I caught this link on Feministing regarding Cynthia Nixon and gayness:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/cynthia-nixon-wit-being-gay_n_1223889.html

thought (a) I didn’t know “Miranda” had come out! She was my favorite! Awesome!

thought (b) I find it fascinating that her saying that her gayness is a choice is controversial! Honestly, I believe, given the overpopulation of the world and constant complications from trying not to breed… homosexuality is the wave of the future. As an option, I personally don’t understand why it isn’t held up as the standard, responsible sexual role. But I am also fairly lesbianic and have my own agenda   “Natural inclinations” aside, I would like to point out this debate here between “Born Gay” and “Chose To Be Gay” The first one has become popular and camped out thanks to Lady Gaga and seems to be the base argument when dealing with the religious wing-nuts. The second one is somewhat less popular in the gay rights movement, however I think it leaves WAY more room for “recruiting”… it is more respectful of sexuality as a fluid, multi-directional spectrum that changes with the tides of your life INSTEAD of a label you’re stamped with at birth. Cynthia Nixon’s got some ovaries:

    I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not…

Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.

While I don’t agree with everything this person has to snark about feminism, I think this monologue brings up some beautiful shit that has come to light. Perhaps it is because I live in a mostly sleepy hippie feminist town now, but this post more accurately represents my reality now (in contrast with my years at vassar). I look through my older posts on the ol gender agenda here and see myself using language that poses me as a victim to all sorts of oppression and evil. The fact is, I’ve had a lovely life and while it was good for me to be informed of how society has mistreated other people like me–that’s not me, I have been respected and given most everything I’ve ever wanted.

While the person in this video does not acknowledge the fact that feminism is kiiiind of the reason why people are listening to her, she has some fabulous points to make about how feminism has failed men. Male victimhood is a controversial topic. There are some people in the world who have actually told me that men cannot be oppressed or victimized. But, as we all know, gender is not destiny and merely being born with a dick does not mean you grow up to swing it around. And the more time I spend listening to the men in my life, the more stories I hear of women emotionally abusing men, women using the legal system unfairly against men, women kidnapping, beating, getting drunk and endangering lives, raping… the list has gone on too long for me NOT to notice a discrepancy between what I was taught by professors to believe about men and women in college and what I am now learning from my friends in the real world. I don’t believe many grown, responsible adults (especially the male-identified) want to see themselves as victims–as people who can be completely fucked over. But this is my reality–I’m not reading about this from books written ten years ago by people I don’t know or hearing it from belligerently second-wave feminist professors–my friends and family are constantly opening my eyes to this new world where, it turns out, I do have power.

This video was pretty much the women’s studies-esque vision of my life now.

looka this: slutwalk

in other news, i used to be this awesome person. WHAT HAPPENED??!??! i have a super corporate jobbbbbb wowowow. and i feel like i can’t even call myself a feminist because i don’t think about feminism. or anything. i, like, struggle to have thoughts about anything. yesterday went to a used sorta radical-benty bookstore w/ bejai and realized there was not a single topic in which i was interested. yikes…

I am no longer a student.

I now work (volunteer through a social service fellowship) at a homeless shelter for 18-21 year olds in Philadelphia. I work on what is known as the “Boys’ Floor.” Let’s ignore that this is infantilizing and de-powering because there are no boys or girls (excepting babies) at the shelter–there are young women and young men. My main problem is that the floor on which I work has proven to be not the Boys’ Floor, or the Men’s Floor, but for all intents and practices the Penis Floor.

We live in a world where 1/5 of transgendered youth are homeless. This is a world where many of these youths, when they cannot find a safe shelter, turn to survival sex work where they open themselves up to dangers and conditions that make you cry. If you were to ever hear some of these stories you would cry.

Regardless, at the moment the shelter at which I work has an unprecedented number (for them) of transgendered women–all of them placed on the “Boy’s Floor.” I think this is a problem. Fortunately, I’m not the only one at my work place who thinks so; I’ve just somehow proven myself the loudest.

Recently a transgendered youth came into shelter. She provoked discussion of the trans-policy more than any young women before her. Why, you may ask: she’s white, she’s not urban, she is consistently “lady-like”, she was further along the transition process than any youth before her. She almost left.

You see, the place at which I work doesn’t seem to have any concept of outing. Or rather they have very specific notions of outing based on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning youth (In Philly no one in social services seems to acknowledges the use of queer by queer folks). You see, no staff would ever get away with making explicit the sexual orientation/preference of a youth. Yet, we consistently out transgendered youth by their placements between the “boys’ floor” and the “girls’ floor.”

This is why she almost left.

In fact the only reason she stayed is because she had nowhere else. Because administration met with her, and told her, in not so many words, this is how it is: she can not out herself and return to the streets, or we can shit all over her gender identity and the investments she’s made to protect it and give her a bed and food. Not exactly the loving-kindness this shelter purports to give.

She was outed. She stayed. On a floor where she, and the other women, don’t always feel safe, where they are open to rampant sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.

I went home furious that night.

The program I’m doing for the year, that placed me at this shelter, also provides housing. It is also a religious-based program through the Episcopal Diocese. I live with folks I would never have spoken to otherwise–the usual middle-class white savior types except instead of it being merely a social calling, they believe they are on a divine mission to save, largely poor, Black, urban folks throughout Philly.

I went home that night, and I hit the bottle with extra vigor. The healthiest way to unwind?–maybe socially if I had done it alone. But I didn’t, or not exactly. I wanted to rant, I wanted to complain. I wanted folks to agree with me. These weren’t the people.

“It’s such bullshit,” I say, “She–all of them–should be allowed on the girl’s floor.”

“But they’re men.”

What. The. Fuck.

“No. They are women.”

Half of my housemates are silent–these are the ones with unformed opinions, or who refuse to join a verbal fray. I take their guilt, in the heat of the moment, for agreement with the others. Silence has a habit of doing that.

“They were born men. They are men,” says the conservative Catholic.

“Yeah, they still have penises,” says the agnostic liberal.

Who the fuck cares.

“Who cares. It’s none of my, or anyone else’s, business what their genitals look like.”

“But! They have penises. They can penetrate the women. They can rape them.”

“Anyone can rape anyone–women rape women. It happens. It has nothing to do with genitals.”

“But the other women don’t have penises.”

“WHATEVER.”

I leave and slam my door, and fume, and drink, and fume, and text people obscure and abstract questions about penes, drink, explain that my housemates are transphobes/cryptotransphobes, drink. Black out. Wake up in the morning, go to work and meet with my supervisor.

His reasons for not allowing folks to live with their gender identity:

There are more beds on the boys’ floor. Yet we would never put a cisgendered woman up there because there is more space.

In the past our transgendered ladies have been some of the most violent. So what? The girl’s team staff is mainly small women. So are most of our transgendered population/Most of the women on the girl’s floor currently could kick their asses anyway.

They aren’t consistent. And sometimes its safer to perform male on the street. Asking for consistency is unfare.

And on and on with excuses.

And the words from my housemates ears ring: “They have penises they can penetrate.”

This is what it comes down to: the penis is a tool for penetration, for rape. Do my housemates, cisgendered women the lot of them, worry about living with me? Does my penis automatically make me a rapist-in-waiting? Can my penis be liberated from this social construction? Can anyone’s? If a transgendered woman’s potential penis, out of all penes, is already read as a rapist’s tool is there hope for any cock? Or is it the poor penis? The working-class penis? The black penis? The uneducated penis? Does my socio-cultural mobility: my love of Roquefort, James Joyce, and Philip Glass make my penis safer, or at least place it at a tolerable level of suspicion? Or is the trans-penis more dangerous than the cis-penis–is the transwoman’s penis read as a stealth weapon? These are the questions I ask myself now.

Those and:

Is the penis only for penetration?

but as always what’s more effed up are the comments…

Even though Boynton declined, Boehringer-Ingelheim invited her to write a paper for the British Journal of Sexual Medicine. “They had clear instructions about what they wanted me to say and how this would set the scene that HSDD was a prevalent and distressing problem doctors ought to be aware of — presumably so they could be alerted to a problem and be more willing to prescribe a pill when said medication became available.”

Flash forward to March of this year when Boehringer-Ingelheim rolled out its Sex Brain Body: Make the Connection campaign starring TV personality Lisa Rinna — replete with glitzy disease branding web site in the Restless Legs/Excessive Sleepiness/Social Anxiety Disorder tradition. Nowhere is flibanserin, not approved yet, mentioned.

“If There is No Desire to Get Physically Romantic, You Could Be Suffering from HSDD,” blares a Top News article in June with the indicated boudoir photo, auguring the next “epidemic.”

Of course,  some gynecologists, sex researchers and patients welcome the fact that pharma is no longer ignoring women’s sexuality. Why should men have all the fun, they ask? But others see in HSDD marketing the same forces responsible for the terms “frigid,” “nymphomaniac,” battles for safe and effective birth control and reproductive health care and social tolerance of violent or degrading pornography — namely, men defining women’s sexuality for their own purposes. Nor do Google search images for HSDD, which are pretty “800 number/phone sex” allay fears.

Feminist Africa is a continental gender studies journal produced by the community of feminist scholars. It provides a platform for intellectual and activist research, dialogue and strategy. Feminist Africa attends to the complex and diverse dynamics of creativity and resistance that have emerged in postcolonial Africa, and the manner in which these are shaped by the shifting global geopolitical configurations of power.

It is currently based at the African Gender Institute in Cape Town.

Editorial policy

Feminist Africa is guided by a profound commitment to transforming gender hierarchies in Africa, and seeks to redress injustice and inequality in its content and design, and its open-access and continentally-targeted distribution strategy. Feminist Africa targets gender researchers, students, educators, women’s organisations and feminist activists throughout Africa. It works to develop a feminist intellectual community by promoting and enhancing African women’s intellectual work. To overcome the access and distribution challenges facing conventional academic publications, Feminist Africa deploys a dual dissemination strategy, using the Internet as a key tool for knowledge-sharing and communication, while making hard copies available to those based at African institutions.

The United Nations, western women’s organizations and the Haitian government must immediately provide women in Haiti with the funding that they need to build domestic violence and rape crisis centers. Stop dividing Black families by distributing solely to women, which only exaggerates male resentment and frustration in Haiti. Provide both women and men with job training programs that would allow for self-sufficiency as opposed to continued dependency on whites. Lastly, admit that the issue of racial integration might still need addressing on an international level, and then find a way to address it!

so i have a special research interest in haiti, in case y’all didn’t already know. i found this article to be really engaging, stupendously interesting. i feel so confused by this! i feel confused by one of the responses to the above:

How is it possible, after being the victim of a brutal rape, to absolve the perpetrator of guilt and point the finger at men of another color who are nowhere near one’s body? This projection is absolutely stunning and self-defeating.

The man who committed this crime committed it for his reason and his alone. Without holding him to account, what hope of change is there? If a person cannot own his behavior, he cannot change it.

This sort of rationalization would absolve white slave owners, by the way. They were simply victims of cultural thinking at the time. And the patriarchy? A remnant of twisted religious extremism.

No one would be responsible for any action at any time, anywhere. There is, after all, a context for every crime.

At the root of this absolution is a desire to push personal responsibility on the collective. Unfortunately, the collective was not in that room that night. One man raped one woman.

oh dear. what now? what is this now. why am i so confused? can anyone please tell me what is going on, and who should do what, and why? and how this fits into all of it?

Melissa’s words are so incredibly powerful, and I can’t make that point any better than she can. This is not about the “global hierarchy”. Every person has control over their actions. Amanda’s rapist is no different. Her response is astounding to most – how could she possibly blame the status of the black man in the world society for this? How was the man that beat her and abused her not at fault? We’re right to question that.

oh, i miss Bq, i want Bq to tell me how to think about this real bad!