Pushing the easy buttons

Okay, I know I know, three posts inspired – at least in part – by Toshgate? There’s just so much to say though. I’m trying not to say exactly the same things everyone else has been saying so well, and I’m mostly trying to take a more personal approach so here you go, post number three citing Toshgate as inspiration.

I’ve spent the better part of the last week steeped in the muck of misogyny in the Twitterverse. While I haven’t been engaging nearly as much of some of my braver tweeps I have chosen to stick around and bear witness, showing support where I can.

And then today Shakesville posted this piece about Dan Savage’s track record of fat shaming and A Time to Laugh posted this piece about rape culture and slavery apologists in conservative evangelical circles.

And all of them bring me to the same point: These people who claim to be railing against the oppression of feminism/liberalism/political correctness want us to believe that they are speaking truth to power. Their rape jokes/fat shaming/slave apologia are a spark of light in the darkness, calling attention to uncomfortable truths. They portray themselves as being victimized or attacked by those who try to silence them with the muzzle of political correctness.

At first, the notion that they are pushing boundaries sounds kind of right. I mean their words are certainly shocking to hear.  But scratch a little deeper, take even a nano-second to reflect on what purpose exactly those shocking words are serving and you can see that there is nothing revolutionary about what they are doing.  Whether they are propagating the rape culture, promoting fat-phobia or denying the horrifying legacy of slavery their actions are simply a natural extension of the dominant discourse.

The only rule these people are breaking is the one that requires those with privilege to exercise and maintain that privilege by subtler, more insidious, more structural means.

Daniel Tosh, Dan Savage and Doug Wilson (triple D?) are not the black sheep of the family.  Rather they are that loud drunken uncle that tells abrasive black jokes at the table while the rest of the family tut-tuts, only to go home and discuss why it’s a shame that that nice George Zimmerman is getting persecuted for defending himself.  The Toshes and Wilson’s are extreme enough in their methods that the rest of us can just shake our heads, safe in the knowledge that “we’re not like that”.  But make no mistake, if you have ever even suggested that a woman “should have known what to expect” or that “Black people should just get over it already” then you are just as much a part of the problem as the most offensive maker of rape jokes out there.

Where the boys aren't

Ever since I was nine or ten I’ve gotten along with guys.  In high school most of my friends, especially the ones that hung around, were guys.  I don’t know why except that I never really related to the way so many of the girls acted with their friends.  I wasn’t into the New Kids on the Block, I didn’t watch 90210 and I had a foul mouth and a dirty mind.  While other girls were pining for Jason Priestly and reading Sweet Valley High I was watching Chopping Mall and listening to the Dead Milkmen.

All I know for sure is that I had some amazing friendships with straight guys in high school.

Of course I also had a lot of male “friends” turn into emotionally and sometimes physically abusive assholes. I can think of four off the top of my head who either threatened me with violence or actually hit me.  Others spread slut-shaming rumours about me.  Others would only talk to me on the phone, not willing to be seen talking to me in public.

Still, I miss having straight male friends.

But this last few weeks of witnessing the vile, hateful and abusive things (here and here) that have been said to and about women I respect, admire, and in some cases consider to be friends has driven home how I got to a point where I no longer had male friends.

Because you reach a point where you can no longer ignore the bullshit that sometimes comes out of their mouths.  Part of the deal was always that you didn’t call them on every sexist thing they say, besides, to do so would be exhausting.  So I pulled back.

As I was reading all the hate and vitriol on Twitter this past week all I could think was, “There’s no way to tell which guys walking down the street think this way”.  There are truly no signifiers of who is safe.  As any woman in the activist community will tell you, lefty beliefs and proclamations of feminist ideologies is no guarantee that a guy won’t shut you down with misogynist epithets or rape you after he gets you back to his place to check out his collection of feminist essays.

And I know what you might be thinking, what about the queers? I’ve heard straight women say things like “just hang out with gay guys!” but being gay is not some magic bullet to shedding all your misogynist baggage. In some cases it’s just more open because, unlike straight or bi guys, gay guys don’t have to worry that they won’t get laid if they piss you off.  I’ve been forced to hide out in a bar bathroom because a gay male “friend” was trying to physically intimidate me because I was upset with his friend’s sexism.

So what’s a girl who likes to hang with guys to do?

There are many amazing, open, and thoughtful guys out there but the problem is that it can take so much time and work just to find out if any given guy is “one of the good ones”.  There are friends I had in high school that I still wonder about.  For various reasons I lost touch with pretty much everyone but I still miss some of those guys, especially the ones with whom I spent a lot of one-on-one time. I miss my friend Ryan who’s only reaction to me coming out as bi was to shrug and start talking with me about who we thought was hot, and who promised me that if I ever died he wouldn’t let anyone eulogize me by talking about how “pretty” I was.  I miss my friend Jay whose only reaction to finding me crying in his bedroom at one in the morning was simply, “what happened?”

But at this point in my life as a married mother in her thirties the door on new guy friendship feels closed to me. Because as far as I can tell, straight (or bi) guys don’t make close friendships with married women, especially when the only men I meet these days are married fathers.

So I miss those old friends, and I wish I still had that kind of friendship in my life but Goddamn if I know how to find it now.

This week in rape culture…

I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to blog about this, I wasn’t going to tweet about it. But after seeing the attacks being made on someone I consider a friend who has chosen to take on Daniel Tosh and his defenders I need to say this.  If you haven’t heard, the comedian Daniel Tosh, in response to a woman who “heckled” him by telling him that rape is never funny, declared to the audience “Wouldn’t it be funny if she got gang raped by five guys right now?”  This after witnessing the horror that has been unleashed on Anita Sarkeesian because she had the nerve to even consider talking about sexist tropes in video games. But I digress.

In the ensuing online shit storm a bevy of men, many of them comics themselves, have rushed to his defence.  Because apparently heckling a comedian is the worst possible sin, deserving of any vile or threatening reaction the comic can spew forth.

So, to the point.

For every person defending anyone’s right to make rape jokes there is a woman who just locked another door. In her house, in her car, in her mind.

When I was fifteen at least half of my female friends had been raped or sexually assaulted.  One by her older brother when she was still a child, she worried that because of the assault she’d never have children.  One by a guy in an ally with a knife. One never told me the details, she just asked if that meant she wasn’t a virgin anymore.  Everyone in the school knew that a certain guy had raped a certain girl, when her boyfriend went after him the rapist stabbed him.

When I was in grade twelve a girl in my school was stalked, raped and murdered by her ex-boyfriend.

When I see these people defending the funniness of rape jokes I feel that much less safe in an already unsafe world.  I know that there are real people on the other end of the keyboard who, at the very least, I could not trust to defend my safety if I were openly threatened in a public setting.  More likely they would tell me that I was lucky that someone was paying me any attention at all.

I start wanting to lock doors in my heart and my mind that I have been trying oh so hard to crack open.  Part of me wants to never leave the house again.

I want to not feel nervous every time I hear a bunch of white guys laughing among themselves. I want to not fear for my safety just because I don’t want to give some guy my phone number. I want to remember what it’s like to not fear sex.  And right now, more than anything I want to wrap my arms around those women who literally put their safety on the line by directly challenging the terrifying onslaught of misogyny on Twitter and in the gaming world.

Life as it should be

I once had a therapist tell me that I’m living life as it should be in the world as it is.  It was probably one of the most powerful things a therapist has ever said to me.  I find myself living with a constant narrative in my head telling me that I don’t measure up to others, that I’ve missed the boat on growing up, that I have and am destined to fail.  So here’s my dirty secret: the closest I’ve come to a “real job” is a three month contract about a year before I had M.  That came after completing a psychology degree with honours, one year of grad school, a diploma in web design and administration and a certificate in arts administration.  All that edumacation and I never managed to get beyond one short-term contract.

When I had M and started connecting with other moms they were all on mat leave, coming from a wide variety of professions. While they were trying to decide how long to stay home before returning to work I was filled with anxiety and insecurity because I had nothing to return to. When I became pregnant I was engaged in a long and fruitless job search in arts admin and the thought of trying to return to that with an additional few years of being out with my kid seemed impossible. For about a year I operated under the delusion that I wanted to be an electrician until on the last night of my electrical theory class I realized there was no part of me that really wanted that.

So I went home, sat down with H and said, “I don’t want to do this, I really don’t” and he said, “Okay, let’s figure out what you do want to do” (have I mentioned how much I love that man?). I picked up the continuing ed course catalogue for a local college and started to flip through it for inspiration, and I found it.  One of their courses was in “life skills coaching”, not the same thing as life coaching but it reminded me that I had actually thought about becoming a life coach before but had dismissed it because I figured I couldn’t afford the time or money to train for it.  I did my research, picked a school and dipped into the money given to me by my grandfather.  Two years later I had a certificate in hand, a website up and running and even a couple of clients.  I love coaching.  It feels like a perfect fit.  If I could afford to I would do it for free but of course I can’t afford to do that.  And therein lies the rub. Whenever I think of how little I contribute financially to my household I get overwhelmed with guilt, insecurity and a diminished sense of worth.  It’s like my ability to make money overshadows everything else in my life.

I love where my life is at right now. I have a great partner and a solid marriage, an incredible child, a home that I love (despite the old roof and bizarre DIY work of the previous owners), some great friends and I’m doing work that I love.  But when I start to think about money and my perception of what others see as valuable or important it eclipses all of that. It casts a pall over my otherwise thoroughly fulfilling life.

I also know that I was not just twiddling my thumbs while everyone else was pursuing their careers and “getting things done”.  But the work in which I was engaged was of a deeper more personal kind.  While others were building their external lives and engaging with the outside world I was doing the hard but invisible work of healing, of trying to learn how to be okay.  It boggles my mind now to think of how many years I went, knowing that I needed some kind of treatment, some kind of professional support in my quest for mental health, and got none.  Ironically, university was the one time in my life when I could have gotten free therapy but I never availed myself of it because university was also the longest stretch I went un-medicated with no significant episodes of depression.  Until a month or two before graduation when I started to slip into a nearly paralysing depression that waxed and waned for more than a year.  At a time when I should have been jumping into the working world I was barely able to leave the house, just struggling to keep my head above water.

I know all of this. I know, intellectually how important the work of healing has been and how much energy and time it has taken and still takes.

But despite knowing all of that, I just can’t seem to shut down that voice that tells me that I can’t and will never measure up. That failure is inevitable. That I’m going through the motions, pretending that I haven’t already failed.  That there’s nowhere left to go because if I can’t make a success of this I don’t know what else to do.  That even if I decided to give up and go to work for someone else, no one would have me.

And right now I just want to “live my life as it should be” and “the world as it is” can go fuck itself.

Ad hominem at it's worst

I started out to right a post about what happened to Jan Wong after she had the nerve to suggest that there is racism in Quebec.  But there was just too much to say and not enough coherent brain cells to do it justice so let me be concise.

• A prominent Chinese Canadian reporter claims that there is a bias in Quebec against those who are not “pure laine” or pure francophone Quebecois.
• She is viciously attacked with racist undertones and overt racism.
• Her editor not only fails to back her up (even though he approved the story himself) but he squarely places the blame on her, effectively hanging her out to dry.
• Her toxic work environment leads to a severe clinical depression for which she seeks leave.
• She refuses to sign a form allowing the employer and insurance company access to all of her medical information.
• Her leave is cut short because here employers don’t believe her despite clear doctor’s order not to go to work.
• She is eventually fired even after the insurance company’s own assessment declares that she is suffering from depression and should be treated with care.
• She refuses to sign a confidentiality agreement that would prevent her frm talking about what happened.
• After going through the lengthy process of writing and re-writing a book with a publisher and getting it to the copyright stage, the publisher pulls the rug out from under her and asks her to remove all references to her employer. She refuses and loses her book deal. (happily she self-published)

Originally printed in Le Devoir - Image Credit: Garnotte

So this is what I see.  I see an Asian woman castigated and eventually fired for having the nerve to call out white racism for what it is.

I see a person suffering from mental illness being fired for having the nerve to claim the rights to which she is legally entitled.

I see that once again a woman of colour is turned into a scapegoat to deflect our attention from the very necessary conversation about racism not only in Quebec, but Canadian society as a whole.

I see a woman attacked so viciously from all sides that she is broken, unable to function.

I see the stigma against mental illness, alive and well.

And I see a dramatic illustration of how racism, sexism and ablism collide to create the perfect storm of systemic oppression.


For a bigger picture see these:

The book at Chapters.com
Interview on CBC’s Sunday Edition
Notes on a Scandal by David Hayes
Monday was a great day for xenophobia in Quebec
Quebec's xenophobia - what else is new?
Critics: Quebec town's conduct code 'xenophobic'

Slut

 Slut. Whore. Tramp. These are the names so many of us live with. Whispered under the breath, like a cold rustling wind that follows us through the hallways or down the streets.  This is a letter to those girls in school right now who have been labeled and slut shamed for the sin of being a girl. And make no mistake – that is all it takes to be at risk for this brand of bullying.

Wear short skirts? Slut.
Hang out with guys? Slut.
Dated the wrong guy? Slut.
Wear baggy clothes? Slut.
Live on your own? Slut.
Wear heels? Slut.
Goth? Punk? Slut.
Listen to hip hop? Slut.
On the pill? Slut.
Have a single mom? Slut.
Get along with a male teacher? Slut.
Popular guy likes you? Slut.
Unpopular guy likes you? Slut.

There are a million reasons why someone might call you a slut but they all come down to this: All girls are fair game. While boys are kept in line by the threat of being labeled “fags” girls are forever at risk for a big fat serving of slut shaming.

When it happens it’s so easy to say, “No honey, you’re not a slut. You’re a virgin/you only slept with one guy/ you have a boyfriend.” But this misses the point.

This is what I need to say to you. It is never okay to call someone out as a slut. You’re body is yours and only you get to decide when, how and with whom you want to have sex. No one has the right to tell you that you are deficient or depraved because of your sexuality.  So long as we accept that it’s okay to call a girl a slut if she “really is one” we are giving implicit consent to those who use the word as a weapon against all girls and women.

I don’t care if you’re having sex. I don’t care who you’re doing it with and I don’t care how often.

I care that you only do it when you really want to. I care that you take ownership of your sexuality and talk openly with your partner(s). I care that you take care of yourself and use protection. I care that you don’t do anything that makes you feel ‘less than’. I care that you don’t let anyone make you feel like you’re wrong or bad for being a girl who is comfortable in her own skin.

So no honey, you are not a slut. None of us are.

Sigh. Here we go again.

So the ugly beast rears its head again.

I am so tired of this

This being crazy

This being broken

This roller coaster ride that is my mental health.

I spoke to a friend about my insecurities when I hear other mothers talking about how tired they are after they run off a list of the fifty things they did that day.

I told her that when I hear this I think, “How did you do all of that? I barely clean and I’m still exhausted.”

The reality is that with every day I am doing the invisible work.

Not the invisible work of motherhood or marriage but the invisible work of being and staying okay.

The invisible work of holding myself together.

We talk a lot about the importance of being true to yourself and forging your own path. We talk about the value of the outliers and those who see the world differently.

We talk about not caring about social expectations or conventional norms.

What we fail to talk about is that just because you are different, just because you follow your own path, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t hard as hell.

I don’t want to be anyone else.

I don’t want to fit in.

But I do want to have somewhere that I feel I belong.

I try to imagine what it must feel like to not feel so profoundly set a part from those around me.

I want to know what it feels like to not feel profoundly, inexorably broken.

I want to know what it feels like to not have lost a parent.

I want to know what it feels like to have a clear and well-defined path.

I want to know what it feels like to have a cohesive extended family.

I want to know what it feels like to assume that things will work out.

I want to know what it feels like to have a consistent group of long time friends.

I want to know what it feels like to feel comfortable in social situations.

I want to know what it feels like to not always be wondering if I should expose this or that part of my life and my history.

And sometimes, when things get bad I want to know what it feels like to drink myself into oblivion.

Sometimes I want to know what it feels like to make the pain real with a razor.

Sometimes I want to know what it feels like to smash everything in sight.

For whatever reason, something stops me. I can’t bring myself to cross these lines.

I know that I have to find a way to push through.

And then sometimes I feel trapped.

I feel trapped by the knowledge that not living isn’t an option.

And so, I’m tired. Tired to the marrow of doing what I need to do to be okay.