Yay, Let's Be Angry Together

The main reason I started blogging is that I needed an outlet for my feminist rants. Too often I found myself raving about cesarean sections and movie roles to a bunch of glassy-eyed friends. So I figured NWF would help alleviate the pressure, and roped Jess in to up the quality.

I thought that the result would be fewer booze-fueled feminist rants. Instead, something far more awesome has happened. My friends are starting these conversations instead.

In fact, I can barely keep up with you guys. To those of you who have pointed me to a news item or topic and I haven't been able to write about it yet, my apologies. We are only two women and are sometimes unable to keep up with demand. Also ... *cough* guest post *cough*

The common thread in all of this, the single motivation behind NWF's creation and our readers' requests, can best be summed up by a phrase coined by the estimable Ryan North: sympathy rage.

Yes, we often end our posts with questions.  Still though.

But. as I mentioned, I can't always keep up. So what can you do if we are not providing you with the sympathy rage you need?

Feministing is always a good first stop. They post many times a day and keep on top of current events. Whatever the topic is, odds are they've covered it. If not, check out one of the other many excellent blogs in our blog roll.

You can also post yourself; you should have the ability to post links and comments to our Facebook page. I'm hoping it can function as a sort of forum for the time being. And if you really have a lot to say, you can always submit a guest post.

Anger Redux: Politeness is Overrated

So, I want to talk about anger again, but this time I'm more interested in talking about anger in communication than anger as an emotion.

As you may know, I am a graduate student in a college of education. This is a weird place for me, as a queer person and someone who gets that the education system we have is killing people - queer people, black and brown people - and is still preserving privilege for its traditional recipients. I'm an outsider, erased from the curriculum, but choosing to participate. I'm constantly negotiating whether this is the right thing for me or not.

Sometimes, in academia, conversations get really heated. This happened last week, and two of my friends and I got angry because we felt like the people we were talking to weren't understanding that what is going on is a life-and-death struggle. We are worried about people dying because of the screwed up society we're in that education reinforces. So when people are refusing to get that, to see their own white privilege, we get real pissed.

What happens then is that someone stops the argument because it's getting too hot and not-nice. Abagond calls this "the tone argument," and points out that it is a logical fallacy. It's refusing to acknowledge the truth of what is being said because they don't like how that truth is being spoken. If you stop yelling at me, in other words, maybe I will listen to what you are saying. It's a derailment tactic. I don't think people will listen even when those words are not spoken loudly.

D put it better, when I posted it on Facebook:

On this I am clear - it is not tone but Truth which alienates people. If you say it silently it alienates (Ghandi), if you say it softly it alienates (Rosa Parks), if you say it strong it alienates (MLK Jr.), if you say it loud it alienates (Malcolm X). I get to CHOOSE how I want to say it, but I know the message is the problem, not my choice of conveyance.

And those of you who are Facebook friends with me may find the rest of this familiar, but why rewrite it when I said what I meant the first time:

Here's what I'm struggling to understand: Why do we have to insist on hearing things the way we want to hear them before we can accept that they are true? It's a logical fallacy and a derailment tactic. I feel as though there is some straight white middle-class way of expressing things, that we have this hang-up about being "polite" or whatever, and if other people aren't bringing their words to the table in a way that fits with that politeness, it's over, the straight white middle class doesn't have to listen. They will be hearing uncomfortable truths about themselves, and if those truths can be written off, they will be. You don't have to feel alienated when someone else gets angry. Even if they are angry with you personally. Aren't we all trying to make the world better? Can't we try to understand that anger? Anger is powerful and important. Politeness can silence people. Why do I have to meet you at your politness? You can meet me at my anger. But politeness is privileged, because it is associated with the most privileged people.

Something happened at AERA that I think of when I think of this. In one of the queer SIG panels I went to, this dude got up and (after saying some mean things about trans people, which was enough to lose the crowd) put up transcript excerpts from his interviews that he did with queer college kids. He had changed all kinds of language in the transcripts to "tone them down." He got read for that like you would NOT BELIEVE. The chair of the session said it well, I thought: he talked about how you can't change OUR words, you can't heteronormatize us, or you are trying to change US to fit THEIR system. And the heterosexist/white supremacist system is killing people.

If you see people expressing their anger or using words you don't like as a problem, it feels a lot like saying that there is a deficit in the person whose speech you don't like. It makes it easier to avoid the deficits in the dominant society that are making that kind of speech feel urgent and necessary. People are dying. I don't understand why we're not all yelling all the time.

See also this set of examples for what this blogger calls the Wite-Magik Attax.

The Next Frontier? Queer Teachers in K-12

We have made progress in queer rights over the course of history, but we still have a long way to go. For instance, it's still difficult in many places to be out as a K-12 teacher. There is a lot we can learn from history to help explain why this is such an enormous hurdle. Before we dive into it, I want to note (again) that progress is not inevitable. Queer spaces always have to be contested, and even though 53% of Americans are in support of gay marriage doesn't mean that the 20-40% of homeless youth who identify as LGBTQ are good to go. Right? Anyway.

As we know, teaching became more feminized in the common school movement. (I'd recommend reading that post and this one if you haven't before, because it's helpful background information, I think.) It also became explicitly tied to values, in that education was meant to instill the values in children that would make them good republican citizens. And good republican citizens, apparently, don't rock the boat as far as gender goes.

We don't have a lot of good data on LGBTQ teachers in the 19th century, but there have always been queer people - although queer liberation movements only became even minimally potent in the post-WWII era, and did not become a mass movement until the 1960s.

The sexual psychopath laws of the 1940s-1960s came out of the medicalization of homosexuality, and further limited the freedom of gays and lesbians. A pervasive hostility, expressed through religion, law, and science, kept homosexuality submerged and constrained queer people from openly acknowledging their presence in society. This made it more difficult to come out and find communities, so that when LGBTQ people were harassed, they could not rely on community outcry to provide support or help prevent future occurrences.

The 1950s were especially difficult for LGBTQ people, including teachers. A rising tide of anti-communism turned on gays and lesbians, as the danger posed by "sexual perverts" became a keystone of right-wing partisan rhetoric. Joseph McCarthy latched onto the idea, and other anticommunist crusaders also thought of LGBTQs as just as dangerous as communists.

In Florida, the 1950s and 1960s were especially hard on queer teachers, thanks to the Johns Committee, which I've already quickly explained here. That book whose cover is pictured above is about this, and you should definitely read it if this is of interest to you. Anyway, the Johns Committee was a witch hunt meant to keep queer people out of schools, operating under the old "you can obviously tell who's gay and they are sneaking under the radar ready to recruit your kids" paradox. Anita Bryant used the same thing in 1977 with the Save Our Children campaign, and we're seeing it again now: We're in yer schools, indoctrinatin' yer youth.

But we live in The Future. We can use our phones to find a nearby vegan restaurant and then call it to see if it can deal with gluten-free while in a strange random city. We have Derby Earth! So teachers can totes be out and queer and have no problems, right?

Of course not. Because I always worry that long posts will make Kyrie sad, and because there are dissertations that could be written on this issue and I have to figure out how to tackle it, the deal on the ground now is gonna have to be Part Two. Have something to say that you want included? Holla at me. Everyone else, stay tuned.

Why Are There So Few Statues of Women?

The Washington Post's Cari Shane notes this week that there are very few statues in America that commemorate women's contributions to American history. Indeed, less than 8% of statues in the nation are of specific women (as opposed to anonymous ideals like Liberty, which may be represented by a female-bodied statue, but aren't about the history-making of actual women).

Shane and the people she interviews make several good points about why this might be and why this is a problem: men are the only people historically considered to be contributors to history in any meaningful way; most statues are political or military, fields that are only open to women relatively recently; that "hero" has a masculine ring to it; that women might be doing things other than working to see themselves in statuary. They also note that if girls can't see women memorialized, they might not be able to see themselves as history-makers.

This idea that men are the only ones who have done anything is not an accident. We already know that there are strong cultural forces pulling people towards hetero-patriarchy. Check out the religious right sometime - they're not huge in number, but they sure do have a lot of influence. If men are the people most likely to have official power in the government, if they are the ones who are seen as world-changers, we only continue this narrative that downplays the accomplishments of women.

It is true that women were excluded from the public sphere for much of history, and many people will point to that as a reason for this imbalance: if women haven't been out there in public, how are we supposed to memorialize them publicly? But in fact, many women were not waiting around for permission to act. Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ella Flagg Young, Sojourner Truth, Ida Tarbell, Harriet Tubman, Lucille Ball, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Betty Friedan, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald - I could go on listing people all day. So could you. The point isn't just to show that there are women who have done stuff, because if you're reading this blog you already know that.

One of the biggest problems here, I think, is that we have "history" and then we have "women's history" (the same can be said of black history or Chicana history or almost anything that isn't white-male centric). So we don't need to build lots of statues to women, because that isn't really important, it's not on the FCAT. And goodness knows, we wouldn't want to build statues that only women care about, right? We can all relate to Abraham Lincoln, but men don't care about Betty Friedan, or so the story goes. It's the same justification used for making children's movies, most of which have boys as the main character. Girls will go see movies with boys in them, but boys won't go see movies about girls. But the thing is, boys could stand to see that they're not the center of the movie industry, or our cultural experience, or our history. And girls need to see this, too.

Street Harassment

Being at professional conferences can be both invigorating and draining. So you'll have to forgive me if my posts are short, but I promise I will get back to my normal over-write-y self soon.

First: If you're a new reader from AERA, welcome!! I'm glad you're here. Keep in mind that we are always on the look-out for a guest post.

Anyway. Yesterday I was walking down the street in broad daylight with my friend Nashwa. Some dude sidled up to her and got all creepy, and so I said, "Back off now," and kept walking. Nashwa told me that he looked stunned that I was so blunt, and that she usually just tells people she's running late.

I think that it makes sense to use the "Sorry, gotta run" approach sometimes, particularly when it feels unsafe to be more confrontational. But I am really bad at not being as blunt as possible at any given moment, and I'm also used to this kind of thing from strange dudes, being a woman in America. But the fact that he looked stunned means that he's not used to hearing it. I think that's a problem. People should not bother each other on the street like that, and, given the way power works in our culture, men especially need to be careful about how they approach women. This guy was not asking for directions, you know? I'm not sure what he wanted, exactly, but I deeply do not care. When you act like a jerk first, you get what you get, and feel lucky that all that happened was I told you to fuck off. Right? There is a social contract for a reason.

Street harassment has GOT to stop. It is not okay that men have this power over women, and that they can exert just the slightest pressure and throw off a stranger's whole day. This particular instance didn't get to me that much, but if a man can, just by walking too close to someone and saying three words, make a woman feel unsafe... well, we are not in a post-feminist world, are we?

And while we're up, I think we need to address the way women are socialized to be quiet and non-confrontational. Sometimes we need to confront people, to take ownership of the situation. I think the more women do this, the less likely men will be to harass us. What do you think?

Oh, and check out Hollaback! If I had been quick enough, I'd have gotten this guy's picture. Note to self: carry phone in hand while walking down the streets in New Orleans. If it happens again, I'll be prepared.

Don't Walk Me Home

This is a tricky post to write, because the people who offer to walk me home are friends who like me enough that they want to trade their own time and convenience for my safety. That is incredibly nice, and if one of said friends is reading this: your affection and concern are noted and I am not ungrateful. I'll usually turn down these offers, though; it's one part stubborn independence and three parts political statement.

I am zealously protective of my freedom. That freedom is severely curtailed if I adopt the viewpoint that I need an escort to walk around at night. Women need to be able to wander around by themselves, to take the late bus home after getting drunk downtown, to stroll over to friends' houses after dark. They shouldn't have the additional economic burden of having to have a car just because they're female. It's not fair or reasonable.

Part of our fear is due to a common misconception about rape. American women are frequently subjected to sexual violence, but it's not from crazy men jumping out from the bushes. It's at the hands of men they know. Really, a woman is safer walking home alone than she is with a male friend.

There's also a frequent worry about "bad" neighborhoods. Now, if you actually have statistics that X neighborhood has an unusually high rate of stranger-rapes and muggings, that's one thing. But mostly people just equate black neighborhood with "bad" neighborhood, and I refuse to participate in that.

It's up to each of us, obviously, to decide when and where we feel safe. I happen to feel safe walking home alone after dark in Gainesville. After all, they caught Danny Rolling.

The Utility of Anger?

A couple years ago, I took a class called critical pedagogy. This class tends to be geared towards teacher educators, of which I am not one (I do history of education, and while I might be teaching future educators, my class doesn't deal at all with pedagogy). I didn't necessarily understand exactly what critical pedagogy meant going in, and the class spent a lot of time talking about it. The bottom line is, there isn't complete agreement between critical pedagogues, which already sounds like a parody of the ivory tower. The definition of critical pedagogy I most closely adhere to is that described by Peter McLaren:

The critical pedagogy which I support and practice advocates non-violent dissent, the development of a philosophy of praxis guided by a Marxist humanism, the study of revolutionary social movements and thought, and the struggle for socialist democracy. It is opposed to liberal democracy, which only serves to facilitate the reproduction of capital. It advocates a multiracial and anti-imperialist social movement dedicated to opposing racism, capitalism (both in private property and state property forms), sexism, heterosexism, hierarchies based on social class, as well as other forms of oppression. It draws its inspiration from philosophers of revolutionary praxis such as Paulo Freire, Raya Dunayevskaya, and other philosophers, social theorists and political activists and supports all those who yearn and struggle for freedom. Critical pedagogy is opposed to both state terrorism and individual acts of terrorism. As Freire writes in The Pedagogy of Freedom, "Terrorism is the negation of what I call a universal human ethic." Critical pedagogy is driven by the engine of class struggle in both national and international arenas.

In order to sign on to such a worldview, I believe, a person needs some anger. I have lots of that. Lots and lots. Anger - or rage, as we called it in the critical pedagogy class - comes pretty easily to me. But one of the things we talked about in the class is the combination of rage and hope. I struggle more with the hope part, because it's hard to see how our capitalist overlords committed to the permanent reign of white cis hetero Protestant men is ever going to change.

Hope might just not work for me, as a concept. Gideon Levy - someone with reason to have a great deal of anger, and also a hero of mine - said that you have to be rational enough to believe in miracles. As he says, things don't happen on their own, but the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, and South African apartheid have fallen. Mere months before those events occurred, they looked impossible. Without a lot of anger, would they have happened? I think I like "rational enough to believe in miracles" more than "hope," even though I'm an atheist. The miracle here is that humanity will get its shit together and stop kicking each other around, and the rational part is important to me. What I really want is a more rational world, not one in which people find stupid and arbitrary reasons to kick others out of their sandbox.

We also talked about love in that class - specifically, radical love. Understand that I am not always a very squishy person, but I really love people. Well, some people, and that's where my problems with radical love come in. Am I supposed to love transmisogynists and Exodus International? I try to be empathetic and to humanize them, which is more than they will ever do for me, but I'm not sure that's enough. But loving my people comes easily for me, I'm not afraid to tell people that I love them, and I think that's also the source of my rage. When I hear someone tell me that her mom kicked her out when she was in high school, or that his brother is raising children to be homophobic, or if someone harasses one of my friends on the street, it cuts me deep, and I want to fly into a rage. I'm not good at hope in those moments.

You know who's really good at love, though, is Cornel West. What an inspiration. He can refer to people I would rather have a root canal than deal with as "my dear brother/sister." That instantly humanizes people, and isn't that the goal here? But it's never that simple.

Nic (again! I'm telling you, between Nic, Kyrie, and you, probably, I am never without genius people) encourages me to think about anger as not just anger but a set of complex emotions, and that is completely right. Anger is just part of the mix. Love and sadness are also involved. I'm just so sad that some people - my loved ones, yours, someone else's - are badly treated, and that those doing the mistreating will never understand what amazing people they are. The way Nic put it was great, so I wrote it down: "Anger is energetic anguish."

I think anger is something I see expressed a lot by some of the feminist writers I most admire . I have friends who I think find my tendency to anger endearing, and certainly reliable. People post links on my Facebook wall that they know will piss me off because they want to see what tapestry of profanity I will weave. Other times, I think they want genuine reactions (more so since Kyrie and I started this blog - now we both get requests to write about various issues, which we are delighted to honor).

Anger, I believe, is really important to social justice work. There is the basic level of "that pisses me off, I want to change it," without which social justice work cannot happen. But anger, for me, sustains my commitment to social justice and feminism. It keeps me from slacking off or writing things off as other peoples' problems. It's not just Nic's problem if someone tries to run her over on the street - it's my problem, it's your problem, because that's a human being we're talking about. Without anger, or rage, or whatever you want to call it, it's easy to lose motivation and sink into a depression because people you care about or will never meet are being targeted for the dumbest reasons imaginable. I've been depressed before, and let me tell you, I was completely unproductive. Not only could I not do anything for anyone else, I could barely get my own shit done. When I began to understand that one of the reasons I was so depressed was because the world is so fucked up, I started to feel a lot better, because I could focus on action. Now I try not to allow myself to sink into despair. Rage keeps me from doing that.*

If you're an activist, is anger something you deal with, and if not, what sustains your activism? If you don't consider yourself involved in social justice work, what is your perspective on this?

* I have a derby friend named Rage, so this is kind of a funny sentence for me to look at. But she keeps me from sinking into despair, too. Love her.

The Religious Right: Pro-Bullying

Sometimes I hear about something some politician is doing, and I think, "That cannot possibly be controversial." Usually these are kid-related (though as Lesley Kinzel has brilliantly pointed out, Michelle Obama's child obesity concerns are very problematic indeed). So when I heard that Obama was holding an anti-bullying summit, I thought, "Word. Everyone will be able to deal with this, because no one wants kids to be bullied!"

I know, right? It's like I just fell off the turnip truck or something.

Religious-right* monsters like Glenn Beck are calling it a "Big Brother" initiative - these are the same people who want to control uteri, and would be happy to use federal power to do so, remember - because they think that it's about teachers and principals Facebook-stalking students.

In fact, as Media Matters reports, the DOE is trying to help schools and parents prevent and handle bullying. All Facebook is doing is allowing users to report harassing comments to Facebook and safely alert a trusted community member to the problems, as online harassment is often a mirror to the off-line world.

Statistics show that LGBTQ kids are FAR more likely to experience harassment and bullying than straight-identified kids. The National Education Policy Center reports that "over 85% report being harassed because of their sexual or gender identity, and over 20% report being physically attacked." LGBTQ students have a suicide rate 3-4 times higher than do their straight classmates, and that statistic goes up to 8 times higher if their parents are not supportive. GLSEN, an organization of which I am a member despite having some problems with its name, reported in 2009 that 9 out of 10 LGBTQ students experience harassment in schools.

So now - for the last four or five months, and honestly, for years and decades - right-wing activists and lawmakers are calling this anti-bullying program part of the "homosexual agenda."

Go listen to Johann Hari's most recent podcast, in which he talks about how a kid in England killed himself recently by lying on train tracks, because he was bullied for being gay. As Johann so rightly points out, the only homosexual agenda is to get this kind of treatment of people to stop.

Dan Savage has said something along the lines of, "Adults bully queer people quietly at the ballot box, but teach their kids to do it in schools." If it becomes harder over time for adults to bully us at the ballot box, that means they're only going to turn up the heat on children in schools. They need a safe space to be assholes, you see. I can relate to Dan's anger on this, even if sometimes I think he says problematic things.

This really started to get bad back in October, when Focus on the Family launched a campaign called "True Tolerance," arguing that anti-bullying strategies are really meant to promote homosexuality in kids. This is the same "gay agenda" shit we've been hearing since Anita Bryant. It would be nice if these lunatics could at least be creative.

As Al Franken said in The Advocate, it's "unbelievable that anyone would suggest that bullying is not a problem." Nonetheless, the Minnesota Family Council has been ramping up their anti-anti-bullying campaign since October. In fact, in a classic moment of victim-blaming, the head of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality blames LGBTQ groups for the bullying, because more students have been coming out of the closet.

Listen: A kid doesn't have to be out of the closet to be bullied. A kid doesn't even have to actually be LGBTQ - other kids only have to perceive her or him that way. I was bullied plenty in K-12, and I wasn't out. It just doesn't work that way. I have a friend whose first-grade son loves the color pink. But at school, he tells people his favorite color is yellow, because the other kids harassed him mercilessly until he changed his tune. I have no idea how this kid does or will identify, and that isn't the point. The kids are policing his gender signifiers.

But now the anti-queer people have their fee-fees hurt because they're being told they need to stop picking on queers. This is fascist! It is indoctrination! How DARE you tell us who we cannot drive to depression and suicide! THIS IS AMERICA.

(Speaking of America, these people want to rewrite history so that they can more effectively use it as a weapon. In a really fun revisionist moment, Gary Glenn claims that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been an anti-gay activist. I think he forgot about Bayard Rustin. Also, I'm not sure Glenn is on the side of confronting issues of social justice for racial minorities, either.)

Things really started to sound violent to me, though, when Liberty Counsel's Matt Barber got on ye olde radio on March 28 to say that “kids who are engaging in homosexual behavior often look inward and know that what they are doing is unnatural, is wrong, is immoral, and so they become depressed and the instances of suicide can rise there as well.”

You do not need me to tell you this is insanity. But this is why LGBTQ kids who are bullied actually do have it worse sometimes. Any given straight kid might have it worse in school than a queer classmate, but they don't have to listen to the whole of society, including their religious leaders and maybe even their parents, talking about how their very existence is wrong.

I have a hard time when I hear stuff like this, because I get really angry and feel like I'm flailing around. I think the problem with these people is that they are used to being at the top of the heap, but in order to justify continuing to get everything they want, they have to front like they're somehow oppressed. I really cannot figure out what else it would be. What are they so afraid of, that they blame children for their own suicides? There is something wrong with them. There is no good reason that this anti-bullying initiative should be controversial, but I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that the bullies themselves are fighting it.

What do you do, to keep the bullies from getting to you?

* No, not everyone on the right is religious, and not everyone religious is on the right (in fact, probably most religious people aren't, just by the numbers). But to deny that the religious right is a powerful voice in American culture and tends to be very much in favor of preserving the status quo I so loathe is misguided, I think. The right wing of the American political spectrum is loud, louder than its numbers suggest it should be, and also very wealthy. Complicate the notions of right wing and religious all you want, but write them off at your peril.

By Request, Part 1: We Really Need to Boycott Abercrombie and Fitch

Lordy day Amelia. Abercrombie & Fitch apparently thinks it hasn't done enough to cement itself in my mind as ridiculous. It is now selling push-up bikinis to children. Our friend Sarah has made another request that we discuss this issue. I know Kyrie is about to write something about how this is fucked up from the angle of sexualizing girls and conflating women and children, so I want to say something about how we really, seriously need to boycott Abercrombie. It isn't funny anymore. Not that it ever was.

Here's why I think Abercrombie & Fitch should be boycotted, broken down into a handy-dandy list:

1. Abercrombie & Fitch is doing work here to push gender norms onto people. And who, exactly, is supposed to be appreciating the sight of seven year old girls in padded bikini tops? This isn't doing a thing for body-acceptance/self-love, I can tell you that. Wear whatever you want, ye autonomous adults, but I do have a problem with teaching first graders that their body should look a certain way ASAP, and here, we have something you can buy to look more socially acceptable. This is revolting. Kids that age, regardless of gender, are really impressionable. I was kind of screwed up when I was that age* thanks in part to these messages, and I think the culture of body-shaming is only getting worse. This is part of it, and it's truly harmful, both from the gender/heteronormativity perspective, and from the body acceptance perspective.

2. Abercrombie & Fitch is racist. Or, at least, it's fine with selling racist t-shirts. Is there a difference? Good for the people who freaked out on their asses and got this revolting t-shirt pulled from the shelves.

3. A&F also sells sexist t-shirts, according to Wikipedia, including one that said "L is for Loser" next to a picture of a male gymnast, and t-shirts that said "Who needs brains when you need these?," "Available for Parties," "I had a nightmare I was a brunette," "Female streaking encouraged," "Show the twins," and "Female students wanted for sexual research." The message that women exist for men's sexual pleasure comes through loud and clear. It's awfully hetero/cis-normative, too.

4. Abercrombie & Fitch is guilty of workplace discrimination based on race and gender. I'm not sure how "gender" is being defined here - well, it isn't, but I'm guessing they mean discrimination against cis women? This idea of gender discrimination being something that is presumed to mean discrimination against cis women is something that needs to be raised in a future blog post. Anyway. These aren't hiring practices we want to support with our dollars, right?

5. A&F also discriminates by ability. They made a woman with a prosthetic arm work in the store room because she didn't suit their "look policy"? Are you fucking KIDDING me? So even if they are forced to widen their hiring pool, that doesn't meant they're going to treat people better. The look policy says that staff need to have a "natural, classic American style." What the hell does that mean? What is "natural"? Do they mean women shouldn't shave? Because I kind of doubt it. What about "classic"? Petticoats are classic, is that what they want? Or do they mean monocles and top-hats? And, finally, "American" - I don't even know where to begin with that one, but I fear it means "white." Their web site as of today only features skinny white models, some of whom aren't wearing much clothing anyway. Nothing against skinny people, white people, models, or people who aren't wearing much clothing. It's just not exactly representing an array of "natural, classic American style." I guess that is something A&F defines narrowly. Fortunately, this woman won her wrongful dismissal case.

6. You know who else doesn't fit their "look policy"? Muslims! That's right: A&F has now, through its corporate policy, treated people unfairly on the basis of race, gender, ability, and religion. A Muslim teenager was fired for wearing her headscarf to work.

That article also contains this gem:

The youth-oriented retailer describes its brand as "rooted in east coast traditions and Ivy League heritage," and as "the essence of privilege."

I'm sorry, folks. I just cannot possibly condone this. "East coast traditions" very clearly means "rich white people" traditions. In using these kinds of words, they are not only aligning themselves with the most privileged possible customer base, they are less-than-implicitly excluding people who can't fit into it demographically - including the Muslim woman they fired. This east coast-dwelling white person will have nothing to do with this kind of narrow-mindedness.

7. As if all of that weren't enough, A&F is size-ist. Their sizes only run up to a large, and reports on the web say that the sizes run small. Judging by their size chart, I'd wear a medium, which means there is only one size up from what I'd wear. This sends yet another message about who they think should be buying their clothes, and it is a message I cannot possibly endorse.

8. A&F uses unfair labor practices. In fact, the International Labor Rights Forum inducted it into the 2010 Sweatshop Hall of Shame.

A quote from their web site:

Most of the companies listed employ laborers who toil for long hours under dangerous working conditions for poverty wages. When these workers attempt to form a union to voice their collective concerns, they face threats from management and risk being fired or even beaten. Many of this years’ inductees use suppliers that practice illegal tactics to suppress workers’ rights to organize. Some of the companies mentioned weave shame into their clothing by continuing to use cotton sourced from Uzbekistan where harvesting is accomplished through forced child labor.

This is what the PDF says about A&F specifically, for those who don't want to download:

Abercrombie and Fitch (A&F) clothing is manufactured at Alta Mode factory in the Philippines. Employees of the factory sought to form a union to address concerns and on the day the Alta Mode Worker’s Union was to be certified, all of the more than 100 union members and officers were placed on forced leave, a clear case of employer interference in the exercise of the right to unionize and an unfair labor practice by law. Workers have struggled for a union as an antidote to a production quota set beyond human capacity.

It is essential for A&F to send a strong signal to the factory that freedom of association violations will not be tolerated. The A&F supplier has even filed criminal cases against the union members. This factory case is a clear example of the flagrant disregard for the law by garment factory owners in the Philippines.

Unfortunately A&F doesn’t even have a public code of conduct and utilizes factory inspectors that have missed glaring issues such as the ones highlighted in the Alta Mode factory. One major concern is that A&F shifts its production around from factory to factory which results in lack of stable orders at the factory. ILRF encourages A&F to build long term meaningful relationships with suppliers so that their standards around wages, overtime and freedom of association are clearly enforced.

Every single instance I listed above is unacceptable and reason alone to boycott A&F. You can rip holes in your own jeans, you know.

* It only got worse over time, too. Thanks, body-shaming culture! It took me til my mid-20s to be cool with myself. That's a lot of wasted time, folks.

Update on my Neighbors

So, I had a chat with the mom of the family I posted about yesterday. After all, I sometimes have a hard time parsing rapid speech, so I figured I'd better go back with pen and paper and get the facts straight before I start raising hell on their behalf.

This mom (whose name I am reluctant to disclose, because the internet can be evil) shared a lot of info with me. I saw the eviction notice with my own eyes, and, yes it gave them only 7 days to vacate, dating from March 15. I am not a legal expert, but this seems far too short.

So, why are they being evicted? Here's what the notice said. Let us marvel at the triviality of their supposed crimes:

1. Not cleaning up after their pets. (In fact, this family does not have pets – the mother occasionally pet sits for her sister and is perplexed by this charge. Additionally, she notified the management every time she engaged in pet-sitting, as she was requested to do.)


2. One instance of grilling in front of their apartment.


3. One instance of their children screaming.

Yeah. You read that right. They are being kicked out because their children yelled. What kind of total Scrooge do you have to be to kick a family with small children out of their home because their children sometimes make noise?

I work at home a lot, so I know what these kids sound like. And if I can do theoretical astrophysics (which, in my case, requires intense concentration) in my home while they are playing, I don’t know how these kids can be considered disruptive.

But this is really just the latest development in a long list of harassment this family has had to endure. Here's some of the history they've shared with me: they have had their possessions thrown away (by maintenance personnel, who subsequently admitted doing so), been yelled at (also by maintenance personnel), and have had their vents illegally blocked (by the management). One particular neighbor has engaged in additional harassing behavior, including trying to get their car towed because she wanted the spot it was in, yelling at them, telling them that this complex was “not the ghetto”, and telling them that she had videotaped them. They've even received a late night phone call in which they were called "niggers" (a word I hate even to type) and threatened with expulsion for the complex.

The whole thing is making me really angry. I'd like to get a reporter involved who could help me verify some of the records; the mom says there are police records for a lot of these incidents.

On the positive side, the family has hired a lawyer, and they seem confident that they have a great case. They're sharp people, and I hope they come out on top. But I would be remiss if I didn't do everything I could to help. Plus, they're exactly the type of people I want in my neighborhood.

On Request: Parenting Under Pressure

We have a topic request! Sarah writes:

I've heard people say that breastfeeding, cloth diapering, and making your own baby food actually take women back a few steps and further tie us to the home and our babies. But others say that breastfeeding, especially, is an empowering experience for women. What are your thoughts on the issue? Does it all lie in the fact that we have the power to CHOOSE how we raise our children?

The short response is, yes, these choices are absolutely ones that should be made on an individual parent-by-parent basis. The DIY approach appeals to some more than others; I would rather take a hard punch to the nose than knit something, but to each their own.

This is complicated by the fact that parents are not able to make their child-rearing decisions in a vacuum. On the contrary, parents are subjected to incredible pressures by their families, friends, and even perfect strangers to raise their children in particular ways. Some of these choices vary by region, and some are nationwide.

The pressure to breastfeed seems to fall into the latter category. A number of organizations, including the Ohio Department of Health and PETA, fund billboards that push the breastfeeding option. "Breast is best" is heard over and over. It is yet another example of our society's collective efforts to control women's health care decisions. I imagine that it requires a not-tiny amount of personal courage for any woman to decide not to breastfeed in the face of such monolithic public opinion.

Furthermore, the attitude that only breast milk will do can cause undue emotional distress for women who would choose to breastfeed, but cannot. And this is despite the fact that a lack of breastmilk is hardly the fault of the mother, and that babies can certainly thrive on formula. (Just to be clear, though, I totally understand how one might look forward to the experience and be disappointed when it doesn't happen, a feeling which is separate and distinct from the artificially induced guilt I'm talking about.)

To summarize, I feel that the decision to breastfeed (or to use cloth diapers, or to sew your child's clothing, etc.) or not is a personal decision to be made by a child's parents. The rest of us have the responsibility to respect that decision, and enable parents to raise their children as best as they can. In the case of breastfeeding, I am simultaneously in favor of increased time off/facilities/resources for mothers to breastfeed and pump and also in favor of backing off on the "breast is best" rhetoric.

As this blog is written entirely by childless women, I would love to hear about the experiences of actual parents, especially mothers, in the comments section.

Victim-Blaming 101

The New York Times has outdone itself. It has been awhile since I've seen it as much beyond a corporate mouthpiece (an honor it shares with CNN, FOX, NBC, and The Washington Post. If it isn't Democracy Now, I'm skeptical). This time, though, it has gone too far.

James McKinley has this to say about an eleven year old gang rape victim in a small East Texas town:

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”

Because she had it coming, right? It's her fault, it's her mom's fault (but not her dad's!) - anyone but the group of older teenage boys who raped her. There are pictures and videos to prove it. But we see women as the gatekeepers of sexuality, so if she dressed in a way some other people think was inappropriate and her mom might not know where she was, she totally deserved it. They boys were powerless to not rape her! And as another person interviewed in the story says, “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

WON'T ANYONE THINK OF THE RAPISTS?

This just makes me want to vomit. 1) When I was 11, I'm pretty sure my mom didn't know where I was at every minute of every day. Neither did my dad. I have fantastic parents, but... I was 11, not six. I never did anything terrible, and I'm lucky I didn't get into trouble, but lordy day, people. Her mom is probably devastated. Compassion?

2) I don't think I need to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway: It does not matter how you dress. It does not matter how much you drink. It does not matter what alley you walk down alone or at what hour of the night. Rape victims are not to blame for their rape. Rapists rape. Rape victims are never asking for it, and they never have it coming. Never. No exceptions. If you try to raise an exception in the comments, your comment will be blocked.

3). Eleven. Years. Old.

I see this as part of the trend of misogyny that the right wing has been working really hard to perpetuate, but also part of a victim-blaming, showing-no-compassion trend that really bothers me. Why do we have to be so awful to other people? No one in this story shows any feeling for this little girl. It's all about how boys don't deserve to have to deal with this, the mother was wrong, these people are poor.

If you would like to join me in writing angry e-mails to the New York Times, you can use this e-mail address: public@nytimes.com.

Edited: Thanks to Steve and Terror for posting these very good takes on this issue:
Amanda Marcotte
Lisa Falkenberg