I hereby induct my boyfriend into Feminism.

I'm making it official.  Today, my boyfriend told me he's been reading Feministe.  I think he's finally earned the official jacket and pin.  I'll sign his card tonight, which I'm sure he'll keep in his wallet.  It'll be great having him in the club because he's a very useful mole.  See, he also gets to go to the Privileged White Male meetings, so he can tell us their secrets.

Obviously, I'm being very facetious here, but I'm actually really excited that he's independently interested in these things now (meaning I don't have to bombard him with links to great posts--he's finding them on his own).  The boy is a catch.  I'm keeping him.

Funny or Die offering the best political analysis ftw!

Hilarious, yet poignant.  I like the calculator spelling boobs, personally.

Seriously, why doesn't everyone realize how ridiculous this political climate is?

Rick Santorum: Actually anti-life.

Dear Rick Santorum,

If you are pro-life, why do you want to sabotage the lives of countless unborn children?  That seems a little ass-backwards, as it were.

Sincerely,
Because there's this thing called science.

Hey, if he wants to play the "pro-life" game, I'll just show that pro-choicers are better at it than anti-choicers.

Pro-life.  Your doin' it wrong.

That awkward moment when you are sexually harassed by one of your neighbors.

I'm becoming disgusted with the world.  Last night, one of my neighbors left a truly creepy, sexually explicit note in my mailbox with a phone number, asking me to call or text him.  It was really frightening to me because in the note, the man (yes, he made his sex quite clear to me, thank you very much) talked about listening to me having sex.  He left this note somewhere between 9 PM and 3 AM, and my lights were on that whole time.  He didn't wait until it looked like no one was home to do this.  He left a phone number.  This man is not afraid of potential consequences for his actions.

I'm still not sure whether or not I want to file a complaint for harassment.  Yes, he deserves it, but it was mortifying enough having my landlord and the police read this note.  I don't particularly want any more people to read it.  The salt in the wound of sexual crimes:  the victim gets to experience shame and humiliation for things they didn't do.

This event just makes me realize to how great an extent women's lives are often littered with sexual violence.  No, this act wasn't violent--but it was intimidating, and it certainly lands on the spectrum of sexual violence.  Things like this aren't even that uncommon.  I mean, this was essentially the note equivalent of street harassment.  You know cat calling a woman in the street isn't actually going to win her over, but a part of you just wants to make sure she knows she's public property.  This was a lot like that--with the added component of destroying my sense of safety in my own home.  I'm 21 and this is the third person who has committed some form of sexual violence against me.  I'm a person who is informed about sexual violence, works with survivors, and tries my best to keep myself safe--and I've experienced this much violence.  What I'm realizing today is that experiencing sexual violence is not necessarily a one time occurrence, or even something that happens at clearly defined "moments" by obvious acts.  Our culture, our rape culture, makes sexual violence a part of life.  My life has been plagued by sexual violence, and, shit, I haven't even had it that bad.  Some people, mostly women, go through much worse.  What does that say about our culture?  Terrible, terrible things.  It says that women's bodies are property.  It says that sex is a weapon.  It says that women should expect violence to be committed against them, over and over again.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Officially less personal.

Not more cheerful, sorry. 

On the social implications of being a survivor, or: I thought I was beyond these things?

Trigger warning:  I'm going to talk about sexual assault, emotional abuse, and stalking in this post.  It won't be graphic, but feel free to spare yourself.

A friend of mine, a good friend who is in my circle of friends at school, was sexually harassed by another student in... 2010, if memory serves.  She told the circle of friends at a later time, and the boy who committed the act was socially ostracized (he was also a part of this social circle).  He deserved it, he's a creep.  This is a good example of a circle of friends coming together to support a friend who was sexually victimized.  This is a good moment in feminism, in my book.  The perpetrator was blamed, not the victim.  The perpetrator experienced some form of justice (the victim was not going to press charges, and so this is the closest thing to "justice" we could achieve).  We've also warned the freshman girls about this guy when he has tried to swoop in on them.  Things that are good.

I have been victimized by two people in my life.  I'm not going to get too specific, as I'm trying to avoid stirring up drama.  In each case, my attacker was either my boyfriend or ex-boyfriend, and he was a part of whatever social circle is involved.  Mutual friends and such, although in each case, the friends started off as my own friends and accepted him into the fold either as we were getting together or just after.  It feels so silly and trivial to establish this context, but I think it matters.

In each case, when I told my circle of close friends what happened--about my attacks and chronic abuse and, in the most recent instance, stalking--their first reaction was disgust at his behavior and sympathy for my situation.  Things that are good.  However, in each case, they also didn't actually reject him from the social circle.  In each case, he was still deemed "friend material."  Eventually, they stopped even pretending to know what had happened between us... even though they did.  In the most recent instance, the circle of friends in question is the circle of friends I mentioned in my first paragraph.  The same people decided that my attacker was worth keeping in the fold, so to speak.  And so while I have blocked all forms of contact between us (out of necessity, again, stalking), they still chat with him casually, bring him up in conversation with me as if it doesn't matter.  This group of friends includes feminist allies.

I know, I know.  I should never ask my friends to take sides after a break up, and when we first broke up (before things got really ugly), I was very clear about there being no sides to take.  But is it so much to ask for my feminist ally friends to at the very least not chat about my attacker with me as if we're still friends, now that they know the things they know?  I can't ask my friends to vilify him the way I have, I know.  I just... didn't think I'd have to, I guess.  I remember feeling so proud of my friends when they held the sexual harasser accountable for his actions--it's so rare, especially in a college context.  I suppose that's what makes this extra disappointing.  They already know what sexual assault is (and so they know that just because I didn't have a gun held to my head doesn't mean it wasn't assault), they have been supportive of victims in the past...  So what happened?

Of course, I've been drifting apart from my friends as of late anyway (although, that started at about the time I told them what happened and they continued to socialize with him, so I suppose these things are related), but this certainly contributes to the feeling of disconnection I have with them now.  It certainly makes me feel as if they don't care what happened to me, or that they don't take me seriously, or that they just value the other victimized friend more, or that they just value the friendship of my attacker more than my friendship.

I don't know.  Perhaps this isn't really relevant to feminism.  Maybe I'm just a survivor who's disappointed by the response of her friends.  Then again, that's pretty relevant to feminism.  Perhaps this is just passive aggressive, knowing that my friends could very well read this.  Perhaps this is me hoping that they'll read it and at least be more tactful about it if they're going to be friends with him.

Sorry, this was long.  I'll do something less personal next time, I promise.

I just had a "Fur is Back" moment.

This is what I'm going to start calling those "Oh, god, did you have to go and feminism?!" moments.  You know the kind I mean.  Those moments where everyone's having a good time, joking around, laughing, and then someone says/does something incredibly sexist/racist/ableist/classist/cissexist/heterosexist/all of the above.  If you're anything like me, what comes after that bad thing that was said or done is, "Um, no."  A moment of quiet.  And then the rant comes where you have to show them exactly why what they said or did was wrong.

I just had one of those on facebook, of all silly places.  A friend--actually, a friend of a friend--said that they like to use offensive language because it's an "extremely effective and under appreciated method of undermining the ignorant, racist use of those same terms."


Of course, I couldn't control myself.  I was good, though!  I didn't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, or call them a privileged sack of crap, or even act meanly.  I just replied "False," and left the link to this article on hipster racism.  You should go read it, but it basically explains that "hipster racism," or the jocular use of racist language, is bad because it perpetuates racism--duh.


Okay, so maybe it was a passive aggressive move, but whatever--it's my bookface.

Colbert's take on this contraception circus.

Hilarious.

Also, Rick Santorum, you are the most ridiculous human being in the public eye--and that's saying something.  Kudos, sir.  You just compared making churches actually obey the law to the reign of terror.  Good fucking job.

Not to be missed.

What Jon Stewart has to say about the "war on religion" as it concerns this birth control insurance reform.

Brilliant.  I love this man.  "Even they know I'm not the Hitler of ice cream."

Pretty much

Just saying, I definitely pull the Xena thing pretty often.

"Oh, no, I'm not a feminist. I mean, I believe in gender equality, but not gender superiority..."

This is the event that convinced me I should finally stop taking up blog space on what is supposed to just be my angsty blog with the Feminismz.  (Not that writing about feminism is less worthwhile than writing whine-y posts about my angst--to the contrary--but I just feel like I should keep my blogs organized, and so here we are!)

I was in one of my Lit courses that's cross-listed as WGS today.  We had a guest speaker, Richard, a fellow undergrad who is about to publish a paper on Onanism in The Awakening (fascinating stuff, seriously).  In this paper, Richard takes a good look at the Victorian crusade against "the solitary vice," "sexual inversion," and individualist feminism while making his case.  He argues that Edna's husband is so oppressive that he "turns her to masturbation" (obviously, this is from the Victorian point of view), and thus ruins her.  It's a solid argument, and I was really impressed with his work.

But first I had to overcome a big, bad, awful, terrible first impression failure.  The professor made some comment calling Richard a feminist (which is totally valid!), and his response was, "Oh, no, I'm not a feminist.  I mean, I believe in gender equality, but not gender superiority, which the majority of feminists do.  Those are who I like to call 'feminazis.'"

RAGE!  SO MUCH RAGE!

I couldn't keep quiet, of course.  "Actually, you're wrong.  Feminism is all about gender equality, not superiority.  Only radical sects on the fringe of feminism, who you couldn't really call feminists, believe in gender superiority.  Also, it's never okay to compare anyone to a Nazi, unless they are committing genocide or actively perpetuating racism/anti-Semitism/etc."  In his defense, Richard corrected himself and admitted that it was a small minority who believed in "gender superiority," but I still felt it was necessary to remind him that you don't identify large groups by their most extreme members.

This is my biggest pet peeve, this vast cultural misunderstanding of feminism.  I would love to say that people are simply uninformed about feminism, and that's why they don't understand, but that would be naive.  People are misinformed about feminism, and I genuinely believe this is a lie perpetuated by the mainstream to maintain the status quo--to keep power in the hands of those who already have it.

Don't believe their lies.  Don't accept the status quo.  If you believe in gender equality, you can call yourself a feminist.  I understand that there are other reasons not to identify as such (e.g. many WOC reject the label because the feminist movement has historically shut them out), and that's more than fair.  But if you're resisting an identification with feminism because "Ewwww, feminazis!  Bunch of castrating bitches!  I hear they don't even shave!" then you're continuing the problem.  Don't be that person.

The beginning is a very good place to start.

Welcome, welcome.  I expect roughly 100% of people who ever read this will know me personally, but in case a stranger should actually stop by, my name is Kelly.  I'm a 21 year-old queer grrl, finishing up my undergraduate career as a Gender Studies major.  Hopefully next year I'll move on to grad school.  I'm a sexual assault advocate as well as a survivor.

So why am I here?  Well, feminism is pretty much my whole life.  I like to think of feminism as more of a verb than a noun, and I try to live my life as a series of "feministings" (to borrow a very useful title of a blog I love and respect).  I'm planning to this blog to process and record my adventures in feminism, rant a little (okay, maybe a lot), share things I find interesting or important (and probably things I find awful, too), and maaaaybe even teach someone something.  This will probably come off as more personal than a lot of feminist blogs, and that's very much intentional.  I want to share my experiences fighting the good fight, so to speak, and hopefully someone will be able to identify with some of them.

Oh, by the way, sorry if you're not a fan of swear words.  I'll try to use them more as a verbal garnish than as a staple, but, well, I'm not making any promises.