the anti-porn feminist activists of the 1980s tried to do. i feel like this is a relatively unknown or misunderstood part of the work done by the anti-porn contingent of feminists and they are often reviled by people who don't even have a grasp of what it is they did that got so much attention. catharine mackinnon and andrea dworkin (this is why their names are linked in tirades) led an attempt to change the framework of laws on pornography, to replace the obscenity-law framework with a discrimination/civil-damages one. most laws about pornography were and are about obscenity, and about how "obscenity" is excluded from the free speech that is protected by the first amendment. obscenity laws rely on "community standards" and a social enforcement of morality, and they constitute censorship of speech that is considered not worth protecting. censorship is a problem for a lot of us, because it's highly illiberal and most of us value the first amendment. a more appropriate way to respond to pornography, these activists felt, was to create laws that classed it as discrimination against women and would allow women who were harmed by porn to file suit against its creators. this seems like a pretty sensible idea to me. if porn is actually harmless like people say it is, then the industry should do just fine. if it isn't, victims can be compensated and try to prevent the harm from being repeated in the future. unfortunately, the movement had some unsavory bedfellows, namely republican conservatives who were not known for their defense of sexual expression, were trying to prevent sex shops from opening in their neighborhoods and attracting a clientele of undesirables, and had been just as much in favor of obscenity laws (as well as zoning laws intended to that effect) as of this latest strategy. the attempt to pass civil-suit laws succeeded in two different cities in the midwest, but i think they might both have been repealed since then. anyway, it sounded like a good idea to me, but even i know that if right-wingers are jumping into bed with you it's time to adjust your strategy. there is some very interesting reading out there about this, i'll try to find my bibliography when i get around to unpacking all those damn boxes.

inaugural post: feminism Q&A! (blog intro to come.)

2006-10-04T16:38:00.000-05:00

EDIT -- i am still trying to figure out to use trackbacks when i link to blogs, because it seems like the courteous thing to do, but every blogging site is different and so i'm still a little confused about where to find the trackback links. if you can help me please do.

repost: livejournal entry from 9/14/2006
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ok. i have a proposition. first a little background, which is that i read several feminist blogs.

--and here i have to digress and plug the one i hit up most often, pandagon, which updates several times daily and is pretty fucking good. it covers a wide field of feminist issues, and also race issues, religious fundamentalism, economics and poverty, neo-conservatism and the war, and so forth, and any intersections among those things. it's pretty strongly focused on how these things play out in the states and in current domestic politics, with most of the posts inspired by current news stories, and since i am so tired of most newsmedia lately it's basically where i get my u.s. news these days. hey, it works for me. doesn't hurt that the writing is no-nonsense, trenchant and mostly spot-on smart, AND occasionally wrings out a laugh from a pretty depressing state of affairs. so yeah.--

ok. so amanda marcotte, one of the pandagon writers, wrote a post that led me to check in on another feminist blog, one that i used to read but had lost over the summer. this one is called molly saves the day, and in her latest post molly has invited readers with (honest, good-faith) questions about feminism, no matter how basic or "dumb", to go ahead and ask them without fear of being a nuisance to the more versed feminists or of being sent off to read more stuff. as she disclaims, though, feminists are within their rights when they say things like "it's not my job to teach you about this, it's your job to teach yourself about it". (quick mini-paragraph about this: this is true, and it's something feminists will often say to those questions, the same way a lot of people of color say that they do not want to be teaching "black people 101" or similar such things, and you could imagine the same about queers who don't feel willing to make it their life's work to educate others about being them. i mean, you might think that anyone would WANT to or feel a DUTY to do that sort of thing -- but there is one group of people who essentially never have to do any of that stuff, because everyone else already lives in their reality and has to know about it just to function. and i don't think it makes sense for well-off able-bodied straight white men to demand explanations of everyone else, they ought to have to do some active learning too, and there is plenty of stuff already put out there by people who DO want to spend their time educating everyone else.) but on the other hand, an occasional boost from someone who knows the material like the back of their hand can be really helpful and engaging, and if someone feels like going the extra mile for others then that's great, so molly's offering her (personal, individual) answers to whoever wants. and, since no one feminist speaks for "all of feminism", amanda in this post, and jill at feministe, and who knows who else, decided to do the same.

so, i like this idea, and if i thought more people read my posts, i'd do it too. i'd like to add my voice to the variety of voices, i just don't know if there's anyone reading this who'd have any questions they'd want me to answer. because this is still definitely a "journal" even though i've been running it a little like a "blog" lately, and by that distinction all i am really saying is that i haven't publicized it and strangers don't read it (i think). that said, i'll still extend the offer. so, thing-one is, if you want me to answer any questions in this vein, ask away. thing-two is, if you just want to get a sense generally of what various feminists out there are wondering about and stating, you should visit one of these blog-posts' comment threads. they touch on things like tensions among feminist women, tensions between feminist and non-feminist women, internalized sexism, what men can do to be pro-feminist, reading resources for more edification, etc.

ok, that's all. in the next few days i hope to post some other, really worthwhile blog reading i found recently.