Racism and sexism are more than impolite

This morning on Meet the Press, Gwen Ifill, David Brooks, John Harwood and Eugene Robinson discussed the Don Imus issue. What I found interesting was that, to a man, each white person at the roundtable defended Imus as a decent man who said something terrible and put forth the belief that the real problem here is a "culture of meanness," not flagrant racism and sexism.

I can't think of any way to be clearer about this - by calling a group of women "nappy headed hos," you are discussing primarily two things - their appearance and their sexual availability. When that group of women is comprised of college basketball players playing one of the most important games of their lives, commenting on them as Imus did is dismissing their accomplishments, skills and abilities and instead constructs them only in terms of their fuckability. That's a disgusting way to treat a group of talented, intelligent (mostly) black women, and that's not because it's not nice. It's because it's the playing out of institutionalized racism and sexism on the backs of young women who are just trying to win a basketball game.

Against Civility

Since the online attacks against Kathy Sierra, I'm happy to report that the blogosphere has continued the conversation about how to make change in reaction to this event. The most recent and most discussed idea has been Tim O'Reilly's Blogger's Code of Conduct.

O'Reilly has put together a list of six rules for bloggers to abide by to avoid the same situation happening again. Most of them center around the idea that bloggers and commenters are responsible for the words they post. While I certainly have no problem with people taking responsibility for what they say, I think O'Reilly is missing the point. The problem here isn't anonymity, it's misogyny. It's not that people feel comfortable attacking women when cloaked in internet-anonymity, it's that they want to attack women in the first place. Enforcing civility in the blogosphere (and yes, I realize that O'Reilly's system is an opt-in type of situation and that any blogger has the absolute right to decide whether or not they want to aide by his code) only drives misogyny, racism, homophobia and all other kinds of categorical hate underground. It ghettoizes that kind of hate and allows it to flourish and become stronger in places where it will never be challenged.

So fuck civility. I'd rather see the enemy, I'd rather be able to fight hate in the open than pretend like as long as I can't see it, it's not there. Until the individuals who use hateful rhetoric to feel like they're maintaining their own ill-gotten power are challenged in open, public dialogue, we'll never have the opportunity to change their minds. I'm not yet willing to believe that that's not a possibility.

On Women and Threats

Threats against women have been on my mind a lot lately. Most recently, Kathy Sierra's silencing at the hands of misogynistic bloggers has been on my radar screen. I can't help but connect that to the same sort of aggression that Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan were subject to, just a few months back. In the past few weeks, I've also been subject to threats of violence from a man I used to be friends with. Over the course of two weeks, he contacted both me and a male mutual friend, trying to revive the friendship. Both of us rejected the offer of friendship, and while neither of received particularly pleasant responses, only I was told to leave the city I live in because there are “dangerous people around that know [me].”

I'm not actually overly concerned for my safety, mostly because this is not someone who knows how to track me down, nor do I think the threat was about anything other than a sad attempt to try maintain the power I had taken away by saying no to him. My threats came from someone I once knew very well, which allowed me to judge their danger based on years of information about what this person is capable of and what lengths he's willing to go to. I'm lucky. Kathy, Amanda and Melissa didn't have the benefit of being able to make that kind of informed decision.

What this all comes down to is power – in each case, a woman's safety was threatened because she was perceived as being a threat to established male power. This much is obvious. What's less obvious is what we can do about this. As women continue to make inroads to traditionally masculinized power centers, and more importantly, as women continue to agitate for the elimination of power-based-on-gender, more men will find this threatening their status. This is what's frustrating and this is what seems unworkable – the harder we fight and the more we win, the more dangerous the backlash becomes.

As was posted on Shakesville yesterday, one of the keys to breaking open this quagmire is to ensure that women aren't the only people fighting against these occurrences. We need men to speak up as well; we need them to point out to each other why the world is a better place when women are safe, and we need them to police themselves when we're not around. It's essential that we spread the assumption that it is never, never, never okay to violently threaten women to as many allies as possible, to our friends, our families and our coworkers. Why? Why target the regular people around us instead of focusing on elected representatives, the media and the people with the most power? Well, as usual, when power comes into it, I turn to Michel Foucault:

Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix – no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body. One must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole. These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them together; to be sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments, homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences of the force relations. Major dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations.

Phew. What this means is that power relations aren't dictated by the powerful – rather, the powerful stay powerful by monitoring the way the wind is blowing. When it is clear that the mainstream will no longer accept violence against women, neither will the people in power. Power is a dialogue between the rulers and the ruled – this is how we got universal suffrage, how we won Roe v. Wade and how we got Arizona to refuse to ban same-sex marriage. By continuing this conversation, by inviting as many people into the conversation as possible, and by continuing and spreading vigilance about every single woman who is violently threatened, we can actually make change. And in that way, we can remind women that it is utterly unacceptable for us to ever have to decide between silence and safety, that our voices are our rights.

Because that's what it comes down to - this is the reason women don't say no. We're taught that saying no gets us in trouble, gets us threatened. While I would never claim that what any of us who have been threatened have been through anything akin to being raped, it's the same impulse in the men who have threatened us and the men who rape. While only rapists can stop rape and only threateners can stop threatening, all of us can stand up and say silencing women and threatening violence to women to maintain ill-gotten power isn't right. We can support the women who've suffered in whatever ways they ask to be supported. Most importantly, we can keep talking about this. Every incident of hateful speech against women should be brought into the light of day. The more publicity these kinds of attack garner, the more people who will realize that the fight for feminism simply isn't over yet and we need every last person on our side we can get, because eventually, even the people you'd never expect do start to change their minds.

Thoughts on Independence Day

I'm a little late, I know, but I thought it might be a good time to repost these thoughts.

Today is a good day to think about change.

Today, 229 years ago, fifty-six men signed a document which forever changed the course of human events. They declared certain unalienable rights which belong to everyone, always, and more importantly, they declared that whenever government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. Politely, on paper, they declared revolution.

It's easy to forget that this *is* a country of revolutionaries and that, as Americans, we have both the right and the responsibility to uphold the high standards set for us by fifty-six men with parchment and quills. In our ultra-connected global village, revolution is not the same as it was then, it's not the same as it was fifty years ago. Protests don't work and neither will storming the capitol, arms in hand. But as we reimagine the ideas of revolution in the political sphere, we can conduct our own tiny revolutions in the personal sphere.

I accepted delivery of a new mattress in my new apartment today, and built a new bed frame, and when I was done, I was dying for an itty-bitty Amanda flag to stake through my bed, declaring it mine, declaring my space mine and claiming ownership of the hundred square feet around me. It's not much, moving out of an unhealthy living situation, but for me, it's changed everything. I've made small steps - I smile more, at everything and everyone. I let myself wander around New York like a tourist because I just can't ignore the beauty of the skyline. I make friends, I take risks and I find myself tearing up with pure wonderment on a daily basis. I love, again, everything, and now that I've declared myself independent, I never again want to suffer a situation just because it's sufferable.

The political *is* personal. Revolt, in whatever way you can.

Wordplay - 2006 (Patrick Creadon)

Wordplay is mostly exactly what you would expect from a documentary about crossword puzzles and the people who love them. The film begins by introducing us to a number of solvers, including Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword (and the film's main character, as much as it can be said to have one), the highest ranked amateur crossword puzzle solvers (based on their history at the Annual Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut), and a number of celebrity solvers, like Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton and the Indigo Girls. As we get to know these solvers, the film moves toward its climax, the final round (a three-man showdown) of the 28th crossword tournament.

The film mostly works; the tournament is exciting. Even as all the solvers continue to insist that the tournament is just for fun, it's clear that there's something bigger at stake for all of them. However, this is where the film falls short. As we're introduced to each of the tournament solvers, the film obviously regards their earnestness with the slightest level of contempt. Rather than examine why these solvers are so rabid and what it is that drives them to compete at these levels, we're treated to their most awkward moments; it's funny and mostly good-natured, but not without derision. A documentary about crossword puzzle solvers is probably going to draw an audience of crossword puzzle solvers and had Patrick Creadon, the filmmaker, shown a little more respect to both of those groups of people, the film may have been able to transcend from a cutesy niche documentary to something bigger than the subject matter.

Thoughts on anti-porn feminism

This isn't related to anything specific I've read, but rather to a lot of rumblings I've run across lately about the "right" way to be a feminist (hate porn, don't wear skirts, etc.). I really thought we were past the point where we started infighting based on skirts vs. pants, but apparently not. Regardless, here are a few thoughts on anti-porn feminism - it's more defining terms and working out the framework of the discussion rather than arguing a position.

Feminism often constructs pornography as something inherently harmful to the class "woman." The most extreme view holds that pornography, by design, Otherizes and destroys women. While no one can coherently argue that every piece of porn ever produced is entirely respectful of women, it's patently absurd to claim that something essential in pornography is dangerous. There are two parts of pornography that could cause this danger; it's either the sex act itself or the act of recording the sex act.

Very few theorists would argue that any sex act (as every sex act possible has been pornographized at some point) is necessarily dangerous, degrading and disrespectful to women. While the sort of lesbian sex usually portrayed in porn is not something I think most lesbians would find familiar, it's still undefiable that lesbian porn is probably one of the most popular forms of porn. To claim that the lesbian sex act is, in essence, demeaning to women, is clearly ridiculous.

So, then, it must be the recording of it. Somehow, by preserving images of sex on film, they are transformed from mere sex acts, able to be imbued with whatever meaning the engaging partners decide on, into something separate and different. yet, no other act has ever been thusly tranformed, so this must mean that sex is somehow different from every other action. It comes prepackaged with meanings, one of which is that the recording of sex is bad for women.