"Our Girls"

Janelle Monae with the message we need

There's a speech by Elizabeth Cady Stanton called "Our Girls" that I use to teach 19th century feminism, in all its flaws. It makes a good contrast with Frances Willard's linking of women's rights to temperance and "home protection," and often surprises my students because they did not think there were women in the Gilded Age who thought as radically as Stanton did. The opening lines are certainly evocative:

"They are the music, the flowers, the sunshine of our social life. How beautiful they make our homes, churches, schools and festive scenes: how glad and gay they make our streets with their scarlet plumes, bright shawls and tartan plaids. Who can see a bevy of girls tripping home from school without pausing to watch their graceful motions, pretty faces, feet and legs, to listen to their merry words and peals of laughter. See how they romp and play with hoops and balls, with sleds and skates, wash their brothers’ faces in the snow, and beat them in a race on yonder pond. These boys and girls are one to-day in school, at play, at home, never dreaming that one sex was foreordained to clutch the stars, the other but to kiss the dust."

I think about these lines all the time when I watch my six year old daughters playing with their friends in their joyous, carefree way. It often fills me with profound sadness, because I know what society is about to put them through.

The glimpses are already there. Based on their behavior, the boys I see their age have not been taught a lot about being nice to each other or caring about other people's feelings. I know that in a few years my daughters' male peers will be judging them by their looks, and that they will be dealing with the Kavanaughs, Squis, and Judges of the world. My wife and I know that as their parents there is only so much that we can do, and that they are going to have to navigate the minefields of female adolescence mostly by themselves. Things were bad enough already, but with the election of Trump and the confirmation of Kavanaugh the abusers, predators, and misogynists can rest easy that their people are at the helm. I am sure that they feel emboldened.

I know too many people to count who have been sexually abused and assaulted (not all of them women, by the way.) I am sure that I know many more who have not shared their stories with me. I know that in some cases the resulting pain and trauma lasts a lifetime. I also know that not a single person who perpetuated these assaults on the people in my life ever had to face justice. I have also seen up close and in painful ways how institutions and authority figures makes excuses for abusers. Kavanaugh's confirmation sends a clear message to the already disbelieved and disrespected victims: your pain, your experience, and your life simply don't matter.

That's the message Trump's America sends to so many people on a daily basis. The children murdered in school shootings, the black men and women shot down by the police, the immigrant families broken apart and jailed, and the women who are sexually assaulted have essentially been told that their sufferings are justified.

I can't help but to make it personal, and to think about what my girls are growing up into. Those who want them conditioned to "kiss the dust" are behaving with impunity. They have control over the courts now, so their vile fantasies about what kind of lives our girls can and cannot have will soon be a reality. I owe it them to fight to my last breath.

Locker Room Talk

The discussion of Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh has brought back some buried memories of my time in high school.

I did not go to any parties in high school where drinking and drugs were present, but they were an omnipresent part of my teenage environment. Everyone knew about the "stoneys" who would get high before school. In my class there was even a group of "popular" guys who drank themselves into a stupor and called themselves the Brew Crew and even had their own t-shirts made (which they wore to football games.) In the rural Nebraska town where I grew up everybody knew teenage drinking and debauchery ran rampant.

My lack of interest in that culture was mostly due to my complete alienation from my high school's surroundings and my desire to get the hell out as soon as possible. (Once I got to college I started drinking and haven't looked back!) That was confirmed by what so many conservatives euphemistically call "locker room talk."

Most of this talk I heard in the literal locker room, after gym class, although I also heard plenty while working in the corn fields during detasseling season. Locker room talk mostly amounts to men discussing their purported sex with women, usually in a degrading and misogynistic way. What amazes me is that this has been used as a defense rather than an accusation. The president's Access Hollywood tape, for example, was written off as "locker room talk." This kind of talk is evidently the birthright of heterosexual men. If you were ever a boy in high school anywhere in America, you probably heard or engaged in your fair share of locker room talk.

It was my window into a different world, where I heard about all of the parties I wasn't attending and all of the sex I wasn't having. One consistent theme was humiliation. Girls who were willing to fuck, especially if they wanted to fuck more than one person or initiated sex, were branded sluts. The boys who fucked them, of course, were able to brag of their conquests. Sometimes this bragging was about how those girls had not only been fucked, but also demeaned in the process.

One boy who was especially awful boasted of how he had taken the panties of one girl and had put them on the antenna of his pickup truck for everyone to see. I remember another story about a boy intentionally getting his sperm in a girl's hair after a tryst a party in order to embarrass her. I heard that another girl in my class was nicknamed "blue lightning" for the veins in the very pale skin of her breasts.

When men defend their shitty behavior as "locker room talk" what they are really telling you is "I reserve the right in the company of men to demean and attack individual women in a sexual way." Anyone who uses this as a defense is telling on themselves.

Even if the allegations against Kavanaugh (which I believe) are not true, I still recognize his type from my high school days. The thought of one of those people being on the highest court in the land makes me sick with anger. The fact that one of them is in the White House is almost unbearable. 

A Pep Talk From Cranky Bear

[Editor's Note: I have been quite busy lately, and so I have decided to hand the reins over to my friend Cranky Bear. Warning: he is a lot less civil than I am. Right now, I think we could use that.]

Hello all, Cranky Bear here, drinking coffee and ready to give you all a taste of my mind.

A lot of you are really upset today. After all, the Supreme Court just decided to kneecap public employee unions, and Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Yesterday they affirmed gerrymandering and the ability of crisis pregnancy centers to misrepresent themselves. Shit looks pretty bleak.

This is all coming while the government is still holding immigrant children in cages. Just a couple of weeks before, the dotard despot effectively ripped up the postwar alliance system. He is also waging a trade war that is already costing jobs in this country. We are living in dangerous dark times.

Which is why you fuckers have to get up off of your asses and FIGHT!

Yes this sucks, but translate your fear and concern into action, dammit!

When the other side loses, do they engage in fatalism and hopelessness? No, they go out there and relentlessly keep trying to push their agenda forward. After Obama won the presidency they unleashed the Tea Party. As long as we are chickenshit we will lose because we are up against awful people who will stop at nothing to win. They blocked the Garland nomination, they are suppressing votes, and they are relying on the electoral college to maintain minority rule. They have absolutely no fucking shame about going against the will of the majority because they don't give a shit about democracy.

A lot of this is down to our mistaken belief that history is on our side due to our righteousness. Sorry folks, history doesn't give a shit about morality and nothing is inevitable. The tides of history turn only when people MAKE them turn. And as a student of history, I can assure you that shit has been worse than this before. That's not an invitation to fatalism, that's an invitation to FIGHT!

The lying fuckwits and craven crony capitalists and wacko Christianist theocrats up against us are actually few in number. They derive their power and influence from filthy lucre, and also from a pervasive propaganda machine. The thing is, the level of commitment possessed by your average Limbaugh and Fox devoted chodes is pretty damn limited. They might lose their shit when they see a black athlete daring to protest police violence, but they won't do much about it rather than buy another asinine "blue lives matter sticker."

We are younger than them. We are more devoted than them. We are motived by seizing the future, they are still wedded to maintaining a non-existent past. We can win, but first we have to commit ourselves, we have to organize, and we have to stop fucking around. For liberals this means no more West Wing-inspired insipid bullshit about civility. There's no being civil with people who want to wipe you out. For Leftists this means no more purity test bullshit and especially no more standing on the sidelines and sniping rather than getting your damn hands dirty. For all y'all, remember while you are coming up with excuses to not fight, there are children being held in cages in this country every minute of every day. Your bullshit is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

If we are going to fight to win we need to commit ourselves to being in the streets, to striking, to talking to our neighbors, to voting, to canvasing, to running for office, and above all to ORGANIZING. The Fox/Limbaugh chodes will vote for Trump no matter what. Their support of his human trafficking and hostage-taking is proof of this. Stop trying to convince these people to change their minds. They are lost. They are not to be convinced, they are to be defeated, and in that fight, no quarter should be given.

We need to get out there and tell people why they need to care. And please, no more of this "when they go low, we go high" horseshit. Fight to win or don't even bother to fucking fight at all. Times are hard and getting harder. Things will get worse before they get better, but they will only get better if we get out there and make it happen. To quote the speech in Mrs Miniver: "this is the people's war, our war! Fight it then! And may God defend the right."

I'll be in the streets on Saturday, I hope to see you there.

Cranky out