The Girl Detective

- When a family member, upon learning that I don’t wear a helmet when I ride my bike at two miles an hour to the coffee shop, says, “Well, I guess a helmet is only for someone with a brain to protect!” I don’t say Don’t call me brainless, but rather, “Ha ha! Funny joke! Clever witty funny! You sure got me there!”

Sorry, that one was repressed.

Here’s how pathological my politeness has gotten:

- When I run out to my car to feed the meter, and the cop who has just three seconds ago slipped a citation under my windshield wiper acts like a condescending asshole to me, the harshest response I can muster is, “Of course, I understand. Have a nice day!” (This is similar to last year’s car accident, when another asshole cop gave me a ticket as I was being loaded into the ambulance and I thanked him.)

- When my tutoring job stops giving me students until I’m forced to take whatever convoluted hint they’re dropping and send them my letter of resignation, I can’t bring myself to ask what I did wrong, nor can I even think about being frank with them and saying that if I was so crappy that I needed to be fired, they should have just fired me. In November. So I wouldn’t have politely waited by the phone for three months.

- When someone tells me that Ashkenazi Jews aren’t white, even though she knows a lot of Jews “consider” themselves white, I don’t say what I’m thinking, but rather stammer that Oh, yeah, I totally get what you’re saying, because yeah, it’s more about assimilation than genetics, isn’t it? You’re smarter than me! You’re smarter than me! Everyone’s smarter than me! Gotta remember that everyone’s smarter than me!!!

Because I’m just a stupid ditz whom everyone will hate if she ever says something substantive, right? Gotta be polite, Girl Detective! Gotta be polite! You don’t want PEOPLE to HATE YOU, do you!?

From AP:

Gazans knock down border, flee to Egypt

RAFAH, Gaza Strip - Tens of thousands of Palestinians on foot and donkey carts poured into Egypt from Gaza Wednesday after masked gunmen used land mines to blast down a seven-mile barrier dividing the border town of Rafah.

The border breach was a dramatic protest against the closure of the impoverished Palestinian territory imposed last week by Israel in response to increasing rocket attacks by Gaza militants. The closure cut off fuel and food supplies.

Jubilant men and women crossed unhindered by border controls over toppled corrugated metal along sections of the barrier, carrying goats, chickens and crates of Coca-Cola. Some brought back televisions, car tires and cigarettes and one man even bought a motorcycle. Vendors sold soft drinks and baked goods to the crowds.

Just so we’re clear: No, I’m not a self-hating Jew; no, I don’t believe Israel should be destroyed; no, I don’t believe all Israelis are inhuman monsters; no, I don’t believe terrorism is ever justified; no, I don’t deny that there are Israeli civilians who are suffering, too. But for those of you who are tempted to argue, “But those evil Gazans launched rockets into Israel! What else could Israel do!?” I’d like to ask you if you really, seriously believe that depriving 100% of Gaza’s civilians of food, water, medicine, and electricity is the wisest, fairest, and most effective way to deal with rocket attacks. Do you really, seriously believe that? Really? Seriously?

Also:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert … added: “Does anyone seriously think that our children will wet their beds at night in fear and be afraid to go out of the house and they (Gazans) will live in quiet normality?”

A classic shrink-and-grow fallacy. To suggest that a) life in the Gaza strip is quiet and normal and b) all Israeli children are living in constant fear is a joke. The fact is, the situation in Palestine is worse than the situation is Israel. The death toll is higher and the standard of living is lower. My intent isn’t to insult the Israelis who are living in constant fear of attack; I just want to point out that Olmert’s version of events doesn’t line up even remotely with reality.

Anyway, I hope Gazans can stock up on what they need before the border’s closed again. Yes, I realize that there’s a danger of militants bringing in more weapons; again, though, it doesn’t justify depriving civilians of basic supplies.

Pro-lifers aren’t bad people.

Or, at least, not the ones I know. I’ve had friends throughout high school and college who were pro-life. Many of my students are pro-life. Feminist bloggers and journalists often talk about how pro-lifers only care about punishing women for having sex; they highlight pro-life organizations’ attacks on contraception, welfare, healthcare, and fair wages (all of which would help babies), along with the fact that abortion bans have been proven not to decrease the number of abortions (if they really wanted to save lives, wouldn’t they find a more effective prevention method than illegality?), to demonstrate that, when it comes down to it, pro-lifers don’t actually care that much about saving babies’ lives, and instead are primarily concerned with keeping abortion taboo. And while I think this is basically correct - those at the highest echelons of the pro-life movement have demonstrated their real priorities pretty clearly - I firmly believe, from my experiences with pro-lifers down here in the normal world, that most of them do sincerely believe that they’re fighting for a worthy cause.

So. If you’re pro-life and you’re reading this, I urge you to hear me out. Please read the whole thing. If you’d like to leave a comment, I always appreciate a healthy debate. (Just be polite, please, and try to understand where I’m coming from, as I’ve tried to do for you.) I just hate the idea of Roe Day producing yet another set of echo chambers.

***

I’d like to start off by offering my own definition of choice. Well, it’s not mine, exactly - I’ve formed it from reading excellent sources like Abortion Under Attack. Since Roe, the word choice has taken on a lot of bourgeois connotations; when people hear the term pro-choice, they tend to think of an affluent, promiscuous woman thinking, “Eh… I’d rather not be a mother. What a drag!” The description of abortion as a choice completely glosses over the fact that, in most cases, abortion is a necessity. The mainstream pro-choice movement hasn’t been doing enough to counteract this perception, and that’s why we’re losing so much ground.

When I think of choice, I think of the choice to start or add to a family, not just to get an abortion. Choice means having the money, healthcare, and resources to decide when you’re going to get pregnant, and the choice to welcome a child into your life even if the pregnancy was unintended. With that definition, one can be pro-life and still vote pro-choice. One can believe that a fertilized egg is human, but still work to create a society in which women, married or single, are able to enjoy sex (which I know a lot of you pro-lifers enjoy yourselves), but still avoid pregnancy. One can work to decrease the number of abortions - really, truly decrease the number of abortions, not just talk about it - by supporting policies that give women a wider range of options if they become pregnant.

Right now, I don’t have a choice. If I got pregnant today, my husband and I would have to terminate it. My second job laid me off a couple of days ago, and I’m frantically searching for another one. I may have to get two more, if whatever I find doesn’t pay as much as the last one did. My husband and I have been scrimping like crazy but we still end every month in the red. There are hundreds of dollars on our credit card that I really don’t know how we’re going to pay. And, since full-time jobs in my field are incredibly rare (thank you, exploitation!), I don’t know when it’s going to get better. All this means that, if I were to get pregnant, I wouldn’t be able to take time off from work, nor would I be able to pay for childcare. What a delightful Catch-22! I wouldn’t be able to pay for food, doctor visits, clothes, toys, baby supplies, school supplies, or any of the other myriad expenses that come with a dependent. But, most importantly, I wouldn’t be able to afford giving birth. My husband’s job’s health plan doesn’t cover spouses or dependents, so I’m paying for my own, which doesn’t cover maternity. That means that if I were to show up at a hospital in labor (forget about luxuries like prenatal care), I’d have to pay around $7,700 - the average cost of childbirth - out of pocket. If nothing went wrong.

Do you have $7,700 sitting around? If you do, and you’re pro-life, then give that money to someone who’s pregnant and underinsured. If you don’t, and you’re pro-life, then put yourself in someone else’s position before you tell them what to do.

Abortions are legal, but I don’t have a choice. People, I’m twenty-seven and married; yes, I’ve thought about this. There’s a chance I might qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP; maybe there’s an organization that could help me; maybe my parents would be able to give me financial suppport. But all three of those possibilities are pretty iffy, and each one only deals with part of the problem. Furthermore, I’d be working under an extremely tight schedule while I investigated each one. What if, say, by the time I found out that I wasn’t eligible for SCHIP after all, the fetus had brain activity? What if it was kicking? I don’t consider a fertilized egg a human being, but I’m not sure I could go through with an abortion if the fetus looked more like an infant than a cell. So I’d have to choose between having the baby and financially ruining my household - not to mention closing off a few career options and consigning myself to poverty for a long, long time - or killing a son or daughter that, if I’d only had more money, I would have joyfully anticipated.

Some choice, huh?

And, compared to the people who are the most affected by the abortion debate, I’ve got it pretty good. I’m middle class, despite my meager income. I’ve got the skills and the education to climb out of debt, even if it took me until I was forty. What about women who are in real poverty? Women who are working for minimum wage or less? Women who are having trouble feeding the children they already have? Women whose employers would blithely fire them if they took a week off to give birth? Women who don’t have a committed partner? Women who are homeless? (There are few better ways to stay down on your luck than to walk into a job interview pregnant.) One of the biggest effects of social privilege is that it keeps us from empathizing with those who are less fortunate. We middle classers can’t conceive of the realities of poverty, because we’ve never had to live with them. We can say things like “I’m sure she could find some way to pay for it” and “having a child is always worth it, no matter what” and “she should just get a better job” and “she could just give it up for adoption” because we have no clue what issues poor women are grappling with. We have no clue how anyone could possibly be unable to afford to “just have it,” because it’s not in our realm of experience. We have no idea how racism and worker exploitation consistently prevent women from improving their living conditions. We simply have no clue.

I could talk about a lot of other issues here. I could talk about, for instance, late term abortions - how almost all of them are performed because something has gone disastrously wrong in the pregnancy, and the fetus is either doomed or endangering the mother’s health or life. I could point out that removing someone’s brain is actually more humane than letting them slowly suffocate because their lungs aren’t fully formed, or hooking them up to life support (an extremely invasive and violent procedure) and forcing them to suffer for days, weeks, or even years. I could talk about forced and coerced sterilization. I could talk about rape. I could talk about the worldwide abortion debate, instead of limiting my post to the United States. But the main thing I want to say here is this: Choice isn’t just about abortion. There are so many issues that come together to force a woman to abort her pregnancy. Yes, force. Women are forced to get abortions. This is what I want to make clear to you.

And it’s why voting pro-choice doesn’t just mean giving women access to abortions. Such an understanding of choice is shallow and ignorant at best. Voting pro-choice means supporting living wages so that families can support their children. Voting pro-choice means supporting universal or affordable healthcare, so that women don’t have to wonder how they’ll come up with the money to give birth. Voting pro-choice means supporting contraception and realistic sex education, so that women don’t have to become nuns in order to avoid pregnancy. (Men - you know how unbearable it is to be aroused and unable to have sex? Yes, women experience that, too.) Voting pro-choice means making an effort to understand how broader issues like poverty, institutionalized racism, a ruinous and exploitative healthcare system, and a dearth of social safety nets increase the US’s yearly abortion rate. Voting pro-choice means supporting policies that will reverse those trends.

I hope at least one pro-lifer made it this far. Thoughts?

EDIT: Above, I mistakenly said all late term abortions are done for medical reasons (a statistic that, upon revisiting it, I realized I’d misread). Red Queen has written a terrific post that includes the story of her late term abortion.

duh doot-doot-doo-doot-doo. Duh duh doot-doot-doo duh doot-doot-doo duh doot-doot-doo doot-doo!

That was the Bubble Bobble theme, in case you couldn’t tell. I have Bubble Bobble now.

So last night I had too much to drink and thought it’d be a good idea to join the Navy. Wait, Facebook. It was Facebook I joined. When I got home at two and checked my email I had six - six! - “how we met” confirmations waiting for me. Six, people! That’s six times as many emails as I normally get at two in the morning. And when I woke up in the real morning? Six more! What have I done? What have I done!? I’d finally subscribed to enough blogs to keep me busy for like half an hour, and now there’s this, too? I don’t know what to do with this Internet thing. It’s like it’s out of control or something. It’s like I close my laptop and sit down to read a book but then the book is my laptop and I’m on the Internet again. It’s like I run out of the room and open another door but that door leads to the same room, and also these rooms are the Internet.

And don’t get me started on the tattoo I apparently got. Yes, it was that kind of party.

There’s an awesome first-hand account of a Johnson County caucus at Days of Industry. Here’s an excerpt:

…all hell broke loose. Clintonites and Obamans started shouting at each other, nose to nose. One Clinton supporter stormed up to the Obama precinct chair and said, right in front of me: “That guy who stood up on the chair is a disgrace.” I said: “Um, you mean me?” She said: “I pity you. You make me sad,” and scurried off as I tried to explain, in a more reasonable voice than I’d used during the crazy-chair-talking episode, why nothing matters to me more than seeing Clinton go down in defeat — crushing, total, historic defeat — in this election.

Read it, and then make sure you’re registered to vote.

The other night, my friends and I had a run-in with a drunk asshole. Yeah, happens all the time, right? Well, now I’m going to blog about it.

Here’s what happened. A group of us - me, Tomemos, Tomemos’s sister, her friend, and her boyfriend - arrived at a bar and Tomemos went up to get us a round. From our spot a few feet away, we saw a woman strike up a conversation with him. The conversation grew increasingly animated until it was clear that the woman was angry at him; at one point I heard her say, “And they produce people like you!” We watched uncertainly until he got our drinks, said good night to her, and came back to us to relate what they’d talked about: after learning that he was a graduate student who wanted to become an English professor, she declared that he was an ivory tower elitist idiot snob whose only concern was catering to rich, privileged brats.

That was when it got really interesting. After about a minute, the woman followed him over to us. “Which one of you is his wife?” she barked, glaring at us. She pointed at his sister. “You? Is it you?”

I identified myself.

Within a second, her face was about six inches from mine. “Well, let me tell you what I’d like you to do for your husband,” she said. (I’m paraphrasing here.) “See, I’m fifty-six, and I grew up in the fifties and sixties, so I’ve been around…” she went on, rambling now, stringing together ideas without really communicating anything, leaning in closer and closer until she had me pinned against a table.

Tomemos and his sister’s boyfriend began telling her to back off. At first she ignored them, continuing to talk while I stood dumbly, at a loss for what to say or do. Finally, though, she acknowledged them by bellowing, “She doesn’t need men to defend her! This is a woman’s bar!”

(It’s true: we were at a lesbian bar, although I didn’t realize it at the time.)

She leaned in close again and told me to agree with her. “Well, finish up real quick,” I said.

She didn’t. Finally I began stepping to the side, trying to escape from her. Either she finally finished whatever background information she thought she was giving me, or she realized she was losing me, because she finally got to the point: “Take him to see Charlie Wilson’s War,” she said.

“I will!” I cried, and turned to Tomemos. “Let’s go see it!”

“Sure!” he frantically agreed. “Sure!”

The woman gave up and gave us both the evil eye before she went back to the bar. About an hour later, on her way out, she gave it to us again.

The encounter left me frustrated and angry on a couple of different levels. First off, it echoed a bizarre trend that I’ve seen on the political and feminist blogosphere: the tendency, by some leftists, to equate a liberal with a white upper-middle-class bourgeois who pretends to care about social justice but actually wants to maintain the status quo. A liberal, in the most common usage of the word, is the opposite of a conservative. Make fine distinctions if you want - I know there are some movements, like anarchists, that identify as further left than liberalism - but don’t lump everyone who identifies as a liberal into one very specific social group. Understand that conservatives are the ones working to make “liberal” a pejorative term, and their attack on liberals is inextricably linked with their attack on scholars and professors. Conservatives would like nothing more than to see the Left fragment and collapse through infighting and pedantry, and they’re helping us along by planting the idea that liberalism isn’t the name for most of our shared beliefs, but rather some perversion to be ashamed of. They’d like nothing more than to prevent the poor and disenfranchised from obtaining college educations, and they thus spread the myth that academics across the board are pompous, overpaid, and uninterested in real issues, which prevents leftists from remembering the role education plays in upward mobility. The Right wants to prevent people without money from having access to the critical thinking skills, understanding of history and science, and practical job training that one gets in college, and is thus working to develop a system in which the general populace believes that we shouldn’t work to lower tuition rates and increase federal funding, but rather shun the entire university system. This will discourage leftists from pursuing education reform and keep potential opponents out of college, which will, in turn, keep rich conservatives in power.

In short, they’re trying to prevent us from staying organized, and people who fall for their propaganda are doing their work for them. The definition of “liberal” is a matter of semantics, not policy; it depends on who you ask, and people fighting for the same causes may give themselves very different labels. If you support religious tolerance, social welfare, environmental protection, and the eradication of racism, but hate liberals and everything “they” stand for, then you’ve been duped by the Right’s misinformation campaign.

Also, I’m sick of people who call themselves allies - male allies to women, white allies to people of color, first world allies to third world nations - but are more concerned with boosting their ego by yelling at fellow leftists than with actually developing any strategies for change. Mainstream feminism is saturated with racism and privilege, but power grabs and snide generalizations aren’t effective ways to improve it. I’m not sure what good this woman thought she was doing by calling us names without bothering to learn anything about us, but I’ll bet she went home drunker on self-righteousness than on alcohol.

What really bothered me on a personal level, though, was the sexism throughout the encounter. I haven’t had many encounters with sexist women, but when I meet one, she really throws me for a loop. Notice that, although she knew I was married to an aspiring professor, this woman didn’t seem to think for a second that maybe I was an academic, too. In her mind, I was a pure and innocent girl-child who’d been unwittingly snatched up by an evil liberal elitist. Furthermore, she maintained a respectful distance from my husband, even while she was chewing him out; when she started talking to me, though, she felt perfectly entitled to my personal space. Also, I loved her hypocrisy: “She doesn’t need men to defend her, because she’s not explicitly saying no! This is a woman’s bar, so I’ll attack any woman I want!”

And it didn’t stop there. The next morning, after I’d spent the night mulling over the issues that I wrote about above, I bounced some ideas off of Tomemos and his sister’s boyfriend, thinking that I might turn them into a blog entry (which, as you can see, I have). We had an interesting discussion - it was actually his sister’s boyfriend who called the woman sexist, after I’d pointed out her sexism; odd that the word didn’t occur to me. However, within hours, Tomemos had written an entry on his own blog, which basically consisted of everything I’d said to him. He gave me credit for it, but that didn’t ease what really stung: the fact that he didn’t realize I might want to speak for myself. Despite the fact that I’m a blogger (and have been longer than he has), it didn’t occur to him that I planned to retain control of my own ideas.

I was pissed at him for a little while, but I eventually realized that his behavior was a product of the system in which all of us - me, the asshole, and all the bystanders - were operating. In my experience, when a woman* is put into a compromising position, whether it’s assault or childbirth or anything in between, she’s viewed as a passive and unresponsive locus around which others take action; they feel the need to step in, intervene, rescue her, and speak for her, but never give her the opportunity to take control of her own situation. And during the encounter, I was complicit in this. As she yelled at me, I was paralyzed by my inability to come up with an exit strategy, my reluctance to prove her right by acting “elitist,” my doubt that she was actually going to hurt me (my own form of sexism?), and my disbelief that I was being attacked, for no reason, by a fellow woman and progressive. I knew I was coming across as terrified, but I didn’t know what to do besides look at Tomemos and his sister’s boyfriend as if I were silently pleading for help.

Afterwards, it felt like I became a symbol of the encounter in a way that Tomemos didn’t, even though she attacked him first. The event revolved around me, but I wasn’t considered a participant. And I let it play out that way. I couldn’t figure out how to assert myself.

How do you dismantle a system when you fall into compliance with it at the most important moments? How can we achieve our goals when we’re so eager to demonize our allies? How the fuck are we going to get anything done when women think they can dominate other women?

This is why conservatives have gained so much ground, people. They’re exploiting our weak spots and we’re too insecure to admit it.

* I’m curious - how widespread is this phenomenon? Do women in other cultures or social groups experience this, too? Also, I realize rape is an exception to this, since cases of rape are so fraught with victim-blame.