Street (or parking spot) harassment

Yesterday I was loading my car up with boxes (I'm in the process of moving from my apartment to my mom's basment- more on that later), sweating my ass off in the heat.  I have a Honda Element, which allows you to fold the seats up to the sides so that there's a lot of stowing space.  I had to climb in to stack some boxes near the front, since I was loading from the back hatch.  And of course, some idiot drives by in a little red wannabe sports car (I know who you are, jackass) and catcalls me as I'm bent over boxes, struggling to stack some more.  I ignored him with much restraint on my part, since I'm not used to keeping quiet about harassment.  A few trips up and down the stairs (I lived on the second floor) later, and there's a man in his mid-forties walking by my car.  He looks like a crack addict.  He decides it's ok to comment on my ass while I'm putting another box in.  This time I get out, look him straight in the eyes and say "Your comments aren't helpful, and you're sexually harassing me.  Leave me alone."  He takes this opportunity to flip me off and call me a bitch, strutting his skinny flat ass away like he's won something besides his ignorance.  I'm twenty five years old and I look like I'm seventeen (seriously, I get carded for rated R movies).  This man was old enough to be my dad.

I don't know what it is about some men that makes them think they can sexually harass women who are minding their own business- and yes, catcalling and talking about a stranger's ass is sexual harassment (check out this awesome blog and project about fighting street harassment called 'Hollaback':http://www.ihollaback.org/).  It's all about objectification of women, and that false sense of male entitlement to women's bodies.  Women are sexualized to the point where we've become nothing but sexual property in many regards, a means to status and a symbol of a man's power.  Think of trophy wives and how many powerful men both date supermodels and cheat on their wives.  Men are also taught that they have a right to sex and a woman's body, though not every man gives in to that lie.  Look at rape statistics, and all the bullshit rape-apologists and 'excuses' about why he did it.  Rape is never about sex but power- and look at the overwhelming statistics of male rapists and female survivors.

So, the twenty-something neighbor of mine that will go to his car one morning to find an angry note on it was asserting his entitlement to my body with his catcalls.  The guy old enough to be my dad was doing the same thing, and arguably more shamefully.  Both should have known better, but the old guy might have a daughter.  I wonder how he'd feel if the same happened to her?  Actually, I wonder how either would feel if some jackass like them did the same to their sisters, daughters, wives, girlfriends.

Getting a bit off topic, I also wonder if either of these men thought about what I might be feeling (obviously not).  How was I to know they weren't going to attack me, or try to rape me?  Will they ever know how it feels to be broken down to a set of tits, an ass and a vagina (never a vulva)?  How would they feel knowing they're being paralleled to rapists in my mind, perpetuating a culture of sexual violence for women?  I'm thinking neither of them would really give a shit.

On Dr. Tiller and Abortion

I watched an MSNBC movie about the assassination of Dr. George Tiller today.  I’m familiar with the story, I wore the pin and spread the news about Tiller’s amazing work with women’s reproductive health and his outspoken support of women’s decisions.  Watching this film only reminded me of my passion for women to have a choice, and of the insanity a handful of people can create when they rely on religion to think for them. 

I understand the stance of abortion as murder.  I understand why people are against abortion, and I can relate to an uneasiness around the issue.  I cannot tolerate hate or murder for the sake of fanaticism, and I certainly will not tolerate domestic terrorism against women.

I never see pro-choice rallies and gatherings bombing churches and health clinics, I never see pro-choice people going so far as to assassinate the leaders of anti-abortion groups.  That brand of evil is firmly in the hands of anti-abortion crazies.

I want to be clear.  Abortion is a controversial issue, and I am all for lower abortion rates.  But there is no way in hell that making abortion illegal is going to do that.  Instead of a dead fetus, there will also be a dead woman.  And I value myself and women everywhere way too much to think that’s ok.  Let me repeat that- illegalizing abortion and using blatant lies and scare tactics, harassment and threats is not going to get rid of abortion.  I’ve seen the pictures of dead women with their vaginas torn up, insides spilled out on the ground, curled over puddles of blood.  I’ve heard the stories of women being rendered infertile or crippled because the person claiming to be a doctor in their back alley abortion had never touched a medical manual in their lives.  I remember the stories of wire coat hangers.  And that is an unacceptable era of history to return to.

Ask anyone standing outside a women’s health clinic with a picture of a dead fetus way older than they tell you, and that nut will insist that abortion is bad.  They will also insist that birth control is abortion, and poor women are sluts who keep pumping out kids to get welfare money.  They’ll tell you that welfare is bad, too, and that giving low income families free childcare will reduce us to a nanny-state.

The only way abortion is going to decrease is through comprehensive sex education including teaching about abstinence (and not from a religious point of view), free birth control for women, welfare to help low income women and men get on their feet and keep their children from starving, and free childcare for low income families so they can get jobs and make desperately-needed money.  There is no getting around this.  Look at the statistics, look at the studies.

The women who are being hurt the worst by our current, shameful Republican-led War on Women are poor minority women.  These are the same women branded as welfare sluts.  These are the women who rely on Planned Parenthood as their only form of healthcare.  These are the women who are affected most by abortion legislation, which is quickly turning abortion into a wealthy white woman’s privilege instead of a poor black woman’s right.  These women are the ones who can’t march in the streets because they can’t afford to miss a day of work.  They are the same ones who labor sixty hour weeks at fast food restaurants to support the children they were forced to have because they didn’t have access to or education about birth control and abortion.  These are the women who can barely afford to pay the weekly grocery bill, much less spend hundreds every week on childcare.  These are America’s forgotten women, who are no longer afforded a voice due to their audacity to want a life beyond hand to mouth survival.  These are women who have been pounded into the ground not just by sexism, but racism too.  

Dr. Tiller’s death was one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism I’ve ever lived through, and I saw the second tower fall during 9/11.  Dr. Tiller was a voice for women everywhere, the poor Latinas and whites, and even the wealthy anti-abortion corporate queens who took quiet vacations to take care of the problem growing in their wombs. 

Abortion is and must always be a fundamental right.  No one has the right to tell a woman what she can or can’t do with her body, rich, colored, poor, or white.  Dr. Tiller knew this, and he was willing to stand up to the danger that should not be inherent with it.  I know it, and I have been spit on and had rocks thrown at me for it.  And I will take that nasty, hate-mongering behavior any day if it means one more woman can make her own reproductive choices.

I look at the legislation being introduced today and it’s so crazy L. Ron Hubbard is wishing he thought of it.  My constitutional right as a woman is being slowly eroded by the Heartbeat Bill, 24-hr waiting periods, 72-hour waiting periods, mandatory counseling sessions, crisis pregnancy center lies and scare tactics, mandatory ultrasounds, misinformation and miseducation.  They are telling lies about us and about our bodies, and they are telling them straight to our faces.  If we don’t stand up for ourselves there is no one else to do it for us, and we’ve seen what lack of representation of women in our governments and our politics leads to.  Women are being stuffed back into the patriarchal pigeonhole of house servants and sex slaves, and I am not going to take it lying down.  Dr. Tiller didn’t, black women didn’t, our grandmothers and mothers didn’t.  It’s the same fight, but this time it’s our turn to dig in our heels, break out our signs and say “Enough”.   

              

An Introductory Rant

I’m pissed off.  Maybe it’s the freezer-burned dinner I have to eat because I can’t afford groceries this week-again.  Maybe it’s the insane amount of work my online instructor thinks I can churn out in two days, or maybe it’s neither of those and the simple fact is I’m pissed off because I’m a woman living in the U.S.. 

I’m sick of living in a country where men don’t think women deserve to be treated with respect and dignity like they do.  I’m so shit-pissed enraged that this country’s (almost totally white-male-heterosexual-Christian) government thinks it’s ok to give women second-class status and laugh down any logical angry responses to this and replace it with their irrational misogynistic bullshit.  I’m pissed that the Supreme Court refused to give the millions of women suing Wal-Mart a class action lawsuit because they were too many of them.  I hate that the Supreme Court gave up the opportunity to give a desperately needed statement about women’s worth, and set us back a century or so.

I’m so exhausted with men’s attitudes towards women I want to vomit.  I’m done with entitled men acting like something their mothers shit out their assholes instead of split their vaginas wide open and labored to gift with life.  I’m spitting fire at those jerk-offs who think it’s ok to tell me what I can do with my body, what decisions I’m allowed to make, where I can work, who I can fuck, what I can say and still be a ‘good woman’.  I’m sick of seeing my friends being denied recognition of their marriages and who they want to fuck.

I hate that it’s a fact that I won’t make as much as a man and it’s not because of my work ethic or his.  I hate that I can’t be taken seriously because I have a hole instead of a pole, that I have to work twice as hard to get the same spoils.  I hate that I have to prove myself because I own- yes, I OWN- a vulva and that great stuff attached.

I hate that I dislike most men I meet, and that I’m quickly losing faith that men can be trusted companions and that this makes me a sexist but I can’t change that simple fact- most men I meet don’t give me respect but expectations. And I’m mostly sick at those expectations which say I have to look pretty and act sexy but be careful not to be a slut, that I have to take care of my man and don’t nag him when he makes me his housemaid, that I have to both want and love kids and that I have to make less than my husband, that I must marry or be seen as a lonely, bitchy spinster the rest of my life, that I can’t fight for equal rights for women and homos and be seen as anything but a radical, a naïve bleeding-heart liberal who wants to castrate men and kill God and make it mandatory that sanitary napkins rest beside toilet paper in public bathrooms (wouldn’t that be nice?).

I can’t stand that a woman can’t walk down the street or go out at night or open the door without being sexually harassed.  It makes me numb that when a woman is raped she’s too ashamed to report it, and that the U.S. does this on purpose.  It makes me scream that when a woman is raped and she asks for justice, she gets everything but- blame, shame, criticism, threats, insults, invasion, speculation- and that this great country victim-blames her out of the courtrooms.

It’s disgusting that there’s even a need for the term ‘rape-apologist’.

I hate that I can’t talk about my vagina or my clit or my menstruation without it being ‘gross’ and inappropriate, that Georgia O’Keefe is considered lewd but the Washington Monument is an important piece of historical and patriotic heritage. 

It pisses me off that FOX is still considered a source for reliable news.

But what really gets to me is that it’s still women shouldering the most burden for our rights, that it’s us who march in the streets and make political art and sign petitions and gather organizations together to stand up for us.  It’s sickening the amount of politicians who don’t represent the women of their constituencies, the people in the government who don’t represent anyone at all but their bigoted, sexist, elitist Catholic agendas.  It’s disgusting that when Clinton and Obama were running for presidential candidacy, there were anti-woman jokes in the mainstream media but not anti-black (that would be crossing the line).

I’m pissed that I got this pissed at all, but it’s a great reminder that my anger is my strength.  Because when all this stops making me angry is when I should be worried.