Author: IndyLib

As some of you know, I am in the middle of trying to move my ass from Arizona to Ohio. (Well, if it were only my ass, things would be going far more easily, but I digress.) I threw out both my back and my neck while cleaning out my closet (shut up Second Nature), so last night I was eating

lots of percocet and catching up a little on blogs and news and such.

And I stumbled across this at Pandagon:

(If you give a shit about women’s equality and you’re not already reading Amanda, then you should be. Brilliant and hilarious, that one, and due to the FP posters as well as the comment community, reading Pandagon can give you a good general education regarding the variety of modern feminist takes on sociopolitical issues. It can also disabuse you of some of the bullshit arguments forwarded by anti-feminists that some folks on the left believe are actually true, because the bias in the MSM isn’t just anti-left, it’s also anti-feminist.)

It seems a complaint was filed with the Washington State Department of Health this week because that contingency of nutjob pharmacists who likes to think they’re more moral than the rest of us is now taking this “punish the sluts” thing to a whole ‘nother level.

Cedar River Clinics, in case you hadn’t worked it out, is a women’s health center with several locations in WA, and it also offers abortion services. So these lunatics, who already seem to think they have an unassailable right to interfere with women’s medical reproductive choices, are now extending that interference to withholding antibiotics from women they deem unworthy. “Let the sluts die”, I guess, is the logic here. Because that’s pro-life, or something. As was pointed out in the Pandagon thread, even prisoners on death row are entitled to antibiotics. These pharmacists are unilaterally demoting law-abiding women to a status below that of prisoners on death row.

Oh, but wait, there’s more:

wtf? Why should any pharmacist have any business to question why any woman chooses any particular medical facility? And why in the hell would a pharmacist withhold pre-natal vitamins, under any circumstances? Even reaching down into the deepest, darkest, wingnuttiest recesses of my brain — and I’m related to these people, I do understand them to an extent — I cannot imagine a scenario in which that makes any more sense than skull-fucking as an after school hobby, not even under their own totally logic-free worldview. What the hell happened to protecting the fetus at all costs? Not if the fetus’ slut mother went to a clinic where they perform abortions on other women, I guess; that fetus is now tainted by association and cannot be given the vitamins that fetus-carriers who see properly moral doctors can have. Seriously, wtf?

There’s been some defense of these controlling lunatics by people on the left, and not nearly enough condemnation from the whole left or from Democratic politicians. (Credit where it’s due, some Dems are bravely fighting this, like the gov there in IL, and I applaud them.) Some people, even on the left, even while they fight for the rights of all kinds of other groups, still seem to think that pharmacists do have a right to withhold medication at their own discretion based on nothing other than their personal moral judgment.

I’ve been wondering whether these folks are only making excuses for this outrageous behavior because they are, in various ways, duped into believing that a fetus should have more rights than the woman it requires use of in order to survive and grow into a baby, but I don’t really know. We’d have to see whether they’d hold their positions when their own heart medication was withheld in every pharmacy for 200 miles just because the pharmacists decided that they didn’t morally approve of some facet of their lifestyle.

But I’m curious. At this point, does anyone here honestly continue to believe that any of this is really about babies? Or is it yet becoming clear to people that the “moral issue” that is at stake here, even when the lunatics say it’s about babies, is really women’s very basic and fundamental rights to both privacy and bodily autonomy? Is it obvious yet to the folks who originally bought the whole “moral/baby” line of bullshit that this behavior is really about controlling women’s sexuality — and at the threat of death, if necessary?

I was 15. It was a little more than a month before my 16th birthday. I was half drunk. I went willingly with him to his bedroom when I knew no one else was at home.

I was a virgin. He knew that. I’d told him, repeatedly. We both knew what my virginity meant in a cultural sense; that I still had the societal worth that a female is afforded before she has sexual intercourse (or before a man rapes her); that if we were to have sex, it would be him who would “score” and me who would “be scored upon”; that he would win something and I would lose something; that sexual intercourse is what makes boys into men and girls into sluts.

We had discussed all of this repeatedly. I’d also told him, repeatedly and very clearly, that whenever we fooled around we could do pretty much anything he wanted except for fucking. I wanted to fool around but I didn’t want to get pregnant. I was 15.

He was 18. He told me he understood that I wanted to remain a virgin for some as yet still undetermined period of time. He said that was cool. He said he was satisfied with the fooling around. He said he loved me. He’d shown me pictures of his trip to Europe with his mom, the town where his family had lived before they’d come to the States, and he’d cried while he told me how horrible he’d always felt about the distance between him and his dad. He shopped with me, people. We bought matching pink polo shirts at the mall and then rode home on his motorcycle looking like one of those obnoxious Bobbsey twins couples. He practically genuflected to me at the football game that night, seemingly so proud to be there with me, to be my boyfriend.

So later on when we started making out on the bed, like we had a bunch of other times, I wasn’t worried. We’d been drinking downstairs earlier with our friends, like we had a bunch of other times. He’d had a few beers, I’d had a few wine coolers, maybe we smoked a joint, I don’t remember anymore. I do remember that when I went upstairs with him, I was kinda high, and bubbly, and turned on, and happy. I remember that I trusted him.

After we were naked, I started to feel a little sketchy. At first, I didn’t know why. I didn’t feel sick. I wasn’t too high. I wasn’t doing anything sexual that I’d not already done with either him or other boyfriends so I wasn’t uncomfortable for reasons of that nature. I don’t know. The air in the room changed. It was subtle but I guess some part of me was primed to pick up a dangerous vibe like that even before I learned how to read it.

The next thing I knew, he was pinning my arms to the sheets and holding my legs apart with his knees and I was going, “No, wait!” and he was forcing his penis into my vagina.

I promptly went into shock. And when I say ‘promptly’, I really mean that, it happened in an instant. My body stopped responding and shut down, and my brain shifted into an emergency functioning mode that didn’t include much emotional awareness of my context. I mostly just stared at the red lit numbers on the alarm clock that sat on the nightstand by the bed, watched them sit static, watched them change from one to the next to the next. Running through my mind was a chaotic series of thoughts that extended from the initial shock of the realization — Is he fucking me? Oh my god, he actually is. I am being fucked against my will. — to frantically wondering how safe I really was since he acted like he didn’t hear me and continued to look as though he were in a trance, all the way through about 15 different brands of panic about what this would mean for my identity, and ultimately, what it might turn out to mean for my future on the whole — If he gets me pregnant, I will fucking kill him.

Eventually, I began to cry. And that seemed to jolt him.

At first, all the communication was non-verbal. He realized that I was crying, and he finally stopped fucking me. He pulled out and sat back on his knees, looking at me with what first appeared to be all the sweet boyfriendly concern in the world. I didn’t say anything, I just looked back at him. And then, as he searched my face for further information, one of two things happened: either it hit him, what he had done, or he realized that it was time to put on a performance. I have never been sure which thing it was.

His face morphed from tightened concern to abject horror. “I’m so sorry,” he began to say, and he tried to lie down next to me and wrap himself around me.

“Don’t touch me,” I snapped.

I got up and reached for my clothes in the pile on the floor.

“But I love you!” he protested.

I think I might have snorted. I also think, in my haste to get dressed and get the hell outta Dodge, that I might have left my socks under his bed.

“Oh god, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t leave, I love you, I didn’t mean to do this, I didn’t even realize that I was….ohmygod I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.”

I could not bring myself to look at him again.

He punched a hole in the closet door and screamed that he loved me some more.

I didn’t even look over my shoulder while I left. I shot out of the apartment and back downstairs to the other apartment in which our friends were still partying. I did not realize that one of them — my boyfriend’s asshole best friend — had just stolen back downstairs two seconds before I did, because he had been watching the whole goddamned time upstairs through an air vent that connected the living room to the bedroom. That bastard watched while his friend raped me.

I wouldn’t find out about that for another week or so afterward, though — I’d find out about it around the same time as I found out the boyfriend who claimed to love me so much had started calling me a lying little slut all around town and started to date one of my best friends. She was a freshman, 14. And he’d rape her too, eventually, even though I’d beg her to get away from him and tell her why and she’d choose to believe his version of events over mine. I don’t know if the asshole best friend got to watch him rape that girl, too, of if the asshole best friend ever said to the other girl what he ultimately said to me, which was something kinda like, “If you ever tell, I’ll testify that I watched and that I heard you say ‘yes’.” This was said all faux-friendly-like, at another party where I unexpectedly ran into these boys later that summer.

Everyone who was at the party the night that the boy actually raped me was able to immediately connect a reasonable number of dots as soon as they saw me. I’m a person who often wears my emotions raw and fuck you if that makes you uncomfortable. Through my tears and rage and shame and fear and confusion, I asked my friend Michael to drive me home because he was the only person in the room I felt certain wouldn’t victimize me again in some way (and he didn’t). I still wasn’t thinking of this as a rape. I never said the word ‘rape’ at the party, and I never said it to Michael. But Michael could barely hold himself inside of his skin while he drove me across town. There were offers to console me, to kick my boyfriend’s ass, and even to kill him iffin he needed killin’. I appreciated that, but I didn’t say much.

When I got home, I showered a lot, cried more, and desperately tried to figure out what the fuck I was going to do if I figured out I was pregnant right as I was turning 16. I was personally against abortion at the time (always politically pro-choice). I knew I couldn’t opt for adoption; I couldn’t even give a dog away. I knew I couldn’t have a child, either. I made a concrete plan to blow up my boyfriend’s motorcycle, but remained on the fence about whether I’d do this while he was riding it or whether I was going to let him live. Then I figured maybe I’d kill myself. That was very calming, and I was working out a methodology when I realized I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t be responsible for killing an infant as well and I couldn’t yet know whether or not my boyfriend and my own biology were still in the process of betraying me by creating one. So I just sat and cried because there wasn’t anything else to do.

I was a severely abused child who was still stuck in a severely abusive house. There was no help for me at home, so I couldn’t mention this to anyone in my family. It only would have got my ass kicked.

The next morning I got up, showered some more, got dressed, and walked to school. With each step I took toward the high school, I felt sicker and sicker to my stomach. I was going to have to see him. I was going to have to see all those people from that party the night before, all of whom knew that something very sexually wrong had happened between me and my boyfriend — nobody was actually saying the word ‘rape’ yet — and all of whom, surely, had formulated their own opinions on the matter by now.

Because that is what people do. People have opinions about other people’s private lives and the way we choose to run them. I knew my friends, I knew my peers, I knew my school. I would be believed by some people and not believed by others; I would be considered a victim by some people and a dumb girl who brought it on herself by others; I would be called stupid for drinking, stupid for dating him, stupid for dating him while drinking; I would be called slutty and I would be called easy and they would say I was just like my mother; even the ones who “supported” me would whisper about how my being “way too cocky for a girl” had surely been what led to this; I would be objectified by both the girls and the boys, the believers and the non-believers, and I would hate every fucking second of it.

Enter the girl who would save my ass. I’d only just met her the night before at the football game. Somehow, we knew all the same people but we’d never met. We’d never even heard of each other before. This was impossible. We were both extremely popular at school, varsity athletes, had been for years. Everybody knew who we were, we knew each other’s friends, we’d been to many of the same parties. It was not that big of a school. I maintain to this day that it is logically impossible that we did not know each other before that night, and that perhaps the universes shifted one parallel universe to the left or something and brought us into the same dimension of each other’s lives. Whatever. Enter the girl who would save my ass.

When I passed through the gate of the parking lot at school she was seated atop the hood of her car, waiting for me to arrive.

“You cannot be in school today,” she informed me. “Wanna go to the beach? For one, we really need to talk, and for two, my prom’s tomorrow night and if you’re still planning on going with Frankie then we both need some damn color.”

I was so grateful that I don’t even remember what I said to her. I only remember agreeing and starting to cry again. We got into her car, she drove to my house, I rolled a few joints, we got on 112 and drove wordlessly to Miami Beach. Heavy on my mind were all the things I was afraid of losing, like freedom and school and soccer and my future, and worse, the things I thought I had already lost, like the most valuable thing a woman is told that she has, her sexual purity via her virginity, and thus nearly all of her self-worth and cultural value.

On the beach, we talked for hours. Among so many other things, this young woman told me about how she’d been victimized and raped, and she said the word. “Rape.” Then she said something like this to me:

“I know you feel dirty, and not in the good way. Like something’s been stolen from you and you’ll never be able to get it back. But that’s mostly just about bullshit you’ve been taught to believe that doesn’t relate much to actual fact. I mean, of course, he’s a bastard who raped you. That’s not going to change. He stole trust from you and abused it. That’s for real and he’s an asshole.

“But you’re all fucked up because you think he took something real and something valuable away from you when he took your virginity, and he didn’t. Aside from your cherry, which you probably popped yourself years ago with a tampon or playing soccer like a madwoman, so is totally inconsequential, virginity is mostly just a fiction for men that revolves around that idea they have that all we’re good for is sex, and that they own us and demean us by fucking us. Which is obviously straight up bullshit to anyone with half a brain, but that doesn’t stop so many of them from acting like total pricks.

“So, you know, if you want to kill him, I’d understand that. I might even be persuaded to help you. I’ll damn sure hide you.” She grinned. “But whatever else you choose to do, DO NOT let this asshole ruin your sense of yourself or your enjoyment of sex. Both of those things are way too good to let some cheap horny bastard steal them from you during your sophomore year in high school.

“He did not take your body. It is not his. You still own it. He did not take your pussy. It is not his. You still own it. You can do whatever you want with it. And all these lines of bullshit they’re always selling us about how women are ‘supposed to be’? Don’t buy into it, it’s a trap, and in the end it just helps men rape women. Look, just like you were already being whatever kind of girl you wanted to be, and you were fucking off convention, you can choose to be whatever kind of sexual woman that you want to be, whenever you’re ready for it, and fuck off convention. Own both your own mind and your own pussy and do whatever you want to do with them — that’s the path from where you are to healing and freedom.”

And that wasn’t the only time she saved my ass, either.

I’m never around when the Cafe needs tending, but lately I seem to stumble in when there’s a need for a new bucket. (Or did we decide to quit doing these and nobody told me?)

Share headlines, news items, and linky goodness.

What’s going on out there? Post your links, headlines, and snark in here. Take the poll!
Proposed legislation in Ohio::

No, not that one, you dirty gutter-minded liberals, bless all y’all’s hearts.

FEMINISM.

I say that particular F Word around folks I don’t yet know very well and I get a wide range of emotional reactions, everything from delight to disgust. The men usually get nervous; even the liberal men. Many of the women are instantly on guard. They seem to be wondering: am I one of those “angry feminists” they’ve heard about or am I going to be “normal”; am I going to be upset if they’re not feminists; am I going to be hyper-critical of their life choices; am I going to be a sanctimonious prick; am I going to try to recruit them. And really, only that last fear is valid. 😉

It’s important to begin any introductory sort of conversation about feminism with some acknowledgement of the history of oppression of women, even though by now most people are more or less familiar with it. There’s always someone who isn’t. Briefly, then:

Women have historically been denied the right to own property because we’ve been considered to be property. Women have spent millennia as the legal property of men, being raped, sold/traded like a commodity, beaten, and/or killed by the men who’ve owned them. This legacy lingers. In fact, Tennessee only got around to making it illegal for a man to rape his wife under all circumstances earlier this year, which was the result of feminist work. (As of last year there was something like 15 states where spousal rape was a lesser crime than other rape. LAST YEAR. 2004.) Women have been categorically denied education — an educated woman can fight back — and in some cultures today it’s still a punishable offense to teach a female to read. We were denied the right to vote here in the US until 1920, we’ve been denied the right to work to support ourselves and our children, and we’ve been forced into prostitution or unwanted marriages to support ourselves and our children. We’ve been denied the right to have equal custody of our children, and we’ve been denied the right to make decisions about our own reproductive processes, such as birth control use and abortion.

These grievous offenses represent only a fraction of the overall reasons why feminism has continued to emerge from the social fabric, time and again, over and over. There have been feminist movements all throughout history, a fact that doesn’t get covered in a lot of World History or Western Civ courses. But oppression always has resistance, it’s just that when oppression wins, the resistance doesn’t get a chance to write a chapter telling its side in the history books. Feminism is not a new phenomenon, its recent relative success in the US notwithstanding.

When feminism emerged in the US it did so for the same reasons it always has; because women were being categorically and systemically oppressed. Of course, as usual, rich women had it better than poor women, and white women better than non-white women, and straight women better than non-straight women (I’ll talk more about this in a minute), but there was still a recognizable oppression that was categorically about being female. White women did not have any more right to not be raped by their husbands than black women; the children of rich women were just as much owned by the male head-of-household as the children of poor women; straight women were not being enthusiastically promoted into boardrooms while queer women were kept at the reception desk. It’s been categorical.

And whatever our differences, we women all have this history of oppression in common, as well as its remaining legacies today. We also have the opportunity to learn to stand together against the renewed fervor with which the conservative movement is trying to resurrect many of these oppressions right back into the law again.

For a little while, feminism in the US really worked. Over decades, women marched and protested and rallied, they wrote books and raised their consciousness and burned their bras and said hell no we won’t back off the demand for the vote and the pill and equal pay and equal rights. And today we all enjoy much of what they demanded for us. (God, I love those women. I owe those women a debt of gratitude which I intend to pay-forward to future women by working to ensure them greater equality by the time they get here.) We won the vote and the right to take the pill. We can get good jobs. We can go to college, and we can send our daughters to law school just as well as our sons. We got the ERA approved in over half the states. A lot of great work was done.

But then a weird thing happened in the late 70s/early 80s. Well, lots of weird shit happened in the late 70s/early 80s, and if you were cognizant then you know what I’m talking about, but the weird thing I mean to mention specifically is the Reagan Revolution. The modern conservative movement began to gain substantive power with Reagan’s election in 1980. The 80s were a fucking mess for liberals and progressives, yo. And somewhere in there (everyone argues about precisely where) the backlash propaganda more or less succeeded in turning feminism back into a dirty word again — and not a dirty word in the good way.

Here’s what feminism is: The belief that people, generally, have equivalent worth regardless of sex; the belief that society should be structured (laws, customs, norms, rights, etc.) to reflect and protect this equality; and the commitment to work that will bring about this equality.

That’s it, that’s all.

Now of course, there are all different kinds of feminists. Some examples include eco-feminism, which as you might guess has a focus on environmental issues; Marxist feminism, which comes at feminist issues from a class analysis perspective and does a lot of economic theory; constructionist feminists, who are mostly into theory like postmodernist feminists, and who believe that most (not all) differences between men and women are socially constructed/learned behavior; and essentialist feminists, who take the opposite tack from constructionists and argue that there must be fundamental, innate biological differences that account for the differences in male and female behavior.

And there are more, but today I just want to stick with what most feminists believe, no matter which sub-group they might align with because it best represents their high-priority issues.

What feminism is fighting against, basically, is the hierarchy of value in culture that privileges men and male concerns over women and female concerns. This hierarchy is a core feminist concept. You can think of it like a ladder of issues, with those on the bottom valued the least and increasing value attached to ever-higher rungs. Feminists argue that we live in a patriarchy, and that our male-dominated social structure is responsible for creating and maintaining this hierarchy of value in which, for example, a career outside the home has much more value attached to it than motherhood and housekeeping, which are both so de-valued by the patriarchy that they are generally the lowest paid work or wholly unpaid work. Feminists oppose this structure vehemently. Feminists have written countless books tracing out how “women’s work” has been systemically de-valued by male-dominated social structures, and why & how feminism seeks to change that. Anyone who tells you that feminists don’t place a high value on motherhood is either ignorant and/or dishonest.

The commitment to feminism is a commitment to social equality — which, I should point out, does not mean sameness. Feminists do not think everyone is or should be “the same”; that’s just as much a right-wing talking point as the man-hating thing. Both are utter bullshit. Feminists think folks should be treated equally, which is a very different thing to say. Consider: 2 + 2 = 4 and 3 + 1 = 4. These equations are different, but equal. That’s the concept. Everything is not the same, but that doesn’t mean it automatically has to turn into a hierarchy, with one thing always worth more than another thing. A lot of feminist values are organized along a more horizontal line, with the choice to have a career not being generally valued any more or less than the choice to not have a career. The feminist value is not about which choice gets made, it’s about the idea that having the choice is good; having a choice that you can make free of as many outside influences as possible is better than not having a choice, or having a heavily coerced choice. If you are manipulated by unfair outside forces into choosing between a rock and a hard place, then you don’t have much of a choice.

The extent to which choices are coerced is another key concept for modern feminist work. Just because something is legal or illegal doesn’t mean that there isn’t intense social pressure that is sexist in nature and is aimed at keeping women down. As an example, consider that we had no women doctors for quite some time in early America because women were categorically refused admission to medical school. It wasn’t illegal (I don’t think it was, anyway), it was “just the way it was”. But feminists fought that, and even though the first woman to be admitted was only let in as a joke, she was nonetheless enormously successful and women started to become doctors despite significant widespread pressure to make different choices. Over a hundred years after the first woman graduated from med school, there was still a pervasive and mistaken belief in society that women weren’t capable of being doctors. I still remember an episode of All In The Family where the Meathead, a liberal feminist man, was pretty freaked out about the idea of a woman performing surgery on him, which had a profound effect on me as a small child. Women have been mercilessly harassed at med school, in attempts to gain licensure, and on the job, and all of this stuff had a measurable effect on the career choices women and girls were making. Choices are not made in a vacuum, and feminists understand that, so feminists fight against not only oppressive laws, but also oppressive “traditions” and social norms in the hopes that someday sex will not be relevant to career choices.

Many people seem to have the misperception that feminism shouldn’t exist anymore because now things are equal. This unfortunately does not only come out of the mouths of young women who don’t know what their immediate world would have looked like before the last generation of feminists changed things so drastically. There’s a whole anti-feminist movement that spreads horseshit about how equality has already been achieved at the same time as it bashes feminists for fighting for equality. It’s typical rightwing hypocritical nonsense, but they are very good at cultural messaging, so this is a problem for the modern feminist movement because people are buying it. As we can all see, women’s rights are under heavy fire these days, and we need more help than we’re getting from people of all sexes.

But feminism is not just about legal rights because, as I mentioned, sexism runs much deeper than the law. Discrimination on the basis of sex is now illegal, yes, but just as no serious non-racist person would argue that there’s not still a massive problem with racism in America, no serious non-sexist person would argue that there’s not still a massive problem with sexism. An excellent case can be made (and has been made by many feminists, among them bell hooks) that the two problems are inextricably intertwined. And that they are as well intertwined with the problems of classism and homophobia.

Think again about the ladder of value. It applies not only to issues, but also to bodies. Some bodies are highly valued within the culture while others are trapped at the bottom of the ladder by virtue of their skin color, social class, sexual orientation, genitalia, or any combination thereof. (To this concept, you can also add in other body-markers, like disability status, or identity-markers, like religious belief, all of which also matter w/r/t value to varying degrees in different social contexts.) Rich straight white Christian(esque) men are on the top rung, and the rest of us…are not. Those at the top understand very well how precarious their position is, so they need for the rest of us to remain in conflict with one another, because otherwise we could upset their control overnight, given how many of the “rest of us” there are. Those with power thus manufacture and encourage conflict about identities among those with lesser power, which serves to reinforce the status quo on several different levels: for example, at the practical level it is a major time suck and people who are bickering amongst themselves (and also working 2 jobs and supporting 4 kids along with their aging sick parents etc.) have no time to plan peaceful revolutions; and at a more meta-level, this bickering amongst ourselves only serves to reinforce the concept of “difference=conflict”, which prevents cooperation before it even starts.

As a feminist, I have a deep respect for all manners of identity differences. I understand that people have a compelling need to define themselves in myriad ways, and I personally find a great deal of beauty, joy, and strength in this diversity. But I’m also working to build bridges between identity groups; I’m working to expose our common interests and create liberal political coalitions in which, together, we are far more powerful than the institutions that try to keep us powerless by setting us against one another.

Much of the work that modern (and postmodern) feminism is doing is largely about broadening women’s choices, whether that’s about laws or about social conventions — without oppressing another group, of course, so again, there’s no man-hating. Feminism is not done at the expense of men’s rights. It’s done at the expense of male privilege, which is that thing that men only have at the expense of women’s equality. So feminism is not unfair, no matter how many anti-feminists whine and cry about how unfair equality is.

Feminism at its core is an extremely simple idea: equivalence of worth regardless of sex. Such is theory. But it is true that in practice it rapidly becomes ridiculously complicated. Such is politics. The devil is always in the details. And there are endless feminist arguments about the details, just as you can tune in here to the Booman Tribune every day and see the endless liberal arguments about the details.

That’s probably enough for us to start having a conversation, yes? Does this idea of feminism jibe with what you thought, or not? Is there anything new here? Anything that stands out as particularly good or ill-conceived? Tell me what y’all think.

Or, you know, just throw a pie and drop a shot of absinthe. Whatever. ;p

For those who don’t know, I’m disabled with autoimmune disease, so I’m on SSDI & Medicare. I just trucked out to the mailbox and got my Medicare & You: 2006 handbook, which told me on the front cover, “This year it’s different.”

No kidding.

What’s different is the drug coverage benefit — and I use those last two words in ways that would make Noah Webster roll in his grave.

Right now I have no drug coverage and I’m paying about $40/month average in meds (more when circumstances warrant), but as my illness progresses, I will definitely be paying more every month. Possibly much more. I get $814/month from SSDI and budgeting is already a work of faith held together by a string and a dirty joke.

The cost of enrolling in Medicare’s Rx plan is approximately $40/month. It has a $250 deductible, and after that, coverage is as follows:

–I pay 25% of my yearly drug costs from $250 to $2,250, then

–I pay 100% of the next $2,850, then

–After I’ve come out of pocket $3,600 (which is pretty much impossible so long as I still have pesky little daily needs like food and shelter), I pay 5%

Sounds like I should just blow this off, right? Enroll later when it will make fiscal sense? BUT NO. Because as the handbook also tells me, “You can first join a drug plan from November 15, 2005 to May 15, 2006. In most cases, if you don’t join during this period, your next chance to join will be November 15, 2006 to December 31, 2006, and you will have to pay a penalty.” (emphasis mine)

Grr. Now instead of trading wisecracks with the hilariously perverted ladies & gents from the FBC, I have to spend the rest of the afternoon digging up more information so I know whether or not I can find a way through this maze that doesn’t involve my begging for tips while I stroll naked through the town square.

Please people, let’s find a way to wrest control back from the Republicans ASAP so they are no longer allowed to “help” people. I’m afraid those of us on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder can’t take much more of their “help”.

I’m in the market for a new desktop so I figured I’d post a thread here about it because it’d be sweet to get recommendations from the community before I drop a bundle.

I’ve been using a Dell Dimension 8100 for the past several years. I haven’t been impressed and I’d rather not buy another Dell. About 5 months after I got this thing new direct from the factory, the power supply went kaput and I had to wait 10 days before they could get a tech out with the right part to fix it. I’ve become increasingly perturbed with the inability of the factory staff to have installed all the software in a non-conflicting manner, plus I am one of only like 6 people on the planet running Windows ME. It was very hard to find more RAM for this machine, and I ultimately took the chips out from my roommate’s old Dell — which, because I’m running ME and ME cannot handle 1GB of RAM, I had to use to replace instead of augment my factory-installed RAM. Grr.

And then just recently, one of my fans started making a heinous noise. When I went to replace it I discovered that even this cheapy plastic $9 part is proprietary and I’d have to overpay & wait for it through Dell. That was annoying but what pissed me off was when I busted open my roommate’s old Dell to raid it for parts again, the damn fan from her system (built within 6 months of mine) wasn’t even compatible because it had a different plastic housing and a different attachment fixture. So that fan is sitting in my machine very precariously as I post this. GRR.

Hence my decision that Dell can go screw itself.

I flirted briefly with the idea of building my own system but sadly I am just not geeky enough for the task. I know what a motherboard is and I know where it goes, but if you handed me 5 random ones I couldn’t begin to tell you which one I’d want. So I’ve been shopping around for new customizable systems and I realized that the past few years I’ve been so preoccupied with the health issues in my life that I’ve fallen way behind on the tech market. I have no idea who’s putting together a good desktop now. I don’t know enough about the performance and reliability of processor chips that compete with Intel, nor am I up to date on cards and other options.

Mostly I use the computer to: write novels, email & surf the ‘net, listen to music & burn CDs, play games (not much of yer fancy-shmancy kiddie 3d stuff; I am Old School, baby), keep track of my financial crap, and play with digital photography and video. Occasionally I do other things, like my tax return or whatever, but it’s all pretty standard stuff.

I can’t be talked into a Mac, so you Fruit Cult People can ease up before you even get started. Nothing personal. I like Apple, I really do — I learned how to <s>hack into the phone company</s&gt use my first desktop in the early 80s on a Mac and I’ll always remember that fondly — but too many of the <s>games I play</s&gt applications I prefer aren’t available off the PC.

Alienware is sexy as hell but still too pricey. Sony also costs more than I’m willing to pay.

Gateway appears to making some reasonably priced machines but I don’t know anything about them as a company. I’m not crazy about HP‘s customer service but I do have a couple of their printers and a digital camera that I like a lot, and HP is also making fairly reasonably priced machines. As of right now, I’m strongly considering the Pavilion d4100y.

So here are my questions, seeking your answers:

• HP — quality or crapola?
• Gateway — are you a fan or a critic?
• (If you want to shill for some other company I don’t know about, please include a link.)
• Should I be willing to pay extra for Windows XP Media Center or is XP Home basically the same excrement for slightly less money?
• Do I need to pay for an Intel chip or is AMD an acceptable less expensive choice? What about this dual core stuff? Sounds cool but is it the Next Big Thing in processors or is it just something that sounds cool and costs more money? Any particular chip recommendations?
• Is it still a bad idea to get any kind of integrated sound or video? Last I knew that was a thing to avoid, and it was better to get individual sound card and video card.
• Is Soundblaster’s Audigy 2 ZS a good sound card?
• How about Raedon & NVIDIA video cards — is one categorically better than the other or is it all about the performance of the individual model/specs of the card? What is the function of a DVI and TV-Out, and do I need a graphics card that has these things if I also want a TV/FM tuner so I can make my PC do that groovy TIVO trick?
• Do I really have no more need for a 3.5 floppy drive? (As small as it seems, this is probably the thing that makes me feel most like I am not in Kansas anymore, Toto. How the hell do you boot the thing when it gets sick? Will they boot off CD/DVD now? Jeebus, I remember when there was no hard drive and you had to store data on a cassette — in the dark and snow, uphill both ways. You kids and your crazy new-fangled technologification. I totally want one of those 9-in-1 media card readers, though, those are nifty.)

Okay, so any and all advice is greatly appreciated — even if you just want to chime in and say how much you love or hate your particular desktop, that could be useful. Thanks in advance.

This is week two of an ongoing series of gender theory diaries. Last week we had the lovely MAJeff hosting the kickoff of the series. This week I’m posting about rethinking gender and power, and how that might translate into political change.

I’ll include the same upfront note as MAJeff, which is that parts of these discussions may get heavy into theoretical language (although I am going to make a concentrated effort to keep my diary as accessible as possible) since there are a lot of academics and other brands of theory dorks around these parts. If you don’t understand something, please don’t hesitate to ask for explanations. The mark of a true theory dork is the ability to convert what sounds like dense, over-intellectualized bullshit into conversational language that actually makes sense to people who don’t study this stuff. No matter what your level of familiarity with the subject matter, if you have an interest, please post your thoughts, questions, musings.

Click on in, the water’s soupy.

In the spring of 1986, a few months before I turned 16, I had an identity crisis from which I’ve never entirely ‘recovered’. I consider this a good thing.

I was a sophomore in high school at the time, and I was skipping school with a new friend, a displaced punk who’d just moved to town from Austin because she kept getting into trouble there. We’d smoked a joint, but we weren’t terribly stoned. We were sitting on the floor of the Florida room of my mom’s house, talking about everything and nothing, when the thing hit me.

Out of everywhere and nowhere, I was abruptly overcome with a profound disconnect inside of myself, sort-of like an episode of depersonalization. It was like, all of the sudden I really didn’t know who I was. Girl, sophomore, popular, honor student, soccer player, Czech-Spanish-Irish, thespian, perhaps lesbian; I had a phone number from capitalism and a social security number from the state and a surname from my father; I knew my address and my birth date and that I had lost my first tooth when I was 5, was allergic to holly berries, liked to play the bass, had gotten my first period when I was 12, didn’t like avocados or mustard, was still a virgin.

But ‘I’ was not in any of those things. Where was I? Who was I, really? I did not know, and it was frightening as hell.

It was then that I began to write. One of the other primary effects of the thing was to loosen the ties between my sense of my own identity and all kinds of labels and categories. This would prove extremely complicated for the ensuing decade. I wouldn’t get to college until my mid-20s and until then I had very little language to talk about this experience and the effects it had on me, and not many people seemed to know what I was trying to say when I’d take a shot at it. I often fell in love with the ones who did seem to know what I was trying to say.

All of it–the inability to express myself in any way that felt ‘real’ enough to me, the trapped feeling I got whenever I thought about myself inhabiting a collection of predefined labels and categories, the way the world treated me for being a woman, for being queer, for being unapologetically weird, for being smart but not traditionally ambitious–made me feel very powerless. Defiant and angry and confused and desperate and passionate and powerless.

Liberals and progressives have these kinds of problems. We have difficulty with identity. We have gender trouble. We have chaotic and ineffective power. Individually and collectively. We keep talking past each other about it, and this failure to communicate in a way that feels ‘real’ is compounding the problems. It is fragmenting the political power that we could otherwise coalesce, and that is bad. Lately, our politics have been little more than reactionary. I’m not being harshly critical. It’s hard not to kick when you are so acutely aware of the noose tightening.

We need to rethink gender and power.

Michel Foucault was a French theorist who didn’t do a whole lot with gender, but who did a lot with power that we can use when we re-think gender and strategies to politics.

When states were still sovereignties, says Foucault, there was a different sort of power relation between sovereignty and subject than there is between state and citizen. The old sort of power was centered around threats and death, whereas the new sort of power, which Foucault calls bio-power, focuses on the organization and discipline of life processes, on the regulation of the body. This power needs what Foucault calls ‘docile’ bodies, and it manufactures them through discipline and regulation. (As an example, think: military. Bodies are heavily regulated, wills are broken down, and then both are rebuilt to reflexively respond to commands from ‘higher up’ with strength, skill, and force.)

‘Docile’ bodies are easy to manipulate, to change, and to inscribe with normalizations of whichever categories are useful in any given scheme of power relations–for example, scientific categories like medical/psychiatric definitions of ‘normal sexuality’. In a detailed analysis in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison Foucault describes how the disciplinary power employed by the state produces not only ‘docile’ bodies, but also utilizes constant surveillance to produce a state of mind “that assures the automatic functioning of power.” (p. 201) We are not constantly observed directly by regulating authorities of the state, but we constantly watch ourselves and each other for signs of deviance; we police ourselves and each other into ‘normality’.

While criticized by some feminists because they see his overall theory as precluding the identity-based politics they view as most effective for feminist concerns, Foucault is a departure point for a good deal of postmodern feminist/queer theory, perhaps most notably Judith Butler.

In her second and probably most popular book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler (an anti-essentialist, like Foucault) crafts an elaborate argument that there is no ‘natural’ sexual or gender identity; in a similar vein as Anne Fausto-Sterling, whom MAJeff wrote about last week, Butler uses biological evidence to demonstrate that the binarily opposed sex categories we use–male/female as opposites–are empirically unstable. This is a sloppy way to say it but to keep it conversational: she has the idea that heteronormativity did not arise from some ‘natural order’ of neatly categorical male and female bodies, but rather, that repetitive gender performances within regulated cultural frames gave rise to a belief in that ‘natural order’. The performances construct us as we construct them. (As an example, think: language. Language is something we create at the same time as it creates us, at least in the sense that language is alive and ever-changing, and we learn about our world and our selves in a way that’s mediated through language.)

For Butler, personal identities–particularly gender and sexual identities–are kinds of fictions. Useful fictions, political fictions, but fictions nonetheless. We aren’t these static-natural-essentialized-categorized things, rather, we are always performing pieces of our selves; our selves are always spilling out over the edges of the walls of categories, slipping around in between the cracks and the lines; we are fluid.

So, what’s the point, right? Get to the action, already. What about politics? What about ethics? What about ethical politics? I’d argue, using portions of Foucault and Butler, that we can’t have true liberal/progressive politics as long as we continue to behave as though the power that is used to ‘control’ us does not flow through our own bodies; we cannot have true liberal/progressive politics unless we resist the structure that seeks to simultaneously erase our differences and construct new differences and then use both those erasures and constructions to manipulate and divide us. We need to learn how to communicate across difference and then build effective coalitions. We need to address the gender trouble. We need more powerful alliances. Butler and Foucault don’t give us any easy answers but they do give us tools, strategies and ideas.

Foucault offers us an interpretation of things where power is omnipresent, and not necessarily always an oppressive force (although he sees desire for power as a bad thing); where power has the body as its target–indeed, where power courses through bodies–and where power is never without resistance. The better we understand the precise nature of the power relations between society and our selves, between the state and our bodies, and how those relations function, the more strategies we can produce to resist, to influence power in various directions, and to transform ourselves. We can also learn from Foucault why it’s so important to listen to the voices of the marginalized when it comes to strategizing political change: because if we don’t, then no matter how good our intentions, we will necessarily produce new configurations of the same old domination.

Although Butler is a constructivist, nothing that she does necessarily erases sexual difference. Contrary to erasure, her work opens up a place to talk about sexual difference in a way that does not restrict bodies to one of only two sets of innate behavioral characteristics assigned by physical resemblance to some kind of genital archetype. (That would be an awesome name for a band: Genital Archetype.) Arguing that we should move beyond identity politics (which, according to Butler, constrict, fragment, and neglect to consider differences in power and resources), Butler describes a strategy of ‘subversive repetition’. It’s a complex strategy and this is probably an over-simplistic reduction of it, but it’ll have to do: even though she posits gender as a social construct that perpetuates through repetition, she doesn’t think we can just make up ‘new gender’ willy-nilly; she thinks we’re limited to the array of performance pieces within our social frame that mark us as intelligible social subjects, but she also thinks we can put those pieces together in novel ways that resist heteronormativity and disrupt gender norms, and thereby destabilize and transform identity–a condition in which Butler locates power and the possibility of political change.

I read a lot of pleas in the liberal/progressive blogosphere to reorganize and rebuild from the grassroots. Here’s the thing: there’s a ‘disease’ in the roots, and that’s how we got the problems we have in the first place. And I think, I think, that the only revolution worth having anymore starts with a politics of personal transformation.