the tone of performance

I do not attend dramatic performances very often, and as such, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything other than the Vagina Monologues performed more than once. In some ways, that disappoints me a little, and I wish I could muster more interest, because seeing a different performer play a role can bring an entirely new meaning to that role, one that you might not have considered previously.

 

That said, sometimes seeing from a different perspective is more like hearing a song you love remade into a song you hate, or a song that’s simply boring, or, worst of all, a song that expresses something you didn’t think was in the original version.

 

Many of the performers in the Vagina Monologues this year appeared to have no lack of acting ability or enthusiasm. What they lacked may have existed only in my view. They lacked the vision of the monologues that I had—a vision that may well have been influenced by past performances, my own experiences, and our different lives.

 

Monologues like “My Angry Vagina” made me wince this year, not laugh in slightly-pained sympathy. “My Short Skirt” was a frenzied bellow of rage at catcallers and gawkers, not a claiming of a woman’s right to wear what she wants because she wants it. The clitoris has twice the number of nerve endings the penis does…And the feeling from this performance was that we’re viciously superior about that, not just happy for ourselves. To me, when I saw the Vagina Monologues this year, the performance didn’t feel like activism. It didn’t feel like acting, even.

 

It felt like a reaction.

 

And that may be a valid view. Perhaps it’s one that makes sense right here and right now. But it makes me sad. Sad because when we react instead of acting, then we make it more about what we oppose than what we are.

abortion is a moral value (revised)

Pro-choice people are ashamed of their stance.

Not everyone, of course. Sweeping generalizations, particularly in discussions about abortion, are the sort of thing likely to get one verbally lynched. But even a quick examination of what people are writing and saying about abortion tells you something important. It tells you that social conservatives have demanded and taken the moral high ground on the matter of abortion, and liberals aren’t doing anything to change that. Instead, most liberals are standing around wringing their hands.Those liberals say things like this: “I…respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available.” (Hillary Rodham Clinton, 01/24/05)“I’m pro-choice politically but pro-life personally.” (Many.)

“I oppose abortion, personally. I don’t like abortion.” (John Kerry, 07/04/04)

“I’m pro-choice, but…” (Many.)

Sometimes they abdicate all forms of choice.

“I’m not a woman, so I can’t tell a woman what to do with her body.”

Let me ask you a question, you who say you support a woman’s right to choose, but…

If opposing abortion is “moral,” then why are you pro-choice? Do you vote pro-choice because you think that it ought to be a right even if you think no one should exercise it? If so, why all the defensiveness? Do you also produce press statements explaining that you think it should be legal to get bitten by venomous snakes for the sake of your religion but you personally don’t agree with the idea? No? Do you issue press statements saying that it should be legal to smoke even though it’s bad for you? No? Tell me, what’s the difference?

Pro-choice.

I’ll repeat that.

Pro-choice.

Note the emphasis. Being pro-choice means that you support a woman’s right to choose, not that you are yourself obligated to have an abortion or that you are demanding others have abortions or even that you think anyone ought to have an abortion. Somewhere along the way, the right told us that moral values and being anti-choice go hand in hand. We forgot what being pro-choice means. We began accommodating. We began trying to get along. We began selling out.

You might think that’s too harsh.

Maybe you think that the way to convert anti-choice people is to talk about how much you respect their views. I ask, then: Do you send memos to the administration telling them that you really respect how they torture people in order to sway them to your side? Or do you speak out and say that torture is wrong and not torturing is right without worrying about whether you’re showing enough respect for them to keep liking you?

Maybe you think that the way to convert anti-choice people is to start with what you think is a middle ground. Most people who are anti-choice make an exception for cases of rape and incest. Liberals giving speeches love to point to this as an example of how really we’re all on the same side and it’s just a matter of degree. The problem is that they’re wrong. Those who support abortion only in cases of rape and incest are those who believe that pregnancy is a woman’s fault and a woman’s punishment. You disagree? Then please. Explain to me the rationale that says otherwise. Explain to me how it is that you are not saying: Women who voluntarily have sex should “take the consequences” and carry that pregnancy to term, but women who are forced into it (as long as we can be sure they were forced; Bill Napoli provides an explanation of a “real-life rape victim” to help us with this) don’t deserve that punishment and thus can be permitted to have abortions. Explain to me how it is not simply another way to control women through their bodies, in complete opposition to the idea of a woman’s right to choose. Can you do that?

Maybe you think that bodily integrity is a constitutional right, a fundamental human right, and that’s the end of the story. If so, why aren’t you taking the moral high ground, my liberal friend? Isn’t freedom one of the ideals of our beloved country? Isn’t freedom a moral value? Why are we allowing these words to be co-opted by those who endorse censorship, spying on citizens, unauthorized detainment, torture, and slaughter, while we hang our heads in shame over our moral values?

Stand up, fellow liberals. Stand strong. Stand tall.

Stand next to me.

I’ll be the person saying, “I am pro-choice.” No buts.

v-day

V-Day.

February 23rd and 24th for us.

Eve Ensler interviewed over 200 women about their vaginas and wrote a play based on the interviews.

What would you say?

Will you hear their stories?

vagina, the four-letter word

A minor spoiler for the Vagina Monologues follows this warning.

 

 

Until the first time I saw the Vagina Monologues, I’d never heard a woman say the word “cunt” in public.

 

I remember the time in fourth grade when they separated the boys and the girls to explain to us girls that someday, ladies, you will bleed from your area. That was how it was put, too. Until I went home and asked my mom, I had no idea what area they were talking about or why we would bleed from it. When she said, “They meant your vagina,” I was enlightened. Then I was horrified, of course, because who wants to bleed from the vagina? Bleeding from your area makes it all sound so much more distant and not as personal, unpleasant, and worrying.

 

It was quite some time after that that I encountered “cunt.” (In the auditory sense, I mean.) I felt an odd kind of satisfaction about the word. A four-letter word for female genitalia. It seemed so appropriate. After all, there are so many four-letter words we can use to refer to male genitalia.

 

Years later, I even read Inga Muscio’s Cunt, carrying it around at the gym while I worked out. I got a few odd looks, but no one directly commented. To be perfectly honest, I think I was more embarrassed about the flower on the cover in conjunction with the word “cunt,” suggesting comparisons of my area with flowers, an idea that has disturbed me since Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Still, though, one cannot simply carry about a book with “cunt” on the cover without being fully aware of it. You never forget that you have it.

 

At the Vagina Monologues the first year, I got a button. It said:   I ♥ my cunt.

 

Four-letter words are fun. And when they refer to my vagina, I’m not willing to say that they’re dirty.

 

But a woman in Atlantic Beach thinks that “vagina” is a dirty word all by itself. When she drove past a marquee advertising the Vagina Monologues, her niece asked what “vagina” meant, prompting a complaint call to the owners of the theater.

For once, I am going to say, “Think of the children!”

 

We should think of the children not because we should take “offensive” words like “vagina” out of their sight. We should think of the children because if we don’t talk about vaginas, we talk about areas. When we talk about areas, we talk about shame. Shame over our bodies, shame over our femaleness, shame over who and what we are. Is that what we want our children to grow up with?

 

The Vagina Monologues are about acknowledging that shame that is instilled by society, and then getting rid of it.

cultural misapprehensions

I don’t think I understand cultural appropriation.

 

Admittedly, being multiracial and adopted may make me inherently unsuited to comprehending the concept of a personal culture.

 

Or maybe it’s that I fundamentally am incapable of understanding how the spread of culture can be a bad thing. Dreadlocks, bindis, henna, kohl, hijab, saris, kanji: Many people would tell you that they’re special, that they ought to be reserved to those people who are of the culture that originated them.

 

Looking at old family pictures from the seventies, right before I was born, I see my dad and his cousins and siblings and friends. They have afros and dashikis and big clunky faux-African jewelry and T-shirts that say, “It’s a black thing. You wouldn’t understand.” The men in these pictures and the kids standing on a street corner a block away from my house wearing jeans sagging to their knees and hooded sweatshirts big enough to house homeless people and a comb stuck in the back of their nappy afros: They are the same people.

 

They are the people who would say, if they said anything at all to mainstream culture, “You won’t accept me or mine so I don’t want you to use what we thought of.” They say this to those people who blare Eminem from the tinted windows of their SUVs or souped-up Hondas as they lock their doors while they drive through the ghetto, just like the people before them said it to those who loved Elvis but talked about the animal nature of the Negro.

 

It’s not that I don’t understand the anger.

 

It’s that it seems to me as though the anger is misplaced when we direct it at “cultural appropriation.”

 

The problem is not that items from “other” cultures are edging into “mainstream culture.” Mainstream culture, at least in the United States, is composed entirely of bits and pieces from other cultures. The one thing that we could claim to be truly American is the capitalistic spirit, and that’s from Protestant work ethics and a national sense of defensiveness. Everything else is borrowed and altered from some other place and some other time so that it can be squished into the fuzzy-edged collage that is American culture. Coffee to cappuccino to chocolate to chai: They were all “cultural appropriations.”

 

The problem is that we’re all willing to buy into the idea that “mainstream culture” is white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture when it’s not. Mainstream culture never has been some concrete item distinct from the minorities of the United States. Sometimes I hear people bemoaning the spread of English-language T-shirts in Japan or American pop music in the Middle East, but no one ever complains about how “American culture is being appropriated.” Instead, people write volumes worrying that Japanese or Middle Eastern culture is being obliterated.

 

It’s a subtle kind of kowtowing to the concept of white superiority. Seems crazy, doesn’t it? But think: What we’re really saying with these sorts of statements is that whiteness and westernization are so powerful that they destroy all that they encounter and the only defense is to stay as far away as possible. Otherwise, your inferior culture will disintegrate under the impact.

 

That’s ridiculous.

 

You know how cultures have been annihilated in the past?

 

Violence and persuasion. One of the key strategies of the British Empire was to convince “the natives” that they were inferior to the British. In many cases, it worked.

 

I look at these claims of cultural appropriation. I see the belief that minorities aren’t strong enough to retain cultural attributes. I see the belief that we—the minorities—will disappear if we don’t put up barriers around what is ours. I see the belief that separatism is the only way to retain individuality. I see insecurity. I see that these beliefs are keeping minorities from joining together because we have come to believe that doing so will destroy us all. I see that as we build walls around our communities and cultures, as we isolate ourselves to guard against the onslaught of mainstream culture: That is when our cultures begin to disintegrate, because we define ourselves as only “the other.” It is not that we are black, Native American, Filipino, Japanese, Hawaiian, Indian; it is that we are Not White.

 

Gwen Stefani with a bindi, middle-class white kids obsessed with anime, suburban teenagers smoking pot and wearing dreads…The danger is in what we believe, not in what they popularize.

 

I saw a T-shirt recently that said, “It’s a black thing. Try to understand.” It’s not the wording I would choose, but I like it. I like it because it suggests that at least some minorities in the U.S. are building the confidence to invite, rather than retreat.

what lies beneath (2nd revision)

Not too long after I graduated from high school, I spent a year as a repair tech and computer lab teacher for a local school corporation. I taught the adults to make sure the computer was plugged in before they called for repair. I taught the kids keyboarding and the basics of computer use. The kids taught me far more than I taught them.

 

I learned that kindergarteners all have a story to tell. As soon as a hand goes up, you have to say, “Okay, Taylor, is this a story or a question?” No matter what the response is, you’ll get a story. Guaranteed.

 

I learned that fourth-graders are literal listeners. Never, ever say the words “Hit the ‘enter’ key.” Never.

 

I learned that first-graders think you know everything they know. Everything. Including obscure video game trivia, characters in sequels of sequels of sequels to Disney movies released in the theater, and their Aunt Jenny. Indications that you do not know any of these things are appalling and will likely result in announcements like, “My mom knows everything.”

 

I learned that fifth-grade boys will say, with no hesitation at all, “You’re a very small person, aren’t you? I’m bigger than you are.” There is no good comeback to this statement. “At least I’ve got a car!” gives you the short-term win but you feel silly about it later.

 

I learned that second-graders think farting is very, very funny, and the humor of it never decreases. Even if it’s the seventeenth time that someone has farted in the last half hour, it’s still hilarious. Also, the more the farts stink, the funnier they are. If they can get their teacher to breathe through her shirt to filter out the stench, they win.

 

I learned that third-graders spout racism without even thinking about it because it’s what their parents taught them, and they don’t recognize it as racism despite having a vague, general idea of what racism is.

 

We had a paint/picture program called KidPix on the computers in the lab. KidPix had a “stamp” feature, where you could use it to “stamp” a small picture on your “canvas.” Available stamps ran the gamut from armadillos to brooms to clouds, but for some reason, the only two stamps with people’s faces were a man’s head and a woman’s head, both shown in opposite profile. In other words, when you put the two stamps next to each other in the right order, the man and woman appeared to be kissing. Naturally, one of my kids discovered this almost immediately. Third-graders are like that.

 

Then Taylor looked over at the monitor next to him and said, “Ewwww. That’s gross. Black people and white people kissing. Gross.”

 

You see, the woman stamp was a dark-skinned woman and the man stamp was a Caucasian man.

 

It never occurred to Taylor that there was anything wrong with his statement. How could it? His parents had told him, he explained to me when I asked where he’d gotten that idea. His parents, who were so very nice to me as his teacher and so very polite to everyone and so very politically correct. His parents, who would have been horrified to discover that along with peanut butter & jelly on wheat bread, they served up a heaping helping of racism to their child. They weren’t KKK members hiding under sheets. They weren’t even malicious bigots hiding under their business reputations. They were upstanding members of the community hiding behind nothing at all.

 

They seemed so normal.

 

Of course, so does racism.

 

I haven’t really changed all that much from first draft to this version. This is probably because I tend to compulsively revise during the writing process and again once I see it actually posted, and without more distance between viewings, it’s hard for me to see where to change things. Unfortunately, I’m also terrible at evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of anything I write for much the same reason; if I could see the weaknesses clearly, then I would change them. We were supposed to tell a personal story. I suppose this is, in a way, but it’s also a story with a very specific point, as are the stories I usually “tell” in a public forum. There’s only so much of me that I’m willing to put out there for public consumption, and I have to have a reason to do more than that. So it’s very possible that one of the biggest weaknesses my public “storytelling” has is that I’m not willing to make it intimate, and that would certainly apply to this piece.

opb

I like that Ro talks about a variety of things. I liked this post, particularly, because sometimes (and gods only know I’m deeply guilty of this), we get all caught up in other things and we forget to look at the details of life. I’m really looking forward to seeing some blogging on community and food and dance; I want to see how that all fits together for her.

vaginas, unite!

I’m going to go see the Vagina Monologues. This will be the third time I’ve seen them, and while I’m going again partly out of a vague, general sense that I ought to Support The Cause (and what cause is better than female genitalia?) and partly because the ones performed vary every year, mostly I’m going because both times I’ve gone, it’s been different for me. Not just different in terms of what’s performed, but I hear a little more behind the words sometimes, or if I’ve heard that monologue before, I can pay more attention to the audience’s reaction, and it’s a fuller experience.

 

This year, I’m trying to convince my mom and my aunt to go with me. My aunt, the second wave feminist, and my mom, who is an activist within the school system. So far, neither of them is confident that she needs to listen to women talk about vaginas in public. On the other hand, they think it might be nice to attend something that’s sort of like consciousness-raising. Sort of like the old days.

 

Wish me luck.

let’s not ask the pilot.

Patrick Smith, writer of Salon’s “Ask the Pilot” column, wants to explain to us why a letter-writer who objected to his use of the term “stewardess” is silly. It’s not just silly, in fact; it’s childish and she’s throwing a temper tantrum. She should take a long walk and get over it.

 

One wonders if all of Salon’s editors had a momentary breakdown of thought and failed to recall that they’re supposed to be a liberal magazine, not a combination of Maxim, the Bob & Tom Show, and Howard Stern.

 

For one brief, brief moment, I wondered if maybe I was overreacting. It’s one of the hazards of being a feminist in a patriarchal society. People accuse you all the time of seeing harassment where there was only an unwanted breast fondle of an employee who was probably asking for it anyway, and you start to worry that you’re on a hair trigger. Then I noticed the sidebar.

 

Isn’t that cockpit a little drab? Perhaps a spider plant, or a simple lithograph, would liven it up!

 

I went ahead and clicked. Then I got to read Mr. Smith’s strangely mangled defense–replete with sexist quotes from letter-writers–of how even though decorating is girly, he’s a straight man who is more of a man than other men because he talks about interior design.

 

And then I realized that I wasn’t overreacting; I was simply reacting. Reacting to Mr. Smith’s assumption that demeaning women is acceptable because it’s all in the name of “aesthetics” and it’s “within the boundaries of good taste.” But here’s the thing, Mr. Smith: If it were truly a simple matter of terminology, a casual way of referring to a flight attendant who is female, then why the big deal? Why do you need to differentiate between female and male flight attendants? Don’t they do the same job? 

 But then, that’s the problem, isn’t it? They do the same job, but that doesn’t mean we want to value them the same. Mr. Smith spends most of his article talking about how hot stewardesses are, were, and can be. In case we still want to be offended that the only value we are attributing to female flight attendants is tied to how good they look in a sarong and how well they can serve coffee, he includes his mom (complete with picture, so we can see that yup, the woman who brought us Mr. Smith was quite attractive). After all, if his mom is there, it can’t be insulting. If, by some bizarre chance, you’re still insulted, Mr. Smith assures you that it could be worse. Be grateful for what you’ve got, girlies.

Unfortunately, Mr. Smith undermines his own argument when he explains that “flight attendant” makes a person sound competent. The job of the flight attendant is to react to emergencies. So, then…Are we to assume that the job of the stewardess is to stand around and look pretty? That seems to be what Mr. Smith is suggesting. Along with serving coffee. Don’t forget the serving. Serving is important. You thought the job of an airline was to get people from one place to another? Silly you! Their real job is to make you feel like Somebody, with warm, caring service from a young, slender, and attractive woman. You might think that this sounds like the description of a brothel, but we’re still talking about airlines.

Mr. Smith’s decision to use the term “stewardess” sometimes “for color” means that he is occasionally choosing to diminish the real competency and significance of a position because he thinks it sounds better. Kind of like if we decided that “boy” was a good way to refer to adult black men sometimes because it sounds better and it’s colloquial. Some of the responses to Mr. Smith’s article demand to know why feminists don’t want to be called women. While I’m not willing to presume to speak for “feminists,” as though every person who believes in the equality of genders and sexes were exactly the same, I’ll offer up a suggestion.

I don’t want to be called a woman when the only reason for doing so is to demean and diminish me while simultaneously implying that my job requires only a pair of breasts and a sweet smile. Oh, and the ability to perform interior decorating, as noted in the sidebar to Mr. Smith’s article. Being a woman is only relevant in the work environment when someone wants to put you in your place.

If that’s not true, then I have only one question. Mr. Smith, why don’t you ever use the term “stewards” to refer to flight attendants?

opb (other people’s blogs)

Sandy’s post about the hidden rules of economic class is interesting. While I’ve seen many people try to make the point that she’s making—we all assume that middle class is the standard and everyone understands it—most people use many more words to do it. The bulleted format of her post makes it harder to ignore the differences. When “I know how to get someone out of jail” is buried in the middle of a paragraph about the life cycle of poverty, it becomes easier to ignore. Also, I’ve never seen the portion about being able to survive in wealth, and in a way it makes a stronger point than the usual middle class/lower class distinctions. Encountering the idea that a middle-class person wouldn’t be able to move up in class any more easily than a working-class person is helpful.

Sandy did a great job of laying out this post to make her points.

JAJS has some great turns of phrase in her stories. I especially like “There are things we are changed by learning…” She’s also good with titles—a faculty I admire a great deal, since mine tend to be randomly tacked on at the end and if I haven’t had any coffee recently I usually just give up entirely and leave it untitled. The gift for what to tell and how to tell it is also very much present in her stories; she doesn’t clutter them with unnecessary information but also doesn’t leave us wondering what really happened.