September 22, 2010

On the Ground: Getting to Know CO

Greetings from Denver – I’ve finally arrived!

Not without incident, of course. I wish sometimes I had counted how many hours over the past five years I’ve spent stranded in airports, wrangling with airlines, and cursing the lack of electrical outlets in terminals. I won’t bore you with the details but to say that Delta managed to make me miss my first flight, which put me next to a drooling hunter on the second flight…but it was all well worth it!

The fabulous Beth K. of NARAL Colorado picked me up from the airport and took me and my absurd amount of luggage back to the NARAL headquarters. It’s truly a campaign office, with ‘No on 62′ yard signs, buttons, stickers, and the like all over the place. Oooh, and zucchini cupcakes. And, of course, a crew of fabulous hardworking young feminists – I arrived as several were coming back from canvassing for votes, two were making volunteer recruiting calls for the next canvas (which is, no joke, on a party bus!), and one was cutting out small invites for the members-only champagne reception on September 30th.

I sat down with Beth to go over the schedule for the next two weeks – I won’t recount it here because it’s long but mostly because it’s overwhelming. There are rallies on campuses, rallies in parks, a potluck, meetings with students, a screening of my film, phone banks, canvassing, and media interviews. I’m also taking charge of NARAL Colorado’s Twitter and Facebook streams so, go follow!

The picture above is of Beth serving as a human teleprompter for me as I film a video promoting the NARAL Colorado Voting Guide. See, no one told me when I became a feminist organizer that I would be asked (with increasing frequency, for some reason!) to be in videos, on the spot, with no prep time. I’ll post it in a few days if it’s usable!

After that, dinner and dessert with the amazing staff, who I will introduce you to in the next couple of days. Tomorrow, look for video, more photos, and the start of a series of stories from the women working on the campaign and those who will be affected most if the “personhood” amendment is passed.

Finally, a note on the title of this series, ‘On the Ground.’ As you probably know, nothing makes me angrier than the myth that young women aren’t feminists. But a close second and third are the myths that the young feminists of my generation who do exist don’t care about reproductive rights and we don’t do any offline activism to complement our blogging. Both are untrue and both stem from a misunderstanding of what I see as evolving Forth Wave feminist ideology. We care very much about reproductive issues, so much so that we’ve expanded the framework from advocating for political ‘reproductive rights’ to advocating for and making ‘reproductive justice’ for all women and men. And, yes, we do a lot of that activism online, writing to raise consciousness, making out own counter-media, and connecting our networks to amplify previously silenced voices. Often, as I hope to do with this series, we do all of these things in conjunction with on the ground organizing, whether it be making calls, canvassing, organizing rallies schools or community centers, lobbying representatives…the list is endless.

As I said in a (very tired) toast last night: here’s to young feminists, not cogs in a wheel but the brains behind the operation, not the future of the movement but the now, on the front lines, changing the world, saving lives, on the ground.

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September 18, 2010

Off to Pro-Choice Battleground Colorado!

Why am I, a native Texan and current New Yorker, heading to Colorado for two weeks to organize against state ballot initiatives? Well, because I’m an itinerant feminist organizer and if I’m home for too long without a campaign to work on, I get really, really, REALLY difficult to be around.

It’s true – just ask my suffering friends! But the real reason I’m heading to Colorado on Tuesday is because Amendment 62 is really, really, REALLY bad and if it’s not defeated in Colorado then it could impact reproductive rights in my state and yours.

What is this evil thing, you ask? If passed, Amendment 62 would extend legal rights to fertilized eggs, which would ban ALL abortion in the state, with no exception for rape, incest, or risk to the mother’s life. It would also imperil the right to use emergency contraception and some forms of birth control. I visualize this amendment as the government sending in tiny little commandos to guard my uterus, a part of my body, from me. It simply goes too far.

How do I know Coloradans don’t want tiny little commandos in women’s uteri? Because I was there in 2008, organizing against it the first time anti-choice forces put this thing on the ballot and I personally talked to women and men of all parties, ages, and religions who felt the law was too vague, too dangerous, and simply unnecessary. I was there the night we celebrated defeating it 3 to 1. Bringing it back again after such a resounding rejection betrays its’ backers true agenda and it’s one that has nothing to do with Colorado or families and certainly nothing to do with reviving the state’s flagging economy. They want a national, Supreme Court fight on abortion and they don’t care how many Colorado women and families they hurt to get it.

I’ll also be working to defeat a couple of other bad amendment, including Amendment 63, which would block the state from enforcing the new health care law and Amendments 60, 61, and Proposition 101, which would force dramatic and devastating cuts to state services like public education, roads and bridges, public safety, and higher education. And I’ll be doing all of this with my wonderful friends at NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado, who’ve been kind enough to invite me out to help!

When I say working and organizing against, well, what does that mean? That’s the other reason I’m so excited about this trip! I get asked a lot what my funny title, itinerant feminist organizer, means aside from blogging and doing interviews about…doing whatever it is I do. So, on this trip I’m going to show you here on this blog, on my Facebook and Twitter, and on the NARAL Colorado’s Facebook and Twitter, exactly what running a pro-choice, feminist, on-the-ground campaign entails. I’ll be posting pictures, video, and podcasts of the glamorous things I’m set to do – like a fantastic NARAL Members-Only Champagne Reception on September 30th – and the not-so-glamorous-but-equally-important and really fun things like making fundraising calls, knocking on doors to get out the vote, and tabling on college campuses.

Are you in Colorado and want to help defend women’s rights in your state? Great! Sign up to volunteer, whether it be making phone calls or knocking on doors to get out the word. Better yet, sign up for a No on 62 Boot Camp and join other me and other activists on a bus as we canvass for the cause – you get a free t-shirt and free food! Not in Colorado but still want to help the campaign? Make a donation and post updates on the campaign on your Facebook and Twitter.

Check back here for updates – Protect Pro-Choice Colorado Tour, Part 2, is about to commence!

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September 1, 2010

Levi’s New Ad Campaign Falls On Its Butt

Alright, Levi’s, I gotta give you some credit for trying to make both a product and ad that appeals to women above a size 2.

Scratch that. Actually, no, I don’t. Why? Because first of all, whose ass is not equal? Mine, because it’s a size 12 instead of a size 4? Your very tagline undermines your whole campaign by implying the same “some butts, i.e., smaller butts, are more deserving of jeans than others” trope that you’re claiming to subvert. Fail number one. Let me help your ad agency out: All asses of all shapes and sizes are created equal.  Muuuuch better.

Fail number two: all the models in the ad are the exact same size and that size is small, smaller than the average American woman you’re supposedly trying to reach. If you put the words ‘Bold Curve’ next to a woman, I expect her to have, um, bold curves and preferably legs that don’t look like toothpicks.

Speaking of the average American woman, your target audience, do you only imagine her as white? Some women of color have just as hard a time finding jeans as some white women and I’d assume you would agree their asses are just as equal, right? RIGHT??? Take a step into the 21st century and cast your models to look a little more like America. Fail number three. You’re out!

It’s true that women who have curves sometimes have a harder time finding jeans than women who have “ideal figures,” whatever that disgusting term means. That’s because companies like Levi’s design for a mostly unhealthy, mostly unrealistic ideal for women and spend little time thinking about those who don’t fit that mold. We’re not grateful, Levi’s, that you’re finally making jeans for us non-models. This curvy girl, for one, is pissed at your demeaning, unrepresentative ads and pissed it took you this long to recognize me as worthy of your product.

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August 27, 2010

Unicorns and Young Feminism

This post is one of 37 submissions in the ‘This is What a Young Feminist Looks Like’ blog carnival. Head over to our host, Fair and Feminist, for a list of participating blogs.

Today, I’m declaring my solidarity with the unicorns. After all, I’m also part of a marginalized group that many insist doesn’t exist and upon which many more impose their hopes, dreams and fears. We don’t have horns but, at least in my personal opinion, we have magical powers that can and will change the world in ways no one can yet imagine.

I am a young feminist. Once and for all, I am a very, very real. And I am far from the only member of my pack.

Every couple of weeks another well-known older woman publicly bemoans the extinction of feminism in my generation.  And unfailingly, after each speech I give about my nine years in the feminist movement, someone stands up to ask why young women are unwilling to take up the banner for equality. Each time, it feels like a personal jab. I know or have met many of the older leaders who propagate this myth and I wonder, “Did you forget the conversations we’ve had about organizing in high schools and on college campuses? Are the young women who run your websites and table at your events and stuff packets for your conferences really invisible or do they just mean that little to you?” To those at my speeches I want to scream, “Did you tune out the last thirty minutes of me talking about college feminists in Colorado getting their peers to vote against anti-choice ballot initiatives and immigrant young women in California helping nail salon workers form unions and brave young women teaching comprehensive sex education in the South?”

But, I don’t say any of those things. I go back to my herstory and try to remind these older women, often veterans of the Second Wave battles, that one of the reasons some young women fail to see gender equality as a main issue in their life is because their work eradicated many of the overt oppressions against women that, before, were simply known as “life.” My generation has never experienced segregated employment ads or “men only” signs or been unable to get credit without a male co-signer. The feminists of the 1970’s dreamed and labored into a reality a country in which little girls are told they can be anything they want to be and have far more role models to prove it. If we seem ungrateful, it’s because we can never truly know how bad it was and, I believe, most of the women’s liberationists wanted it that way.

I also find myself trying to explain why, for very valid political reasons, some young women don’t identify as feminist. I feel my older colleagues pain on this one – I, too, feel my life was saved and radically transformed by this thing called feminism and I can’t think of a better way to describe my work and worldview than the f-word. Yet, my ability to love and use this word is strongly tied to my privilege as a white, middle-class, educated, able-bodied, cisgender woman. People who share these privileges have historically and continue to control the mainstream women’s movement and that movement has a history and often a present of silencing, shaming, and/or marginalizing women who don’t fit into that privilege set. For these reasons, many young women of color, queer women, disabled women, and trans women don’t consider “feminist” a safe or useful term.

That doesn’t, however, mean that these women are not working for gender equality and working in ways that extend the scope and impact of social justice organizing like we’ve never seen before. For example, young women doing their activism under the umbrella of the woman of color led reproductive justice movement are expanding the fight for reproductive rights from a legal and political struggle to a community conversation about economic access to services, the rights of incarcerated mothers, and the impacts of often intersecting identity-based oppressions that influence individual ability to parent, get health care, and use those hard won legal rights. To discount these young activists as apathetic or uninformed because they use a different label or refuse a label at all is to replicate the silencing that drove many away in the first place and that has splintered social justice efforts for centuries.

Of course, there are some young women who don’t identify as feminist because they don’t like the connotations of the word or they think, falsely, that women have achieved full equality. This is the “I’m not a feminist but” crowd and, yup, that’s a frustrating implication of the backlash against feminism that we’ve been talking about since Susan Faludi named it in 1991. Instead of dwelling on it, I choose to look on the bright side. When 18-25 year old women were asked in a 2007 Harris poll if they believed in the goals of the women’s liberation movement, 90% responded in the affirmative. Young women all over the country and the internet are talking about and doing activism for gender equality and they are doing it at an age when the pressures to sexualize themselves, find a romantic partner, and assume the role of “woman” as seen on TV is at it’s highest. Many are doing it in educational institutions that act as bubbles of perfect equality before that bubble pops upon entering the workplace. Instead of asking why more young women aren’t identifying as feminist, why aren’t we remarking on how many are, against all odds?

Some older feminists do that, of course. I have many wonderful older friends and colleagues who’ve never denied my lived experience and who have worked with me on feminist projects for years. This speech is not to them or about them but to the small part of their group that, like the actually apathetic “I’m not a feminist but” part of my group, has it completely and utterly wrong. If you’ve found yourself here as a skeptical older feminist or a skeptical, “women are equal, right??” young non-feminist,  go check out the 30+ posts in this young feminist carnival. See what this whole newfangled thing is all about. Get inspired, get excited, get pissed off and take action. That, after all, will change the world far faster than sitting around debating the existence of unicorns.

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August 25, 2010

Bristol Palin’s Speaking Fee is Beside the Point

Yesterday, news broke that Bristol Palin will be receiving $14,000 to speak at a fundraiser for LifeHouse, a Christian home for unwed mothers in Louisville, Kentucky.

I can’t say I didn’t roll my eyes at that dollar amount. As someone who has for seven years been speaking on the opposite end of the spectrum, advocating comprehensive sex education and the right and ability for women of all ages to choose motherhood, adoption, or abortion, I can’t imagine raking in a sum that large, especially for a fundraiser. Most of the fundraisers I’ve keynoted across the country have been on a volunteer basis and I’ve never been paid more than $5000 dollars for a speech. Of course, my family and I are not as famous as Bristol and her family. And, of course, activists on all sides of all issues deserve to be paid for their work. Both Jessica Valenti and Monica of TransGRiot wrote eloquently earlier this month about the monetary value of activism and how the expectation that speakers be unpaid not only devalues that work but propagates an environment in which only the voices of those who are privileged enough to do it for free are heard. In any movement, this is a huge problem.

Today, Jezebel responded to the news with a post titled ‘Should Bristol Palin Be Paid This Much?’ in which Sadie Stein wonders how fiscally responsible it is for a non-profit organization to shell out such a sum when it’s desperately trying to raise money. Good point, perhaps, but questions about the dollar amount are sidestepping what I see as the real issue: the immeasurable amount of shame, misinformation, and propaganda this young woman is set to disseminate to other young people across the country.

Bristol Palin stepped into the spotlight as the pregnant, unwed, 17 year-old daughter of then relatively unknown vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.  The elder Palin used her daughter’s pregnancy, and the eventual birth of her grandson, to highlight her extreme anti-abortion policies and to advocate for more funding for the same abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that failed her daughter. For a brief moment, it looked as if Bristol might speak truth to power and her mother to expose the failure of the “just say no” approach when she told Fox’s Greta Van Susteran that abstinence is, “not realistic.”

Sadly, that didn’t turn out to be the case. Bristol has fashioned herself into an advocate for abstinence-only-until-marriage as a spokesperson for the Candies Foundation and has publicly advocated that all young women, without regard to their individual situations, choose young motherhood over adoption or abortion. This is undoubtedly the message she’ll carry to Lifehouse and similar groups willing to shell out the bucks to the famous teen mom.

As a reminder, despite a multi-million dollar federal tax dollar endorsement, abstinence-only programs were a resounding failure. The rates of unintended teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections rose during those dark years and teens who’d been exposed to the programs were found to be less likely to use contraception or protection upon engaging in sex. The programs deny young people medically accurate information about sexual health and often use gender stereotypes of the ‘men are raging hormonal beasts and women are prude’ variety to shame young people into abstaining, which, as Palin said herself, is often unrealistic. They deny not only information about safer sex to gay students but also deny their very existence, maintaining that the only “correct” sexual partnerships are those within a monogamous, heterosexual marriage. One more advocate for these programs, at the moment the federal government has finally decided to fund comprehensive sex education, is disheartening news for young people across the country.

Bristol Palin has also shown a startling ignorance of the reality of the lives of young women who become pregnant who do not have a famous, wealthy family.  Unlike Palin, many young women don’t have sibling and nannies that can help them care for a new addition. Some are pregnant by family members, or their families are absent, or would kick them out of the house if they were to carry the pregnancy to term. Others don’t have any financial means at all to care for a baby. Others simply do not want to be mothers, maybe just not now or maybe not ever. Bristol and the organizations that will ask her to speak revere the concept of fetal life far more than the rights and concerns of real, living young women. What message can she possibly send to them other than, “If you don’t make the choices I did, shame on you.” Unless, of course, she’s talking about abstinence until marriage, in which case it’s, “do as I say, not as I do.”

I’m not saying Bristol Palin doesn’t have the right to be an activist speaker. Of course she does, even though I’ll probably disagree with everything she has to say. I’m saying that instead of focusing on the money she’s making, those of us on the side of reproductive justice need to be focusing on highlighting how harmful and yes, unrealistic, her message is. We owe young women who are pregnant accurate information on all their options and financial, emotional, and legal support for every single one of them. We owe them real depictions of the struggles, joys, and hardships of young motherhood. We owe those who’ve made different choices as much respect and support as Bristol seems to have found.

I don’t care how much I get paid to do it but this is my work. And me and the army of other young women who do the same will be countering the young Ms. Palin every step of the way.

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August 23, 2010

Gucci Ads: Dead Women Are In for Autumn

Here we go again with the high fashion obsession with beautiful, dead women. Gucci’s fall ad campaign was shot in the Marrakech desert but the photos look like something from an episode of CSI.

Hell, if I wore an ostrich motorcycle jacket and velvet pants into the middle of the Moroccan desert, and brought along a $2400 bag instead of a canteen, I’d probably drop dead too. But “dead in the dirt” is creepy and unsettling, no matter how high the heels. In this photo, Raquel Zimmerman and Joan Smalls lie prone and limp while a man circles them like a vulture, taking in the grotesque view.

Same models, same prone poses. Is that their car in the background? Did the expressionless man highjack and kill them? What’s he going to do with them now that they’re sprawled on his hood?

Of course, you can’t do a beautiful corpse ad campaign without at least one picture that expressly hints at violence and rape. In this shot, Nikola Jovanovic is perched upon his golden throne leering down at Raquel Zimmerman, whose skirt is hiked up to her thigh, legs askew. His foot positioned strategically over her throat makes it disgustingly clear he can do, perhaps already has done, whatever he likes to the motionless model.

Gucci certainly isn’t the first to use female dead bodies in their ads. Beautiful corpses are an extension of the almost universal objectification of women in advertising combined with the trope that says helpless, silent women are the best kind. Rendering women dead, or at least disturbingly unconscious, strips them of their agency and sexualizes violence against them. Gucci’s glorification of violence normalizes something that’s already far too prevalent – in the United States, 3 women per day are murdered by their intimate partners. Something tells me those crime scenes are decidedly less picture perfect.

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August 19, 2010

Musings of an Aging (Young) Feminist

When I was eight I wanted to be an Olympic gymnast. By the time I was ten, I was sure I was going to become a world famous singing sensation. At twelve I started toying around with the idea of becoming the first woman president, or at the very least, a wildly influential Senator from Texas. When I finally started to realize I might need a reasonable and profitable career at about fourteen, I settled on becoming a choir director.

Today is my 24th birthday. I read a quote recently by Imelda Marcos that really resonated: “My dreams have become puny compared to the reality my life has become.” The ten year old me or the fourteen year old me or even the sixteen year old me could never have imagined that a movie bearing my name would premiere at Sundance when I was eighteen and change the trajectory of my entire life. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that this birthday would mark nine years in the feminist movement, more than a third of my lifetime, or that today I would be participating in the second photo shoot in two months for another mainstream women’s magazine feature on the leaders of the next generation of feminism.

There’s nothing like a birthday combined with being heralded as a representation of your generation to really scare the shit out of a girl. I wonder often if I did the only important thing that I would ever do when at fifteen when I started a campaign to get abstinence-only out of my high school and if I’ll spend the rest of my life failing to meet these huge expectations it feels like everyone has of me. I wrote yesterday about the suffragist Inez Milholland, who had an amazing and productive career as a speaker and organizer and then died at 30 of exhaustion. What I didn’t mention is that I’ve often thought that might be the best thing that could ever happen to me because I can’t imagine any experiences in my life that could be as amazing, surprising, and wonderful as the ones I’ve had in the past nine years of traveling across the country and organizing with young feminists.

Shortsighted and strange? Yes. Morbid? Definitely. But it’s real. And real is something I’ve been missing for a long time. I feel like I’ve been playing the role of ‘Shelby Knox’ for so long that I haven’t stopped to find out who just plain Shelby might be or become. What I do and say and write is definitely real and it’s what I believe with all my heart. But I also want to finally be able to believe that even if I hadn’t been in a movie or had a famous mentor or testified before Congress, people would still want to know and listen to the girl who gets behind on her emails and double books meetings and sets off the fire alarm making toast every single time.

Of course I don’t really want to die at 30. I want to write a book. I want to write several books, actually. I want to help make abortion a right so solid and undeniable that the protests of today will seem sad and bizarre. I want to help women achieve equal representation at every level of government and I want to campaign for another pro-woman woman for president and this time I want to see her win. I want to be an organizer in the generation that finally understands that all oppressions have to be uprooted at the same time and acts upon that understanding. I want, more than anything, to change the world.

But, I’m starting to realize, if I’m ever going to do any of those things I have to start moving more towards real. I can’t help anyone or be the representation of anything until I love me for me and act that way. I have to allow myself to be 24 and to sometimes be unsure and to be scared and to ask for help. I have to stop preaching self-care and start practicing it by remembering to eat every day and exercise and occasionally look up from my computer and all the injustices it alerts me to and remember that there are also many wonderful things in the world to do and experience. I have to stop thinking my past isn’t mine or I don’t deserve it and own everything, the privileges, the mistakes, and the successes.

I guess the first step to real is this post, which I’m terrified to put out in the world. Are some people going to think, “what a privileged bitch she is, moaning about her practically perfect life?” Sure, and probably rightfully so. But, to paraphrase Gloria Steinem, a pedestal is a damn small space and on this birthday, I’m jumping off it. Not to my death, but to my life.

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August 18, 2010

Young Women and the Battle for Women Suffrage

Today marks the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote almost 133 years after America’s founders penned the words “We the people” but really meant “We the [white, male, land-owning] people.” We cannot mark this anniversary without noting that black men and women were unable to vote in practice, due to racist laws and violence, until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965. Even today, many people are still disenfranchised, such as people with disabilities who are deprived equal access to polling places and those who’ve been convicted of felonies. The battle to apply those lofty founding words to all people equally is far, far from over.

‘Battle’ is the correct word to describe the 100-year campaign to get women the right to vote. Sadly, many American school children never learn about the courageous activism waged by the many women and men of all races it took to make the 19th amendment the law of the land. If they get any information on the topic at all, they leave the classroom thinking Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton simply asked for the vote and it was kindly granted! The lack of women’s history education in schools leaves young women without a true understanding of all the women have done and become before, making it harder to do and become today.

I’m a women’s history nerd so I read a lot about the different generations of the women’s movement. One of the most striking things to me as a young feminist is how many young women not only took part in but also led the battle for women suffrage. Yet these contributions are often overlooked or the ages of the women are never mentioned, meaning modern young women are left imagining their feminist forebears as stodgy old women and with the idea that activism is something most often reserved for the 30-plus crowd. So, in honor of today’s anniversary, a very limited sampling of the work of amazing young women for the passage of the 19th amendment:

Rheta Childe Dorr was 12 years old when she saw a speech by Susan B. Anthony and was inspired to join the National Women’s Suffrage Association. Susan B. Anthony herself is memorialized as an older woman but she began her activism at age 16, when she collected two boxes of petitions opposing slavery. She was 30 years old upon her first meeting with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which sparked a decades long partnership fighting for women’s rights. Alice Stone Blackwell, the daughter of formidable suffrage campaigner Lucy Stone, became the assistant editor of the American Women’s Suffrage Association magazine The Woman’s Journal when she was just 24.

Inez Milholland, who you may remember as the beautiful woman in white robes who led a suffrage demonstration on horseback in the move Iron Jawed Angels, started her activism for women’s suffrage as a student at Vassar. She was suspended for organizing a suffrage meeting in an off-campus cemetery when the university president prohibited on-campus suffrage campaigning. That meeting marked the founding of the Vassar Votes for Women Club, which, under Mulholland’s leadership, launched various protests and debates in the community. Mulholland was just 27 years old when she helped organize the DC suffrage parade, which she led on horseback through crowds of violent protesters. She also joined the National Women’s Party’s band of traveling orators to ramp up support for what would eventually become the 19th amendment. A startling cautionary tale for the importance of activist self-care, the then 30 year-old organizer collapsed while giving a rousing speech and died a few days later of exhaustion.

Alice Paul* is often credited with organizing the final push that led to the passage of the 19th amendment. Yet, few realize that Paul was just 21 years-old when she received her education in suffrage organizing in England and just 26 years old when she was appointed as the Chairwoman of the Congressional Committee of the National Women’s Suffrage Association. Along with Lucy Burns, Paul orchestrated the picketing of Woodrow Wilson’s White House that resulted in mass arrests of suffrage activists and hunger strikes that alerted the American public to the plight of the political prisoners. Paul was just 35 years old when the 19th amendment was ratified.

A final note on young women and suffrage: Susan B. Anthony said, “Our job is not to make young women grateful, it’s to make them ungrateful.” Yet with all due respect to Ms. Anthony, I much prefer the directive set forth to young women by Abigail Duniway:

The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future.

*Alice Paul deserves an asterisk in history because she made racist and anti-Semitic statements and her prejudice and privilege marred her activism, such as when she refused to allow women of color to march with white fellow activists in DC suffrage parades. The women suffrage movement was led and controlled by white women and often sacrificed the rights of and silenced women of color. This continues in the women’s movement today, with (mostly) white women at the helm of major organizations and women of color, gay women, and trans women often marginalized by the movement. Modern feminists have a duty to know and own our painful history and strive not to repeat it. A great analysis of racism in the women’s movement is bell hook’s Black Women and Feminism. It’s an amazing, must-read for anyone of any age or race who’s interested in gender justice.

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August 17, 2010

Is it ‘Miss’ or ‘Ms’? Does it Still Matter?


Yesterday I received a tweet from the Oxford University Press account inquiring as to my feelings about the use of ‘Miss’ versus ‘Ms.’ in relation to myself and modern feminism. The question was accompanied by a link to this article by University of Illinois Professor Dennis Baron, which traces the term ‘Ms.’ to all the way back to 1767 and chronicles its’ various political meanings or lack thereof henceforward. He notes an instance as early as 1913 of feminist attempts to institute a title for women, like Mr. for men, that was free of reference to age or marital status, a goal that didn’t meet with much success until the Second Wave of feminism and the release of Ms. Magazine in 1971.

Like being able to sit unaccompanied in a bar or get credit in my name without a husband of male relative as a co-signer, the pretty much universal understanding that women as well as men should and do have a title that doesn’t convey marital status is one of those wins of the feminist movement for which my generation often seems ungrateful because it’s been a matter of fact our whole lives. Actually, the New York Times — about sixteen years late to the party as per usual – finally declared Ms. “fit to print” in 1986, the year I was born. Long before I consciously identified as a feminist, and even while I was calling myself a good Southern Baptist girl, I preferred the term ‘Ms.’ to ‘Miss’ simply because I didn’t want any part of anything that encompassed both Miss America and Little Miss Muffet.

It wasn’t, however, until I began to strongly identify as a feminist in college that I used ‘Ms.’ as a political statement, though not the straightforward one against the, to my millennial eyes, blatant sexism of the titles that Professor Brown and the Oxford University Press would probably expect. I read Gloria Steinem’s quip, “I refuse to be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. Magazine,” as both an example of the humor members of an oppressed group must possess while fighting that oppression and a reminder of the battle feminists before fought for me to be able to take for granted that women should have an equivalent to ‘Mr.’ Since I was deprived of this important piece of feminist activism in even my college classes, I began using the title ‘Ms.’ as a gentle point of re-education on women’s history as I traveled across the country speaking at universities.

That’s the political significance that influenced, in part, my choice to use ‘Ms.’ in the title of my blog. It serves as a short but meaningful signifier to my readers that everything in my life, and therefore the blog’s content, is shaped by my feminism. It’s also a reference to the humorous and common mistitling of the film made on my high school activism as ‘The Miseducation of Shelby Knox,” as if my journey from conservative Republican to feminist activist was an ill-fated comedy of errors. Most importantly, however, ‘Ms.’ in my blog title is a conscious homage to the Second Wave women who continue to be invaluable in my evolution as a young adult feminist activist.

I know there are women who choose to use ‘Miss’ for a variety of reasons, including as a rejection of the feminism that’s inextricably, at least in modern times, implied in choosing ‘Ms.’ instead. This is an exercise of the self-determination that’s inherent to feminism and I don’t take issue with these women or their decisions. I am less tolerant of companies, like Vista Print, that refuse to offer ‘Ms.’ as an option in the dropdown menu of possible titles when ordering a product online. Which feminine title is a lesbian woman who is prohibited by law from marrying her life partner supposed to choose? What possible relationship could one’s marital status have to a desire to order cheap business cards? As Professor Brown notes, ‘Ms.’ is now a commonly accepted manner in which to refer to half the population and modern companies should get with the times, if only to indicate to consumers like me that they’re not endorsing the sexism and homophobia underlying a forced choice between ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs.’ (For the record, Vista Print, me and several friends have taken our business elsewhere because of this issue.)

Am I going to spend much of my time lobbying companies to provide all three title options for women or monitoring media outlets to make sure they use ‘Ms.’ to refer to female newsmakers without regard to their marital status? No, mostly because that work was done by feminists of previous generations. Instead I’ll fight the sexism endemic in a society that still correlates a woman’s worth with a ring on her finger by getting rid of gendered pay disparities and establishing more social services for single mothers. And I’ll be Ms. Scary Feminist as I do it, thank you very much!

***Question to readers: Do you use the term ‘Ms.’? Why or why not? If you speak another language, what are the feminine titles that traditionally differentiate between a married and unmarried woman and is there an alternative similar to Ms.?

CORRECTION: Post updated at 2pm EST on 8.17.10 to correctly cite Professor Dennis Baron, the author of the Oxford University Press blog post, who was misnamed in the original post.

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August 11, 2010

Pink’s New Video Goes a ‘Little’ Too Far

I love P!nk, always have. As an angsty teen I superimposed onto my the life lyrics of “Don’t Let Me Get Me,” cheered her feminist appeal for more future female presidents and fewer video dancer wannabes in “Stupid Girls,” and played her empowering break-up anthem “So What” so loud the neighbors complained. More than once. So, I’m in her corner. That said, I have serious issues with both videos for her song “Please Don’t Leave Me.”

Yes, both. If you too are a P!nk fan, you know that her album Funhouse, which includes “Please Don’t Leave Me,” is the artist’s heart wrenching, raw musical ode to her divorce from her husband, Carey Hart. The first video she released for the song, in 2009, was this disturbing depiction of the lengths she would have gone to keep him from walking away:

As in Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s Telephone video, P!nk seems to buy into the idea that domestic violence perpetrated by women is ok, even funny, even deserved. She orchestrates her soon to be ex-boyfriend’s tumble down the stairs, smashes his knee with a golf club, and comes after him with an axe. The video ends with the singer falling to her death after her boy sprays her in the face with hairspray. Anyone watching comes away with the idea that true love is literally worth fighting for, to the point of inflicting serious physical harm on your partner.

If I were in Hart’s shoes, I’d never come near a woman who play-acted my demise so convincingly but the couple reconciled shortly after Funhouse came out and are now happily remarried. Which brings us to the second video for the song, released on Sunday. Instead of love as beating each other senseless, she declares in this video it’s possible against all odds. How sweet! Except…not:

Shot in classic black and white movie style, the video opens with P!nk as a Giantess in a sideshow tent holding auditions for a husband. A line of potential suitors waits outside for their chance to impress her, including one who the others mock uproariously and claim “doesn’t have a chance.” The butt of the jokes turns out to be her real-life husband Hart, portrayed as a Little Person named Carey Big-Hart. He wins her heart with his personality and the pair frolics through the video, with P!nk kneeling down to talk to her suitor and picking him up to put him on a swing.

So what’s the problem here? Imagine if instead of being a Little Person, the mercilessly mocked Hart was in blackface or yellowface. Still adorable and funny? Not so much. Carey Hart is an average heighted man objectifying a Little Person for laughs. Hart can shed this persona without ever facing the heightism and ableism that accompanies it in real life, like being unable to reach an ATM or fearing for his safety around idiots who might see him as a projectile, vis a vis that horrible online “Midget Toss” game.

And here we get to the ‘M’ word. Widely considered offensive in the Little Person community, P!nk’s video has spawned a spate of blog posts throwing it around in the “aren’t midgets funny just by their very existence” way rather than the “midget originated as a term for acts in a freak show and therefore has a painful history, thank you much” way. P!nk seems to know that particular history of the term – the video opens with “Freakshow Theatre Presents” and the whole first scene is in a side show tent – and is more than fine with using it as a premise for her video. While she’d likely argue that her character, the Giantess, is the one that’s part of the freak show, she’s the subject of adoration rather than derision. Also, there’s the little sticking point that Giants aren’t a real group of people still fighting for equal rights.

I also don’t buy the theory, which I first saw posited by a commenter on The Frisky, that P!nk is using the Giantess and Little Person characters as an allegory for the marital pairing of a hugely famous rock star and the little-as-in-average guy. It’s not like she pulled a Britney and married her backup dancer; Carey Hart is an international motocross super star and was well known long before they met. I do think P!nk was trying to make the point that love can bloom between the unlikeliest parties but this is problematic, again, because of the way she chose to make her point. Little People and average heighted people have happy, successful relationships all the time – even with P!nk as Giantess, it still begs the question why people of different heights getting together is bizarre enough in itself to be a comment on unlikely relationships.

Do I think P!nk and Hart intended to be malicious toward or even offensive to Little People when they made this video? No. Do I believe they even thought about it being problematic? Again, no. That’s the evil, sticky wicket of privilege: you can’t really know what oppressions a certain group faces unless you’re part of that group and therefore don’t innately know what words, references, or depictions might be triggering or problematic. That’s not an excuse for being discriminatory. The key to combating privilege induced mistakes like this one is to run it by members of that group and really listen to what they have to say. Had P!nk floated her idea to a few Little People activists they might have suggested she celebrated unlikely love with, say, a depiction of the difficult partnership between a rocker and an extreme sports star. That don’t beat the crap out of each other. That right there is a video I’d love to see.

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