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Richard Jeffrey Newman on The Power of Poetry

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I need to do a little self-promotion. This past Saturday, my colleague and friend Marcia McNair interviewed me about my book The Silence Of Men on her BlogTalk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.

Marcia is a perceptive reader and wonderful interviewer and her questions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the conversation was about the poem called “Working The Dotted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girlfriend and I had sex, and she was a virgin. What I liked best about Marcia’s reading of this piece was her noticing my mother’s presence in the poem and how that started me talking about something I often encounter but have never given much serious thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncomfortable with their mother’s sexuality, and I don’t understand it. Or, to be more accurate, while I understand intellectually, I don’t get it emotionally. As well, they often it profoundly disturbing that I am not made uncomfortable not just by the idea of my mother as a sexual being, but by the fact that, when I was growing up, I knew–that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she certainly did not rub it in my face either)–that she had sexual relationships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occasionally go to bars, or dancing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick someone up herself, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it seemed to me perfectly natural. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other single 30-year-old women did when they socialized? My mother has been a single woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expected her not to have one or to keep it hidden from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was growing up, and it never seemed strange to me or wrong or awkward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was having sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awkward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is something I want to write about, something I had never really thought to write about until Marcia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Working The Dotted Line

I don’t remember what vacation
I was home for, or how Beth
managed to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apartment to ourselves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s hanging crystals
scattering the afternoon sunlight
in small rainbows that shimmied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretching
nervous along the length
of the daybed’s mattress,
and my fingers tracing
the ridges of her ribs
as she tugged at my erection.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first condom,
and I’d forgotten to read the directions,
so I stood there growing soft,
squinting at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I needed to learn
was on the inside.
I ripped the cardboard open
and sat reading on the bed’s edge,
thumbing the foil-packed
lubricated circle,
trying to visualize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dotted line,
our protection, like a goldfish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slipped from my grasp
and landed under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I picked it up,
it was covered with the dust
and small particles of dirt
that settle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was kneeling hard
between Beth’s open legs.
She raised herself on her elbows,
smiling that the second skin
we needed to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the instructions called
the reservoir tip—I thought
of the dams holding water back
in the mountains near where she lived
and what would happen if they broke—
her smile disappeared
and bunching the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lifted
her butt onto the pillow
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and climbed up onto her,
trying with one hand
to be graceful and accurate
and with the other
to balance over her
without falling.
At her first grimace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clamped shut and then
staring wide, her voice
a whisper through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I entered her again, trying
from the tightness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out anyway,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nosing downward
towards her navel,
and I placed my palms
against her cheeks,
I cannot hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve chosen you!

And since I wanted so much to be her choice,
I kissed her eyelids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hollow of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giving way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
holding her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a single motion I breathed through
like I was lifting heavy boxes.
She screamed into the muscle
just above my collar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said nothing afterwards.
We didn’t cuddle
or smile at each other as we dressed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My wordlessness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wanted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.

Posted in Whatever | 12 Comments

Twenty Years Ago Today

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

content_berlin_wall

The Cold War was a fact of life.

My parents had grown up during it; I had grown up during it. And I had little doubt my children would grow up during it. From before my parents were born, the Soviet Union and the United States of America were the premier powers on two sides of a chessboard. On America’s side, we had friends like France and Britain. The Soviets had allies like Poland and Czechoslovakia. China was off doing its own thing, Soviet in policy, but more on America’s side than not. Still, the chess pieces were controlled by the Americans and the Soviets, and smack dab in the center of the board were the twins — West and East Germany.

Yes, I know that is a simplistic, America-centric view of what was a difficult, confusing, and dangerous time in human history. But it was the view we were sold — not for nothing was the president referred to, as far back as my memory goes, as “Leader of the Free World.” And while America’s NATO allies were far more independent than was suggested at the time, America played an outsized role in the alliance for the same reason the Soviets did. We were armed to the teeth, armed with weapons that could destroy humanity a dozen times over, in a myriad of horrific ways.

It was these weapons that transformed the Cold War from a mere struggle for national prestige to the potentially suicidal confrontation it was. Some have suggested that nuclear weapons, perversely, may have saved lives, by making the cost of direct conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact too dire for sane leaders ever to comprehend. But if they did so, they did so at a very high price, for every man, woman, and child in the world knew that if ever west or east found itself with a truly unhinged leader, one willing to destroy the world to save it, that all of us could be dead within minutes — if we were lucky. The unlucky — those would be survivors, forced to live in a world where burning wood for fires would unleash radioactive toxins, a world where what few humans survived would be faced with a cataclysmic nuclear winter, followed by several millennia of radioactive poison slowly killing us off, as we descended from our pinnacle to, at best, a stone-age existence. As Albert Einstein once noted, he didn’t know what weapons World War III would be fought with, but World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones.

This was our world, a world in which two sides were constantly jockeying for position, two sides that could end my life and the lives of everyone I loved in an instant. A world in which the Eastern Bloc might as well have been located on Mars. A world in which an Iron Curtain divided Us from Them.

The Iron Curtain was not just a clever metaphor coined by Winston Churchill. It had a real-world counterpart: the Berlin Wall.

The Berlin Wall was built to keep East Germans from escaping to the democratic West, as 3.5 million did between the end of World War II and the start of construction. This outflow had both direct negative affects — it cost East Germany 20 percent of its citizens — and indirect ones, as the constant movement from East to West was a propaganda coup for NATO and democratic Western Europe. It could not continue.

And so the wall was built, beginning on August 13, 1961. It began as a haphazard barrier, made up of barbed wire, chain-link fences, mine fields and unfortified areas patrolled by soldiers. It was still just a wire fence when John F. Kennedy delivered his famous Ich bin ein Berliner ((As a former German student, I would be remiss if I failed to note what you probably already know: that ein Berliner is not a resident of Berlin, but rather a hot, fried pastry similar to a donut. Thus, Kennedy was saying, “I am a donut.” The crowd clapped anyhow; even then, the inability of Americans to speak anything other than English was well-known.)) speech in 1963, albeit a completed one. The wall was built up over time, with concrete walls added in the late 1960s. By the time I was born, in 1974, that wall was complete, and the upgraded Grenzmauer 75 was being installed, 12 feet high and four feet thick, with significant reinforcements on the Eastern side. It is that wall that is remembered best, and the first thing I think of when the words “Iron Curtain” are mentioned.

That wall was the symbol of the Cold War, the unending, unyielding, potentially lethal war that had my parents hiding under their school desks, and that had me lying awake some nights, wondering if my home in suburban Minneapolis would be destroyed in the initial blast wave, or if I might live long enough to see the misery afterward. That massive concrete wall — the one Ronald Reagan urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down, as if that could happen — was a permanent fixture. It would stand throughout my lifetime. Because countries don’t simply decide one day to let their citizens be free. It doesn’t happen — even if the Soviets are mouthing pretty words like Перестройка and Гла́сность.

And yet, in the fall of my sophomore year in High School, that appeared to be exactly what was happening. In August, Hungary had opened its border crossings with neutral, democratic Austria, and quickly, 13,000 East Germans booked tours to Hungary, and didn’t return. Czechoslovakia soon followed suit, forcing East Germany to seal its border with an ostensibly aligned country. Those East Germans who hadn’t left began to agitate for their freedom. They first chanted “Wir wollen raus! — “We want out!” Then, as weeks went by, sensing that more than freedom to travel may be afoot, the protesters began to chant, “Wir bleiben hier!” — we are staying here.

On October 18, Erich Honecker, who had served as General Secretary of the DDR for eighteen years, abruptly resigned. Egon Krenz was elected to replace him, in a split vote by the People’s Chamber. Krenz said he would institute democratic reforms, but events had overtaken him. Krenz re-opened the Czechoslovak-East German border. The Politburo formally began to discuss lifting travel restrictions with the West, as they weren’t enforceable at that point.

On November 9, 1989, twenty years ago today, Günter Schabowski, First Secretary of the East Berlin Chapter of the Socialist Unity Party, was given the news that travel restrictions with West Germany were to be lifted. They were not to be lifted that day; however, the information Schabowski had did not contain the date they were to end. And so Schabowski, asked when the rules were to be lifted, replied “sofort, unverzüglich” — immediately, without delay.

East Berliners streamed to the border, and realizing that they had nothing to gain from killing people for trying to cross the border over a miscommunication, the East German government ordered its troops to let them through, unencumbered. On November 9, 1989, for all intents and purposes, the Berlin Wall fell.

The Ossis were greeted by the Wessis with open arms, and a jubilant celebration began. Within days, people on both sides of the wall arrived with sledgehammers to knock it down, piece by piece, crumbling rock by crumbling rock.

Krenz’s government did not last another month, and East Germany did not last another year. By December 6, Mannfred Gerlach, who had split with the ruling Communist Party in early October, was elected as head of the Council of State and de facto Head of State; he would be replaced when the Council of State was abolished the following April, and Sabine Bergmann-Pohl, the President of the Volkskammer, replaced him. Her government would last until October 2, 1990, the date on which East and West Germany ceased to exist, as all territory belonging to the DDR was brought into the Bundesrepublik. A nation went directly from being part of the Warsaw Pact to part of a NATO ally. And the Cold War began to end.

There were many other milestones on the way to the liberating of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia all joined East Germany in shedding their Communist legacies in 1989. In August of 1991, an attempted coup would fail in the USSR, leading to the dissolution of the empire and the freeing of nations like the Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

It did not bring about, as Francis Fukuyama said it would, the “End of History.” Yugoslavia would implode spectacularly, leading to genocidal violence. In a number of former Soviet states, border disputes and ethnic divisions would foment wars and create breakaway, failed states. And while parts of the east, like the Baltic Republics and the Czech Republic, are thriving, others — including East Germany — continue to struggle with the transition from a command economy to Eurocapitalism.

But the end of the Cold War did end a period of political repression in much of Europe, and it ended the threat of global cataclysm that two generations of humans took as an enduring part of life. The worst al Qaeda can dish out today is kids playing with pop-guns next to the threat of an all-out nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

That threat died over several years. But symbolically, it died twenty years ago today, when people who wanted the freedom to visit their cousins, to speak their minds, and to chart their own destinies abruptly found themselves able to do so. I still remember sitting in my sophomore German class, unable to believe what we were seeing on the television that had been wheeled in for the day. Twenty years later, I have trouble believing it. But I am grateful beyond words that my daughter is not growing up in the world I did, and that throughout Eastern Europe a whole generation is growing up free.

Posted in International issues | 7 Comments

Open Thread and Link Farm, $47221.09 Dinner Edition

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Ampersand

Post what you like, when you like, about what you like, with whatever links (including self-links) you like, for whatever purpose you like, wearing whatever underwear you like, eating whatever food you like, and liking what you like because you like it. Like, wow.

* * *

The first two minutes of this piece are stunning. After that, it turns into a well-done cover of Toto’s “Africa,” which is one of these songs I like for the sound but the lyrics are annoying because they scream exoticization of Africa. And the earworm factor is not to be believed.

Wal-Mart Bans Gay Couple For Not Shoplifting
The Stupak Amendment might, in effect, make sure that insurance that covers abortion is unavailable to most women – regardless of if they use the public option, or the government exchange, at all. I really hope this shit never becomes law.
List of Democrats who voted for Stupak Amendment. They’re not all in very conservative districts, either. Let’s hope for some primary challenges.
Whose Health Care Victory Is It? Not Women’s. More on Stupak, from Ann Friedman.
GLAAD should lighten up about South Park using the word “fag.”
You know, every single chronic pain patient I’ve known in my life has had horrible experiences like this. Is it that way in other countries, or is it just another example of how much the US sucks? It seems to me that we could be doing so much better, be so much more humane.
“It’s time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else’s civil war.” Click through to see who said it.
This expectation that “good people” won’t be bigots is rather amazing.
It turns out DVR is good for television networks, after all.
Very impressive face paintings.
Diary of an Anxious Black Women discusses Rhianna, “Precious,” Toni Morrison, the quest for authenticity, and the representation of black women’s pain in media. Really good post.
Do Smart, Hard-Working People Really Deserve To Make More Money?
Cat and Girl: The Trap. Sometimes I love Cat and Girl.
Sex after mastectomy; Why aren’t doctors preparing women? Note: Reading this article will leaved you pissed off more than you might expect. (Via.)
On the White Anti-Racist Spokesperson
The Obama Administration is secretly pushing an incredibly awful international copyright treaty.
Study: The Government is Discriminating Against Asian Business Owners.
What if we spent just one year spending as much on internal infrastructure as we do on the Defense Department?
Spending $47,000 on dinner for five. Two points. One, that’s the right table to have been serving, as far as the tip goes. Two, couldn’t a restaurant that charges this month spring for a receipt-printer that was designed this century?
Why US health care is so expensive: Like the restaurant in the above link, It all comes down to prices. We simply pay more, for everything.
Pantshead asks Shoshana Johnson if she’s ever been to Iraq. No, really. Also, the country isn’t 93% white and 63-82% male, so why are MSNBC’s guests? (Via.)

Posted in Link farms | 25 Comments

Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question – from The New York Times

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

The Supreme Court in England is set to rule by the end of this year on a case involving a question that has vexed Jewish communities throughout the world for centuries: Who is a Jew? The case began because a 12-year-old boy whose father was born Jewish and whose mother converted to Judaism was denied admission to an Orthodox Jewish high school on the grounds that, because his mother was converted not in an Orthodox synagogue, but in what the Times article refers to as a “progressive synagogue” (which I assume corresponds to something like Reform here in the States), she is not really Jewish; and so, therefore, neither is he. The boy’s family decided to sue the school for discrimination and lost. The Court of Appeal, however, reversed that decision on grounds that question one of the foundational tenets of Jewish identity: that, short of conversion, the only way one can be Jewish is to have been born to a Jewish mother.

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s [which is how the boy is referred to in court documents] mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

“The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.”

The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin,” the court said. (via Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question – NYTimes.com.)

Continue reading →

Posted in Jews and Judaism | 32 Comments

Linkspam on the Weekend: Posts rattling around in my head edition.

Posted on November 8, 2009 by unusualmusic

linkspam-on-the-weekend-posts-rattling-around-in-my-head-edition

Does teen literature exaggerate the mean girl phenomena too much?

Neesha Meminger: “This is a question I’ve often pondered myself. I think my main concern with the “mean girls” phenomenon is that they focus on inter-personal dynamics without also looking at the larger, social,
economic, and political constructs within which we all function. In the case of books, films, television shows, and other mean girls representations, certain isolated incidents are used to somehow prove that *everyone* can be abusive and that violence is a natural and intrinsic part of human nature; without any consideration of the power imbalances at play.

For instance, yes there are mean girls. Of course girls in high school (and middle school and grade school) can be horribly cruel to one another. Girls can absolutely be bullies. Girls beat one another up and can be downright
vicious to those who are perceived to be “different” or “weaker.” Whenever this issue is raised, I am reminded of the 1996 case of Reena Virk, the Indian, Punjabi teen who was murdered by a gang of mostly girls in British
Columbia, Canada. She was viciously attacked by girls she had desperately wanted to be friends with.

The media responded to this horrific tragedy by labeling it as “girl violence” or the “rise of girl gangs.” The whole focus was on the fact that the group of teens who beat Virk to death were mostly girls. There was no race analysis, no class analysis, and absolutely no mention of enforced hetero-normativity (for a great, non-mainstream analysis of that case, see Yasmin Jiwani’s essays as well as Sheila Batacharya’s).MORE

The rules of nutrition

First rule of nutrition: eat or die.

Second rule of nutrition: there are no other rules.MORE

What is normal eating?

Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied. It is being able to choose food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it—not just stop eating because you think you should.

Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food.

Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good.

Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful.

Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more.MORE

In which homework is assigned

Now, when you were thinking about disability access, you probably thought of transcripts and ramps and disabled bathrooms. And those things are important. But did you think about invisible access for invisible disabilities? Where well-known accessibility measures like those transcripts, ramps and bathrooms are often not available (or not properly) the measures that don’t immediately spring to an abled person’s mind don’t have a hope in hell.* And, speaking as someone with an invisible chronic illness, having to out myself in order to perhaps be granted access, with the very real possibility of not being believed, is one of the most unpleasant parts of my life.** I doubt you thought about access to services for people who aren’t accessing them in person. I doubt you’ve ever thought about how to give directions without visual reference. In fact, I bet most of the things you thought of were those that were in your face.

Which brings me to my next point. Accessibility is not just about alternatives and gadgets and adaptations. It’s about you.*** It’s about all the abled people who are in charge of accessibility measures. And that’s not just those of you in a position of authority, that’s you making your way down the street. Remember, you often don’t know who is and who isn’t a PWD, and you don’t know the kind of impact you’re having on them. The world is designed to suit the abled, and it’s every last one of you impacting us. It’s about your attitudes making our lives harder. (Did you ever consider how awful it is to have a loud, public discussion of one’s needs? Did you ever consider that forcing your idea of help on us might be detrimental? Did you consider the kind of devastation you privileging your perceptions over our experiences can lead to?****) It’s about whether you decide our enjoyment, our livelihoods, our life experiences and our humanity are worth your attention.MORE

Guest Post: Disability and Asexuality

Talking about the intersection of asexuality and disability is pretty difficult, because “asexuality” gets another meaning in disability rights discourse: it’s used to refer to the various stereotypes about disabled people’s sexualities. People do often seem to realise that this is problematic when it’s pointed out to them. However, what not so many people realise off the bat is that it goes beyond just “problematic”.

The stereotypes in question actually consist of a wide variety of things tossed together, some of which are in line with asexuality but many of which seem to have little to do with asexuality or in fact to be entirely opposed to it (I am interested to see how the stereotype of the disabled woman not saying no because she feels lucky anyone wants her is supposed to relate to asexuality, for instance). What they have in common, however, seems to be: denying disabled people their sexual agency and the right to make decisions or have knowledge about their own bodies and sexualities. The stereotypes about disabled people’s sexualities seem quite in line with the common tendency to consider us childlike, helpless and needing to be protected for our own good.

Asexual adults? Are not children. Nor do we (or, at least, should we) lack agency. In fact, the very existence of the asexual movement shows that we are in opposition to a lot of these ideas! We’re organising, we’re campaigning, we’re demanding that our sexual identity should be recognised and considered valid; disabled people are stereotyped to not have a sexual identity at all. (There is a distinction between the lack of a sexual orientation and a sexual orientation incorporating lack of sexual attraction that most people miss, but that is crucially important in this context.) Taking all the stereotypes disabled people get hit with regarding sex and sexuality and claiming that they all boil down to making them like asexual people? Like me? Is something I actually find really offensive.

An example: the desexualisation of disabled people often gets used to justify giving them less extensive sex ed or no sex ed at all compared to abled people. However, saying this is because they’re stereotyped as asexual entirely misses the fact that – asexual people need sex ed too!MORE

Asexuality and Rape

IMPORTANT: Read this first. This post will be talking about the impact of the rape culture on the asexuality community and will be based on the y’know fact that rape and coercion towards sex are as common as they are in reality. This means if you desire to spend the comment thread whining about how rape isn’t all that common or other rape apologist lies, your comment will never make it.

Okay, that out of the way, this post has been a long time in the coming. I’ve been wanting to talk more about asexuality and this is an issue that has been bugging me for years now. There has been a long conversation in the community and outside of it on the question of “Are Asexuals Oppressed?” Rather, do asexuals face discrimination or the effects of bigotry yet?

And well, the answer is no big surprise. No, there is not much of an active resistance to asexuality because the bigots don’t really know we exist and most resistance we do get is from assumptions or presentations within the LGBTQ community (assumed to be gay because of lack of interest in opposite sex, assumed to be gay by same-sex relationship or strong friendship, seen as trans or intersex or genderqueer by presentation, etc…).

In fact, most activists for the asexual community such as David Jay have focused on the well acknowledged problematic inclusion of asexuality as a mental disorder in the DSM.

And well, I have little to say about that. It’s a disgrace, it should be amended and conversations with psychologists have been mostly positive, but the narrow focus has allowed a far more subtle and interconnected problem to receive little to no acknowledgment.

That problem is how asexuals are exceptionally prone to the outskirts of the rape culture when they interact with and date sexuals. This is especially true of romantic asexuals.

Now what I mean by this is not that they are especially prone to forcible rape and the types of rape we most focus on when discussing rape, though these occur far too often and can affect asexuals just as much as sexuals.

What I mean are coercive rapes. Those where one’s autonomy and free choice is put to intense pressure and manipulation in order to force a technical consent, which is nowhere near the gold standard of mutual enthusiastic consent or informed consent. This can occur in many forms
MORE

Rape Culture 101

Rape culture is treating straight sexuality as the norm. Rape culture is lumping queer sexuality into nonconsensual sexual practices like pedophilia and bestiality. Rape culture is privileging heterosexuality because ubiquitous imagery of two adults of the same-sex engaging in egalitarian partnerships without gender-based dominance and submission undermines (erroneous) biological rationales for the rape culture’s existence.

Rape culture is rape being used as a weapon, a tool of war and genocide and oppression. Rape culture is rape being used as a corrective to “cure” queer women. Rape culture is a militarized culture and “the natural product of all wars, everywhere, at all times, in all forms.”

Rape culture is 1 in 33 men being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is encouraging men to use the language of rape to establish dominance over one another (”I’ll make you my bitch”). Rape culture is making rape a ubiquitous part of male-exclusive bonding. Rape culture is ignoring the cavernous need for men’s prison reform in part because the threat of being raped in prison is considered an acceptable deterrent to committing crime, and the threat only works if actual men are actually being raped.

Rape culture is 1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is not even talking about the reality that many women are sexually assaulted multiple times in their lives. Rape culture is the way in which the constant threat of sexual assault affects women’s daily movements. Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you’re alone, if you’re with a stranger, if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group of strangers, if it’s dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you’re carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you’re wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who’s around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who’s at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn’t follow all the rules it’s your fault.MORE

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Linkspam on the Weekend: Posts rattling around in my head edition.

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff, Syndicated feeds | 3 Comments

Stupak Amendment Makes a Good Day Bad

Posted on November 7, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

Today should be a good day. It should be a day when Democrats and decent people celebrate the passage of health care reform out of the House of Representatives. But unfortunately, the usual suspects have decided that health care can’t be reformed if said reform leads to women having control of their uteri. So Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., will be pushing — and likely passing — an amendment that would actually manage to reduce the already tenuous access Americans currently have to abortion.

The amendment likely has the votes, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi has evidently decided not to stand in the way of a vote, in order to avoid any further delay in getting the bill voted off the floor. And I can understand that, and even support it as strategy; the bill passing the House today is not the final bill. It will have to be reconciled with the Senate’s bill (if one ever passes) in a conference committee, and the bill that comes out of conference could favor the language of either, both, or neither, depending. Pelosi will appoint the House conferees; presumably Bart Stupak will not be one of them.

So yeah, some bad language is okay at this stage of the game because it’s still a work in progress. But I tend to agree with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., about the endgame here:

The Illinois Democrat said she’ll vote for passage today regardless of whether Stupak’s amendment is included, but would oppose a final bill if the amendment makes it through conference committe.

“If that language were in the final final bill, I certainly couldn’t support it,” Schakowsky said.

That, I think, is the important thing for Democrats to understand, because if that language is in the final bill, I can’t support it, either.

The Stupak Amendment is a bitter pill to swallow, but as of today, it’s a purely symbolic one. Yes, it sucks that a majority of members in the House believe that a person’s right to choose can be chucked aside at will. But the vote today won’t ultimately chuck that right aside. It’s the vote on the final bill that comes out of conference that matters.

If the Stupak language survives the conference committee, it is incumbent on those of us who support reproductive rights to pull our support, and actively campaign for defeat of the bill. For today, I’ll grit my teeth and make note of which Democrats to lean on when the vote for final passage comes. But that’s for today. Tomorrow starts the fight to make sure that the bill that ultimately is passed is a bill that supporters of reproductive rights can support.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Health Care and Related Issues | 8 Comments

Abortion Rights Thrown Under Health Care Bus

Posted on November 7, 2009 by Ampersand

First of all, please check this list of Representatives at RH Reality check. If one of them is your representative, please give them a call right now. They’ll be voting at any time now, so don’t wait.

The news:

House Democratic leaders agreed Friday night to settle an impasse over abortion by letting the entire House vote on a proposed solution, a risky decision that could determine the fate of their trillion-dollar overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

Under the agreement, anti-abortion Democrats will be permitted to offer an amendment on the House floor to the health-care overhaul bill. The amendment would prohibit a new government-run insurance plan created by the health-care bill from offering to cover abortion services, congressional sources said. It would also block people who received federal subsidies for the purchase of health insurance from buying policies that offered coverage for abortions.

The deal clears the way for the dozens of Democratic lawmakers who oppose abortion to lend their support to the health care package, the most dramatic expansion of health coverage in more than 40 years. It also satisfies the demands of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which had threatened to oppose the House bill.

If the amendment from Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) passes, said Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the bishops conference, “we become enthusiastic advocates for moving forward with health care reform.”

The amendment is expected to pass with the combined support of more than 40 anti-abortion Democrats and virtually every House Republican. That likelihood meant that leaders of the much larger group of Democrats who support abortion rights were not happy to learn of the deal.

“There will be no abortion, not just with public funds, but with private funds under the public option, and that’s not acceptable,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.).

House leaders met with that bloc of Democrats late Friday to try to quell their frustration., but the agreement makes clear that they believe abortion-rights Democrats will find it difficult to vote against the health-care bill even with such a restriction attached to it.

According to Politico, “Female Democrats on the Rules Committee, including Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter, left the room during consideration of the Stupak amendment and didn’t cast a vote.”

Keep in mind, even before this amendment, the House bill restricted abortion coverage. But it didn’t do enough to punish poor women, so that wasn’t good enough for either the Blue Dogs, the Republicans, or the Catholic Church.

Ezra writes:

If this amendment passes, it will mean that virtually all women with insurance through the exchange who find themselves in the unwanted and unexpected position of needing to terminate a pregnancy will not have coverage for the procedure. Abortion coverage will not be outlawed in this country. It will simply be tiered, reserved for those rich enough to afford insurance themselves or lucky enough to receive from their employers.

From USA Today (via Jack and Jill Politics):

Nearly 90% of private health insurance policies now offer abortion coverage, and almost half of women with private insurance have it. But women covered under the new system would have to find supplemental insurance or pay out of pocket for an unanticipated procedure that can cost from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on complexity. For anyone unable to afford it, this would amount to a de facto ban.

From Democrasheild:

If the Stupak amendment passes, uninsured women who get health care through the public option will have to pay out-of-pocket to get an abortion. And even if a woman uses her own money to buy an insurance plan from a private company through the exchange, she won’t be able to get a plan that covers abortion. […]

The “exchanges” discussed there are health insurance exchanges, which are marketplaces where people will be able to purchase insurance. Since insurance companies will have to compete against one another and the public option. the exchanges will provide better insurance plans at lower costs. They’re designed to help those who don’t have insurance or who have inadequate insurance but can’t afford better.

Because many small employers are expected to switch to using the exchanges, this means that women who currently have abortion coverage through their small employer, will have their coverage replaced with insurance that doesn’t cover abortion.

Ezra also points out, even if (as now seems likely) this amendment is part of the bill the House passes, that doesn’t guarantee it’ll be in the final legislation: “Even if it muscles into the House bill, it will also have to pass in the Senate, and then survive conference, before it becomes law.” That seems like a pretty thin reed of hope to me, but better than no hope at all.

I’ve been trying to find out if the Stupak Amendment contains exceptions for abortions necessary to prevent immediate threats to the life or health of the woman. I haven’t been able to find out, so far.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Elections and politics, Health Care and Related Issues | 7 Comments

Writing and Pain; Community and Hope

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I haven’t been writing and it hurts; it’s a tightness in my chest and a twist in my gut, and there is a part of me that wants to scream. Well, maybe not scream, but at least to grunt, let out some exclamation of frustration that I have not been making poems, and I have not been working–or only recently started working again–on the foreword I need to write for the translation of the beginning of Shahnameh that has been sitting on my desk more or less completed for the last couple of months. The other day, while I was waiting in a hotel lobby in Washington DC for a friend to call, I was able to get just a little bit of work done on that introduction, but it wasn’t writing. I was taking notes on a book that has been sitting on my shelf for at least a month waiting for me to read it. It’s an interlibrary loan, and I am sure it is very, very overdue. (I find it funny that they abbreviate interlibrary loan ILL; whenever I get an email telling me that a book I have requested has arrived, the subject heading is something like “Your ILL Request,” and it just makes me smile. I have a strange sense of humor that way.) Anyway, I was taking notes on this book and just that little bit of work made me so happy. Because it was my work, not for school, not to make money, but just the work that I do, or one kind of work that I do, to make my life meaningful, to make meaningful and beautiful things to send out into the world.

The book is called Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography, and it’s by A. Shapur Shahbazi. Ferdowsi is the pen name of the poet who wrote Shahnameh, an epic poem of about 50,000 couplets that tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, from the nation’s mythopoetic beginnings to the moment right before the Arab Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE. Shahnameh is often called Iran’s national epic, and for good reason. Not only do the stories in the poem still resonate in Iranian culture, in ways that few poems or poets do in the West, but as the German scholar B. Spuler puts it in the excerpt of his work that Shahbazi uses as an epigraph to the book:

In the last analysis it was The Shah-nama […] that became the milestone for the self-affirmation of the Iranian identity. [T]he importance of the poems of Ferdowsi (and subsequently of later poets) for the preservation of the Iranian character can in no way be overestimated. They provided the entire Iranian folk–nobles, townspeople, artisans and peasants–with that “Iranianness” which despite all social differences united them, perfectly mirrored their image, and allowed them to identify themselves as fully and totally Iranian.

The book is called “a critical biography,” at least in part because Shahbazi arrives at his understanding of Ferdowsi’s life through a critical reading of Shahnameh. The poet left no notebooks, no memoir and the information that we have about his life from outside the epic, as Shahbazi shows, is entirely apocryphal. Indeed, an interesting question raised by this book, though I doubt Shahbazi intended this to be the case, is whether and why we ought to prefer a truthful accounting of a great writer’s life to the myths and legends that grow up around him, especially when the work he is famous for is as important to a nation’s cultural identity as Shahnameh.

So, for example, the traditional story of the poem’s composition has the peasant Ferdowsi laboring for 25 years to write the poem, hoping to earn from it a dowry for his daughter. When, through the good offices of an intermediary, he presents the poem to Sultan Mahmud of Gazna, however, the intermediary’s enemies among the Sultan’s advisers convince the ruler that the poem really is not worth all that much, especially since Ferdowsi is a Shiite and therefore a heretic. Taking his advisers’ advice, the Sultan pays Ferdowsi only 50,000 pieces of silver, not gold, an amount which Ferdowsi sees as an insult. So, instead of taking the payment for himself, he divides the money between two people who have served him. He then flees to another ruler’s court, where he attacks the Sultan in a satire of which only a small number of lines survive. Eventually, he returns home, though he continues to live in constant fear of the Sultan.

One day, something happens in Mahmud’s court that reveals to him the greatness of Ferdowsi’s poem, and he repents of his earlier to decision to underpay the man. So the Sultan sends along with a suitable apology, 60,000 gold coins, a 10,000 coin increase over the amount Ferdowsi had originally expected. Just as the couriers arrive with the money, however, Ferdowsi’s corpse is being carried out of his house so he can be buried. Ferdwosi’s daughter, according to this story, refuses the Sultan’s money, and so it is used to repair a local hostelry.

Shahbazi shows that this story is completely false. It is now generally accepted, he points out, that Ferdowsi was not a peasant, was never in Sultan Mahmud’s court and never had a daughter. Yet which story is better, which one should be the story about Ferdowsi that gets told? The one I have just told you, or the truth: that Ferdowsi was a member of the landed gentry, that he composed the Shahnameh while living on his own income, that he had a son who died at a young age. It’s easy enough to say that what really matters is the truth, but the lessons in the apocryphal story are also truths that are important to tell and the way that Ferdowsi and his daughter behave when confronted with the different payments from the Sultan embody values it is worth emulating, or at least honoring. I’m not suggesting that we should accept falsehoods as history, but one of the things I like about Shahbazai’s book is how the falsehoods become part of the history, part of Ferdowsi’s biography, even as he (Shahbazi) claims to be arriving at as accurate a factual biography of Ferdowsi as can be gleaned from the text of the Shahnameh itself.

But I started writing about how painful it is to be not to be writing, which is ironic, of course, because I am writing this blog post, and I will admit that sitting here in my bed, half listening to the TV program my son is watching in the next room, pecking away at these keys is making me feel better. Except that my foot is starting to hurt with the onset of another gout attack. I’ve been in the middle of one now for a couple of days, the result of having lost a decent amount of weight in a short period of time because of a liver detoxification regimen my doctor put me on. The pain is starting to distract me and so I have lost track of where I wanted to take this blog post next, but it does make me think about the degree to which writing seems to reduce the pain. Or, since I am sure it does not actually reduce it, the way writing is able to take my mind away from the pain, and so I am wondering about the connection between the pain I feel when I am not writing, the pain of my gout, and the way writing seems to alleviate both.

I think it was in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body In Pain that I read about how people experience pain as something alien, something other, something not of the body. Which is ironic, of course, since it is the body that is in pain. The preposition is significant. Metaphorically, it suggests that pain is something physical we can be in, like a lake, or a car, or the world; and yet, if Scarry is correct, and if I understand her–or my memory of what she wrote–correctly, we experience pain as something inside of us that we need to get out of us, something that cannot be integrated into who we are. It can be forced on us, as in torture–and the first part of Scarry’s book is a discussion of torture–but it is not something that we can integrate, that we can make a part of ourselves, the way we make pleasurable sensations welcome within us, make them part of who we are in the world.

Language (I think this is Scarry too) is not just the one way we can give pain meaning–language, after all, is how we give everything meaning–but it is the only way we can make the reality of our pain comprehensible to someone else. Indeed, perhaps on some level we need to make our pain comprehensible in ways that we don’t need to do with our pleasures. After all, it is–at least for me–perfectly possible to keep one’s pleasures entirely private, not to name them, and still find them immensely satisfying. It is not that way with pain. To deal with pain, especially but not only emotional and psychological pain, I need community; I need to be able to tell someone, and while I sometimes may be the only one I tell by writing about it, that is never an entirely satisfactory solution. I need to know there is someone else who understands me or who has at least tried to understand me.

And so I wonder about the degree to which community, the human need for community and communication, is rooted in pain, and I wonder if the pain I feel when I don’t write is my body reminding me to reach out, that I need to reach out. Because that is what I do when I write. No matter how deeply internal and personal and interior the motivation to write may be, no matter how solitary the act of writing is, everything I write is also an invitation to community the goal of which is not so different from the way Spuler describes the Shahnameh as being “the milestone for the self-affirmation of the Iranian identity.” Sometimes, especially when I feel like no one reads what I write, that thought fills me with a deep sadness, because I know I will keep writing anyway, even if no one else ever reads a word I put down on the page. Now, though, I am filled instead with a giddy hopefulness, and that makes me happy.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

Posted in literature | Comments Off

I Know I've Had Orgasms That Changed Me

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

A friend of mine who does not like jazz–especially anything that has a saxophone in it–told me once about a conversation she and her ex-husband, a serious jazz-lover, had over dinner with a couple, the male half of which also loved jazz, while the female half felt similarly to my friend. This second woman defined her dislike by saying something along the lines of, “I don’t need to sit and listen to a bunch of men masturbating,” a reference both to the emphasis in jazz on the improvised solo and to the fact that most jazz musicians–or maybe most well-known jazz musicians–seem to be men. My friend said she felt an immediate click of rightness when her dinner guest made this statement, which led to a long discussion about the comparison between music and sex, between improvisation and solo sex–though, of course, jazz improvisation is not usually done in solitude. I have written elsewhere about the connection I made early on in my own sexual awakening between the orchestrating of sexual pleasure during lovemaking and music, but what my friend’s story made me think about was how, say, a certain kind of jazz solo, where the musician explores subtle nuances of melody and harmony, or the various ways in which you can slice up a beat to create different rhythmic textures, corresponds to the kind of masturbation in which you use the pleasure you are giving yourself to explore yourself, either through the fantasies that arise while you masturbate or through the different kinds of awareness your solo lovemaking gives you of your own body; and then I thought about how rock solos or blues solos or the large solo concerts that Keith Jarrett once gave all have an analog in masturbation, from the kind that is just a release of sexual tension to the kind that is an affirmation in deep sadness and/or joy–and/or the entire range of emotions it is possible to feel during sex, which means pretty much all the emotions of which human beings are capable–of the fact that you are alive, which for me is what defines the sound of the blues, to the kind that is large and complexly motivated and that you may never fully understand.

Masturbation is, as all sex is, a working through of who we are and how we feel about ourselves, of what we wish for, of what we wish to avoid, of the history of our bodies, of everything that makes us human in the capacity of our bodies to experience that humanity; and there is a way in which sex is the creation of a symbol of that humanity: in the pleasures we move through on our way to orgasm, not because orgasm is the only and necessary goal of sex–though in masturbation orgasm usually is the point–but because each orgasm, whether we are conscious of it or not, is something to which we have to give meaning, and meaning requires history, not only the specific history of the sensations that brought you to this particular orgasm, but the larger personal and cultural history that each of those sensations taps into. I know I’ve had orgasms that changed me. Some were solitary and some were shared, but all of them captured a truth about myself that I needed to face if I was going to grow, sexually and otherwise.

This symbolic aspect of sex–which may or may not be an accurate way of talking about these things, but which makes sense to me–reminds me as well of something I read a long time ago in Suzanne Langer’s book, Feeling and Form about how music is the symbolic representation of the process of human emotion and that it is this symbol which the composer creates on the page and that the performer plays into existence when he or she performs; and so it occurs to me that sex, solo or otherwise, is the playing into existence of that part of ourselves that is waiting to become, and sometimes we will understand what we are becoming in and through sex, and sometimes sex is what opens us up to the fact that this understanding is what we need to find.

So I am wondering: What have people out there understood? What have they found? Which are the orgasms that have changed you?

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

Posted in Gender and the Body, Sex | 11 Comments