No! Voting Isn't the Minimum Voters Can Do!

Note: This started as a rant on FB then expanded as I worked through why belittlement of voting in the USA pisses me off so much.
To the folks saying that voting is the minimum and we need to expect more all the time from American citizens.

Your Privilege is Showing!

Some American adults struggle to find time to go vote. They might be juggling multiple jobs. They might have bosses who threaten their jobs if they want to take off time to vote. They may struggle to find transportation to voting polls. They may struggle to find childcare so that they can rush from the polls to work. Sometimes the lines are so long to vote that not everyone can take those hours off to just wait even if they could do it over a lunch break (giving up their lunch that day in the process). Going early? Some folks have long commutes or rely on mass transit that has a set schedule, they might not be able to get their early or right before the polls close.

Some American adults are misinformed about their rights to vote. Some of this is on purpose like giving people the wrong dates, times, and locations. Schools cut education programs about how government works so it is easier and easier to be misinformed. Not understanding how government works or the parts of government on the local, county, state, and federal level, it is easy to overlook the impact it has on their lives.

Some is cultural misinformation like jokes and memes belittling democracies and elections. False comparisons about parties or too loose use of or nitpicking about language used to describe the system of governance makes it all seem like an entity beyond them. It can feel overwhelming or tiring or frustrating to try and sort it all out.

Some American adults are targeted and made afraid to vote. They walk out to their car in the morning to discover flyers "warning" them about police being at the polls. Some of them find graffiti on their property sending silent but clear messages that they are being watched. Some of them have seen neighbors with guns at their sides right outside their polling locations. Those Americans may feel like choosing to vote is risking their lives.

Some American adults have been targeted at the polls. They have had to bring extra paperwork or get a Party advocate to speak up for them. Their neighborhoods have lost polls sites or those sites have been moved into areas where they are made to feel unsafe either on purpose or by the surroundings. It gets tiring fast to feel afraid when you go vote.

Beyond having numerous voting sites, where they are and how they are laid out matters. Just because your eyesight is weak, or you can't hear, or you have difficulty moving doesn't mean you've lost your right to vote but for some American adults it sure makes it a challenge to vote.

Some American adults have been led to believe it doesn't matter. They are constantly bombarded by the idea of the lesser of two evils, or that the corporations run everything, or that democracy is dead, or that it is too gerrymandered to matter where they live. They are told that if they vote this way someone else will vote the opposite so the votes will just cancel anyway. Some of these messages are passed from friend to friend or parent to child, but a lot is shown via mass media. Campaign spend tons of money to spread misinformation about others and to clean up their own messages. Yes, all that information can feel like too much to deal with.

Some American adults get turned off by all the "politics" that they associate with yelling and screaming or greed. They've never heard from nor seen a government official except when it was about taxes.

Some American adults have been raised to think that they must hold out for the "best" or someone who agrees with them 100%. Others are raised to focus on one or two single issues and to ignore any evidence that a candidate might be the worse or best choice on the other dozens of issues out there.

Perhaps as many as 25% of the eligible voting population is NOT even registered (I found different numbers but all were around that national level). We barely get a majority of registered voters out in the Federal presidential elections every four years. Don't get me started on the low turnout for "off-season" elections.

It turns out that for sizable numbers of American adults, voting is not easy, it is not the minimum that they can do because it is a challenge to even do once.

Those of us who do vote in every election... hurray for us! What are we doing to empower our sister and brother Americans?

Those of us who can do more like protest, contact our elected officials, run for office, donate money, help out a campaign, or aid a group that does these things... hurray for us!

But if we turn around and belittle the struggle of our sisters and brothers who also have the right to vote but feel like they can't, we also become the ones standing in their way.

So when I'm asking folks to vote, reminding people to vote, I'm also out there helping get people to the polls. I'm out their contacting my government officials about voting rights. I'm out there weighing voting rights in my decisions about who to vote for.

I'm not asking for the minimum activity from the non-voters.

I'm reminding us with enough privilege that we can and do vote regularly to remember to keep encouraging, keep empowering, and keep fighting for the our sister and brother Americans right to vote, too.

The Normal Heart

The Normal Heart

Sunday, May 25, 2014. The day I’d been anticipating for what seemed like decades.  Finally, HBO would premier its production of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart.  You can read more about the story here but let me summarize by saying it’s a memoir of the onset of the AIDS crisis in America.  Don’t panic. This is not a movie review, although I will include some comments on the film. Mostly this is just some thoughts that came to me while watching.

I first saw this play in 1986/87 when it was done by the Way Off Broadway theater in Indianapolis. I’d known one of the actors for many years and was there mainly to support him.  I certainly wasn’t prepared for the emotional roller-coaster that I’d be riding that night.  At that point in time, there was so much we didn’t know about HIV/AIDS. President Reagan had barely even mentioned it in public. Ryan White and his family were receiving death threats.  The medical establishment seemed to be focused more on controlling the illnesses associated with a compromised immune system than they were actually controlling the virus.  And there were a lot of people in the health care industry who wouldn’t treat or even touch anyone with AIDS.

At that point in my life, I only knew a very small handful of gay men and none of them were HIV positive. But I remember the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Some younger readers may find this odd, but at the time they were the only group distributing information on condom use.  Even Planned Parenthood used the GMHC brochure because they didn’t have one of their own.

Looking back almost thirty years later so many things have changed both for me personally and for the world at large.  I am saddened to have lost friends to this terrible disease. But on the plus side (no pun intended) I now know a lot more gay guys. I’m pleased and honored to call some of them my friend.  

Over the years, I’ve learned that a few of those friends HIV positive.  But their viral load is so small as to be nearly undetectable which is something we couldn’t even have imagined in 1987.  The world at large has come to accept that this is not a plague limited to a certain small percentage of the population.  We accept that this is an illness that doesn’t discriminate based on race, gender, identity or even social status, thanks to people like Ryan White and Arthur Ashe.  Sadly there are still places where ignorance rules but even those seem to be shrinking.

To paraphrase Dan Savage... it has gotten better.

As for the movie itself, it was great! Larry Kramer’s words are as powerful now as they were thirty years ago.  The visuals reflect the in-your-face attitude of the protagonist, Ned Weeks. This movie deserves its TV-MA rating, as any frank depiction of the subject would.  If you think you’ll be squicked by the sex, just avert your eyes for a few seconds.  The scenes are, for the most part, brief.

The acting here is magnificent! I’ve been watching Mark Ruffalo for nearly twenty years and it seems like he just gets better and better in each new role.  If you’ve only seen Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory you really need to see him here as Tommy Boatright. His soliloquy about rolodex cards (no spoilers here) grabbed me by the heart and squeezed with a grip I didn’t think possible.  Mark Ruffalo and Matt Bomer have a chemistry that nearly jumps off the screen. I’m a fan of Bomer’s but I’m so used to seeing him as the glib con man, Neil Caffrey, on White Collar that I’d forgotten just how much depth he can bring to a part. And I’d like to nominate Alfred Molina as my generation’s ‘man of a thousand faces’. I almost didn’t recognize him in the role of Ned’s homophobic brother. You’d never believe this is the same man who played Doc Ock in Spiderman II or Angel, the hired killer in Maverick. 

When HBO announced that they were going to be making this into a film, I was elated. And then I waited anxiously to see what they’d do with the material. I’ll admit that I was a little scared, even with the top-notch cast and Ryan Murphy as director, that it wouldn’t live up to my memories and my expectations.  I needn’t have worried. It’s amazing!  If you have the opportunity to watch this film, please do so.  It’s a wonderful reminder of how far society has come, while also reminding us that there is still more to be done.

In loving memory of Robbie McKinnon and Dale Jordan.

Beyond the Hashtags

#YesAllWomen  #NotAllMen

It’s hard to know what to say about the killing spree Randall Elliot engaged in on May 23rd. So much has already been said. And yet it doesn’t quite seem like enough has been said. Or maybe it’s just not what I’ve wanted to hear.

You see, Randall Elliot isn’t the problem. This was just a specific incidence of a broader issue. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 22 year old who is pissed off because he can’t get laid.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a man in Indianapolis who repeatedly drugged his wife and raped her while she was unconscious because she was “snippy”. For that matter, the problem is not the judge in the case who sentenced the rapist to 8 years of home detention (prosecutors asked for 20-60 years in prison) and then told the woman to forgive her husband.

They’re all symptoms of a problem that has shown up with increasing frequency and that is the discounting, disregarding and dismissing of women everywhere.  We used to think that these kinds of atrocities only happened in other countries, in “less civilized” societies (think “honor killings” or “forced genital mutilation”). We believed that the advancements made by the women’s movement of the 1960s and1970s were correcting this problem  We were wrong.  It’s happening here in the USA and it’s complete intolerable.

What to do then? I know my words won’t be popular but we, as women, have to raise our voices and state unequivocally that this is unacceptable.  And we have to do it over and over again until our message gets through.  It’s all well and good to add the Yes All Women hashtag to our tweets and Facebook postings but it’s not enough because in a few months this will fade out and some other phrase will be popular.  We have to look at this behavior and call it out for what it is... bullshit.  

It doesn’t matter when or where. Much has been said lately about the way females are harassed at SciFi/Fantasy/Media/Comic conventions. Yes it’s wrong and yes plenty of people blog about it. Necessary but insufficient. We have to call out the miscreants at the time they’re being jerks. We have to say “Not cool, dude” or “Don’t be a dick” (thank you Wil Wheaton) or just say “Not acceptable!” And we have to do it over and over again.  If someone says a woman is worth less in some capacity just because she is a woman, that person needs to be hauled up short and told this behavior won’t be tolerated.  Do not debate about why we’re worthy.  Just call their bullshit for what it is and move on.

We have to tell the judge in Indianapolis that his sentence was grossly negligent. We have to tell parents, coaches and teachers in Steubenville, Ohio that when a bunch of jocks use an inebriated girl as the object of a gang bang, they cannot sweep it under the rug. We have to get up in the faces of Department of Corrections officials who don’t tell rape survivors that their attackers have been released from prison, despite the fact that the law requires them to do so (my own personal experience).

And one final thought for those who believe this message is only to those of us with two X chromosomes, listen up fellas.  Every last one of you, especially the #NotAllMen guys, needs to stand up and say the same thing. Psychosocial studies would tell us that this kind of message will have more impact if it comes from men than from women but leaving it to the guys just perpetuates the problem. So while it’s important that everyone speak up, it’s truly a case where we have to heed the call of Aretha Franklin.

“Sisters are doin’ it for themselves!”

Do You Love Your Body?

When most folks think of NOW (National Organization for Women) they generally think of political actions and then a whole bunch of stereotypes that have little reality.  NOW has also maintained a few radical feminist ideas as well even though they are very much a liberal organization.  Don't know the difference between liberal and radical feminism?  I'll talk about that in a bit; I have a minor in women's studies so I've studied the differences.

Official Poster for 2013 Love Your Body

One of the more radical things they do is urge an internal change of major importance.  They urge women to love their bodies with an annual event called "Love Your Body" that I have tried to observe for a few years now even though the campaign has been going on for over a decade now. Part of this campaign this year is a new project called "Let's Talk About It" inspired by the National Eating Disorder Awareness Week.  As a radical feminist, as a survivor of eating disorder, and as a woman this event means a lot to me but as you'll discover below it is also a very huge challenge for me.

I've been losing weight and some might wonder if I can say that I love my body and still be losing as much weight as I have -- currently I'm down 50 pounds for 2013.  The fact is that I've always struggled with my weight and I don't mean that I've always been big but that I've never known what I should weigh, what is healthy.  I saw a nutritionist for several years and she told me to ignore all those charts because they never considered the individual, the ethnic background, the bone structure, and the rest of the physical and emotional health of the person. She took all of that into consideration and told me if I ever got below 145 pounds again she'd put me in the hospital.  But when I started to have troubling walking a few blocks after eating a full meal, I decided I needed to loss a bit... I've just kept going but I am consulting with my doctor and using a very stable and slow approach.

But my post isn't about weight as much as it is about how I've never been able to trust or love my body and I'm struggling to learn to do so.

You see I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and emotional/psychological abuse.  My body was something that was constantly used against me by males larger than I and by females who wanted to feel more powerful themselves by sending me conflicting messages.

My mother was the number one attacker. By the time I was in high school I don't think there was a day that I didn't hear "you are getting too fat" in the morning before I left for school and then hearing "you need to eat, you are getting too thin" at dinner that same night.

Can you imagine how confused that made me?

My body was unknown to me as a positive thing, it was unknowable to me even in terms of the basic idea of what I should look like or weigh.

Instead my body betrayed me constantly.

Getting sick often; too often it seems according to letters I received with my medical records many years back. Did my mother do something to me to make me sick because she got sympathy for being my caregiver?  I know she herself got sick a lot and it is no coincidence that she went into a wheelchair right after I started therapy to recover from my childhood abuse.  I do know that tests have shown doctors and I that I have a very weak immune system not because I'm ill but probably since before I was born.  Of course my mother almost died within a few years of my birth and she (and my father) told me that her doctors had suggested an abortion for her health -- she CHOSE not to do that.  (That is why I am pro-choice so strongly.)

My body was what was molested and raped three times by the age of six.  The memories, both conscious and unconscious damaged my ability to have healthy sex for years and years.  I think that part of my being fat or having eating disorders was an attempt to conquer my body, get control over what seemed utterly out of my control.

My body simply wasn't safe so I invested far more in my mind as a student then scholar and as an author and storyteller.  In my mind I could be in control, I could be free of this shell that tormented me from my earliest memories.

I can't say that I love my body.

I can say I am trying and NOW's campaign reassures me that I am not alone.

Bras Empowering Women

Hi, everyone!

Earlier one of my co-authors here wrote about bras, and I want to do that today with a twist: bras that can help women.

Bras Donated to Free the Girls

I'm specifically referring to the Free the Girls Foundation, which has a program that collects gently-used bras and sends them to organizations where their sales can help empower survivors of the worldwide "illegal sex trade," sometimes called "white slavery."  Local collections sites for this project were the topic of a front-page article in my local newspaper two weeks ago. Currently there are two drop sites in my town for this, so on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, I dropped off three "not even worn more than once" fancy bras.  Just because companies can't seem to sell bras that aren't a standard size, so I'm constantly having problems finding them for myself, doesn't mean the bras can't help someone else, right?

As I understand it, this project, featured on a CNN three-part series about the "illegal slave" trade, employs survivors of the "illegal sex trade" and helps them earn an income while engaging in business where they primarily, if not exclusively, interact with other women.  Why is this important?

To understand that, we have to think about economics, illegal sex trafficking, abuse, and women. I don't want to make this a huge post, so let me just write out a few ideas and share a few facts about these issues.  At the bottom of this essay I'll list online resources I consulted for you to look at further.  Slavery is also a subject I've studied throughout human history, and for that background information the sources would fill a book, so please just bear with my basic statements.

You've probably heard the headlines that right now in 2013 there are more people held in slavery than at any other time in human history.  There is a big problem with this statement. There are more people held/doing/involved/almost any verb you want right now than in any other time in human history, simply because the planet has a much higher population than at any other time in human history.  While factually true in terms of raw numbers, the statement is misleading.  What about percentage of the population?  That involves the very tricky issue of calculating not just populations but parts of populations in the past.  It is better to simply say that even though legal slavery is no longer recognized in most of the world, illegal slavery is still going on.

What is "illegal slavery?"  Slavery is a condition by which a human being is reduced to the status of an object or animal that can be bought and sold.  Note that it does not require social or legal backing, but throughout most of human history slavery was legally and socially promoted — not merely accepted, but promoted.  So "illegal slavery" is merely slavery that continues to exist in a society that has outlawed it.

This creates several problems that you might not think about.  When legal, when socially accepted/promoted, slavery has built-in enforcement, which has both negatives and positives for the owners and the slaves. Yup, I just typed that ... both negatives and positives for the owners and the slaves. What "illegal slavery" lacks are the open enforcement methods that everyone knows about and can use, whether it is a requirement for how much a seller needs to reveal to a potential buyer, to what is considered cruel treatment of slaves, to a slave's right to ask for asylum in a church, to the regulations involved in freeing someone and integrating them into the society at large.  When someone today is rescued from "illegal slavery," we often do not know how to integrate them back into society, if they were ever part of society to begin with.  Similarly, those who are found guilty of illegally enslaving another live their lives either in the shadows, creating false stories about their maids or field workers, and face the choice of jail or running away before they are caught.  They have very little incentive to treat those they enslave as much more than a disposable tool, because the illegal slave is really a piece of evidence to be used against them.

Let me be clear: I am not supporting slavery, merely pointing out that "illegal slavery" lacks many of the social and legal protections and restrictions for the enslaved, the traders, and the owners.

Another headline you may have read is that illegal slavery is about sex trafficking or forced prostitution in which the victims are women and girls.  This is a flashy headline, and it's certainly the one that Free the Girls is focused on, but it is far from the full picture.  While the child or teen girl being forced to service clients in the back room of seedy bars is a heart-rending image, many illegal slaves are boys and men, too, and many, many of them do basic labor or work as domestic staff.   Claims of percentages that do any particular type of labor should be viewed with a pound of salt, because "illegal" means the true numbers must be hidden for the trade to survive.  But it may also be misleading to assume that one type of work does not bleed over into other types of work for the enslaved.   A maid tricked into leaving her country may also be forced to perform sexually, or the man picking crops in a field may have to get extra food through sex acts.  Sadly, we may best understand illegal slavery as creating objects from people, and there are no limits to how an object may be used.

How do people end up illegal slaves?  There seem to be three primary methods.

The first is trickery — they believe they have a job, and then it turns out they signed a contract that they didn't fully understand, or they have a debt but have been offered a chance to "work it off."  In these cases the company or individual owning them rigs the system so that they have a hard time working off the debt or they are guarded heavily, their passports, wallets, and other means of independence taken away.  In a way this is a more extreme form of the "company town," which operated and still happens quite legally around the world.  When you need money to survive, you may have to do whatever you think is necessary, and people will take advantage of you if they can.

The second is family sale — it is not uncommon for parents to sell children, either for debt or for what they believe is job training.  Now we might say this is trickery, like the first method I mention; however, I also know that stories of "rescued" children given back to parents often end up resold.  To say that the parents or family are unaware seems difficult to believe in many cases.  Of course, once you are a child slave the role models that you have for what your life can be like are very limited, and it is likely easier to keep someone enslaved if they were acquired as a child.  Truly insidious, and very much like the generational slave systems of the past around the world.

The third method is straight-up kidnapping or forced co-dependence — this can involve drugs, beating, forms of brainwashing, and lies about families being dead or having sold the victim.  This seems to be the most popular "media" version of illegal slavery, though it can paint the victim as a bad person who made poor choices, versus the child slave or the tricked slave who just wanted to make a living.

In none of these cases is the survivor of illegal slavery to blame for their treatment.  Those of us looking at this from the outside may like to think we could see through the lies or not get caught up with "those sorts of people," or that our families love us enough to take care of us.  Slavery has been around for thousands of years, and the methods and means of enslavement are tested over and over, proven to work time and again.  That you are not an illegal slave may be a matter of luck more than a matter of how clever and loved you are.

So I've been rambling, and I apologize. Slavery, illegal or not, is a huge topic, and I'm certain I'll return to it again and again.  Let's get back to the connection between bras and the "illegal slave trade."

Free the Girls is one organization trying to fight against the very profitable and widespread "illegal slave trade" by using bras, an item that was very likely controlled by their illegal owners. Think about it.  Most of the survivors they held were used in the sex trade and even if they had other jobs we know that it is very likely they were also exploited sexually.  In many, many societies, the breast and anything associated with is often sexualized or connected to the woman's ability to reproduce. In both cases women's bodies are often subject to the control of men either directly or through the desire to seek their approval. If you fall victim to the "illegal slave trade" you are even more controlled and your body ceases to be under your ownership.  I don't know if Free the Girls is making this connection but I find it very powerful that they are helping women reclaim their bodies and decide what they wear in this way.

If you have some extra bras and want to help empower some of the female survivors of it, look them up and see if there is a drop-off spot in your town.  Please do check the resources below, because they all offer other ways to help and more specifics you might find useful, if horrifying.

1: Free the Girls
2: NJ.com article
3: NY Times Bits article
4: The Guardian article
5: Pravda article