It wasn’t the most formal talk I’ve ever given, but I didn’t know it was being filmed at all, so I’m glad to see it.
And let me tell you “slut” + “faculty member” + “”43” is not the easiest sartorial equation to solve, and on Mother’s Day, no less!
Slutwalk: Appleton
Today, for my 43rd birthday, and on Mother’s Day to boot, I’ll be speaking at Appleton’s first Slutwalk. Here’s a preview of what I’m planning on saying:
Thank you so much, VDAY, for having the ovarios to put on this event here in Appleton.
For those of you who don’t know, Slutwalk began only last year in April, in Toronto, when a police officer admitted that he was told he wasn’t supposed to say that women shouldn’t dress like sluts so as not to be victimized. And by that, he meant they should dress in ways that hid their bodies in ways our misogynist, sex-obsessed culture would find acceptable. Aside from the impossibility of being able to decide what “dressing like a slut” means in any culture, he put together the idea that somehow women’s bodies are at fault for the violence and slut shaming perpetrated against them.
They are not.
Women’s bodies are beautiful and should be seen, and in a culture that had its act together – on both violence and sexuality – police officers wouldn’t say such stupid things. Mind you: he wasn’t trying to be hateful. His words, no doubt, came out of something like compassion for the women who he had seen victimized while doing his job. He wanted – like so many of us do – to keep women safe from sexual assault, from trauma, from fear.
But what many men don’t know is that it’s not what kind of clothing a woman’s body wears that has anything to do with it. It’s what a woman’s body IS that causes us all these troubles: bodies full of desire, desiring, desired; bodies of curves and straight lines and freckles and hair. Bodies of skin and fat and muscle and bone; bodies of organs, of hearts and brains and cervixes.
What I love is that every day of my life I can wake up & say that I was born with the one body part whose only use is pleasure. But if you think about it, which parts of us aren’t? Brains, hair, hands, hearts, breasts, legs, feet and elbows – the skin itself is about pleasure. Freud had this theory that we were all polymorphously perverse – meaning that when we’re born, we’re so awash in the pleasure of having a body that every touch, ever breeze, brings us rolling waves of pleasure and that the process of getting older is learning to move some of that sensitivity to a few precious locations – mostly so, as he figured it, we were going to get anything done at all. And so our nerves, so adept at finding pleasure, became located in our nipples and tongues, our fingers and toes, the backs of knees and the backs of our necks, our lips – both sets of lips – and of course in our genitals too. And somehow we managed to stop touching our selves long enough to write books and build buildings.
But women are a kind of warm, breathing repository of all of that pleasure, and it’s hard not to see, especially not in spring. Our sexual selves come out of hiding in the spring, and so our clothes come off – even here in Wisconsin, where “spring” and “warm” are not always the same thing – because we feel the joy of having bodies, of desiring and being desired. Continue reading “Slutwalk: Appleton”
Ripped & Religious
Decades ago my church decided that the ordination of women was a just and morally responsible thing. Some people left over the decision. Some people still tell me they struggle with the idea. Now many women serve as priests, and many parishioners applaud this fact.
But somehow, despite our belief that both sexes can serve the church, it seems there’s still something unnerving about a priest who is a woman. It has to do with having a woman’s body.
A parishioner told me that he thought I was a great priest, but that if I became pregnant, it would be too weird for him to see me at the altar. Merely holding hands with my husband, even when I am not in clerical clothes, has elicited the comment “Can you do that? I mean, in public?” Another parishioner told me I was too petite to be a priest. I’m 5-10. I have never been called “petite.” I think he meant “female.”
Of course for me, raised Catholic, it’s still odd that ministers/priests should be married, male female or otherwise.
Unfunny Bedfellows
Horrible, Horrible Racism
On Sunday, April 15th, at the Moderna Museet the Swedish Artists Organisation celebrated World Art Day, as well as celebrating its own 75th birthday. Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth, the culture Minister, was Invited to speak and a number of artists were invited to create birthday cakes for the celebration. The Minister was informed that the cake would be about the limits of provocative art, and about female genital mutilation. The event was launched with Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth cutting the first piece of cake from a dark, ruby red velvet filling with black icing, which we understand was created by the Afro-Swedish artist Makode Aj Linde, whose head forms that of the black woman, and is seen with a blackened face screaming with pain each time a guest cuts a slice from the cake. Rather disturbingly for many African women, the minister is pictured laughing as she cuts off the genital area (clitoris)from the metaphorical cake, as the artist Makode screams distastefully. The gaze of the predominantly white Swedish crowd is on Lijeroth who is positioned at the crotch end, as they look on at their visibly ebullient culture minister with seemingly nervous laughter as she becomes a part of the performance – a re-enactment of FGM on a cake made in the image of a disembodied African woman.
Here’s the petition. Sign it.
Radical Nun
Oh, the Church and its consistency with being misogynist. The Vatican has investigated and censured American nuns for being too feminist.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an umbrella group representing most of America’s 55,000 nuns, is in trouble with the Vatican because they’ve apparently have not been vocal enough in their opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and women’s ordination . . .
This directive came as the result of a two-year-long investigation—excellent use of resources, boys—and appears to be part of what is seen as the church veering into more conservative territory. You might not think nuns would be the obvious target of any investigations, considering it’s the priests who’ve been causing most of the actual problems the church has faced recently, but of course organized religion never lets a little thing like logic get in the way.
In terms of the Vatican’s specific issues with the LCWR, it appears they’re mostly angry because the nuns have been “silent on the right to life from conception to natural death.” Also they maintain the LCWR hasn’t taken certain things seriously enough . . .
Here’s the Washington Post‘s version. Ridiculous.
Radfem Trans Misogyny
It makes me sad still. Feminism is better than this, but it persists.
Adrienne Rich was thanked by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire.
She was also thanked by Leslie Feinberg and Minnie Bruce Pratt in their books, which may mean she was only ever okay with some FTM spectrum trans people. So maybe she was only trans misogynist, which is hardly better.
If anyone has any actual evidence in her work of her feelings about transness, I would love to know.
Some days the irony of “biology is not destiny” being a feminist slogan isn’t funny at all.
Kym Worthy’s Noteworthy Goal
Kym Worthy – that’s a name out of a superhero comic in itself, isn’t it? – is Detroit’s prosecutor and she’s trying to get 11,000 rape kits that have never been processed by the Detroit police into the system in hopes of solving some of these crimes.
Today Worthy is a prosecutor in Detroit, with a much different perspective. Her decision not to report the crime, she says, was “all justification and rationalization.” Now she is on a singular mission: seeking justice for people who do report their rapes. She’s leading a charge to get more than 11,000 police rape kits—which contain swabs of semen, saliva, and other evidence—tested for DNA in her city, and to establish a road map for other U.S. cities to do the same. In Detroit the kits had piled up, ignored for years, in a police storage facility, until one of Worthy’s colleagues discovered them in 2009.
11,000.
And that’s the women who came forward.
Another article discusses how exactly these rape kits work in helping get rapists prosecuted:
While the DNA test results identified assailants in stranger-rape cases, they also created leads in cases that police and prosecutors were not expecting. For example, prosecutors told me of tying the same assailant to multiple acquaintance-rape cases that might otherwise have been difficult to move through the criminal-justice system. Said one, “We had an assailant who raped drug addicts coming to him to buy drugs. These are women who may be particularly vulnerable to rape because of their addictions or their socioeconomic status, but whose cases are hard to get a jury to believe. But when we could connect the same guy to a number of rapes, we could get a conviction.”
One of the reasons they don’t get processed is because so often women know the rapist, and so police have found doing the rape kit redundant – they already know who the suspect is.
A rape arrest rate that hasn’t changed since the late 1970s is a national travesty. Imagine anything else having stayed the same in that 40 years: no cell phones, computers, or cable TV, for starters.
Anti Choice Except When It’s Mine
To follow up on yesterday’s post, here’s an article by Joyce Arthur about how even anti-choice activists have abortions.
Many anti-choice women are convinced that their need for abortion is unique — not like those “other” women — even though they have abortions for the same sorts of reasons. Anti-choice women often expect special treatment from clinic staff. Some demand an abortion immediately, wanting to skip important preliminaries such as taking a history or waiting for blood test results. Frequently, anti-abortion women will refuse counseling (such women are generally turned away or referred to an outside counselor because counseling at clinics is mandatory). Some women insist on sneaking in the back door and hiding in a room away from other patients. Others refuse to sit in the waiting room with women they call “sluts” and “trash.” Or if they do, they get angry when other patients in the waiting room talk or laugh, because it proves to them that women get abortions casually, for “convenience”.
It’s worth reading, especially if you are anti-choice.
My thanks to my former student Naomi Waxman for the linkage.
Letter from PP About WI Bombing
A (.pdf) note from Teri Huyck to our patients and supporters regarding Incident at Appleton Health Center:
“For 77 years, the dedicated staff at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin have worked to ensure that women and families will always be able to access affordable, high-quality health care in a safe and caring environment in which their privacy and dignity is respected.
“We care for 80,000 patients statewide who turn to us for medical exams, lifesaving cancer screenings, birth control and STD testing and treatment. Over 97 percent of the health care services we provide are essential, preventive care such as this. At three of our 27 health centers, we provide abortion care, a critical component of comprehensive women’s health care.
“Last night around 7:40 p.m. the Grand Chute Fire Department was called to our Appleton North Health Center. Police are telling us that a small, homemade explosive device was placed on an outside windowsill causing a small fire that burned out prior to the fire department arriving. There was minimal damage to one of the exam rooms. No staff or patients were injured or present. The health center will reopen tomorrow. Our primary concern today—as always— is our patients, staff and volunteers.
“Women deserve safe and compassionate care, and we are proud to provide it. Rest assured, our doors will remain open for the thousands of women who rely on Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin each year for high quality health care.
“We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the law enforcement agencies working with us to ensure Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin continues to be a safe and trusted health care provider for Wisconsin women and families.”
Sincerely,
Teri Huyck
CEO and President