Where is RooshV’s opposite?

I’m sure many of you saw the headlines last week.  “Pro-rape blogger organizes meetings for men across U.S.—Including Seattle, Everett” “Pro-Rape International Meetup Day” “RooshV Plans ‘Rape Should Be Legal’ Meetups”.  If you haven’t heard, this was a day of meetups around the world planned by Roosh Valizadeh, the owner of the misogynistic blog “Return of Kings.

RooshV is second from right.  IMG_0423 by Joe Loong is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Thankfully, the meetups did not happen, at least officially, because there was an uproar on social media protesting them. 

This uproar was inspiring, and overall, effective.  But it made me think: where is the radical feminism pulling our culture in the opposite direction, to counterbalance the RooshVs of the world? 

First, I’m happy that there are no direct equivalents to RooshV in the feminist world.  His hate-filled doctrines are of a tone and intention that do not belong in any movement. 

But the point stands: when it comes to certain aspects of gender, particularly with women’s sexuality and reproductive health, the scales seem to be tipping in a conservative direction over the past few years.   And those radical voices, as much as we try to discount them, matter a lot. 

You might be thinking, instead of more radical feminism, wouldn’t it be better to have an increase in more moderates? 

I would love an increase there too, but we can’t do without our radical feminists.

This is because of something called the Overton Window.  This fancy term basically just refers to the range of ideas around a topic that the public will accept.  It changes constantly, being pulled in one direction or another.   

Let me explain. If you’ve seen the movie Selma (which I highly recommend), there’s a scene that portrays this concept well.  Martin Luther King Junior is planning a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, demanding equal voting rights for black Americans.  He has been treading extremely carefully, because he knows this action has the potential to influence national law, and supporters have been facing severe violence.

A few days before the march, Malcolm X shows up.  He wants to give a speech in favor of MLJK’s march.  But Malcolm X does not exactly have a reputation for treading carefully, so when he meets with Coretta Scott King, the decision maker in this case, she initially denies his proposition, because of the risk of damaging their movement. 

But she changes her mind when Malcolm X says one thing.

“I thought that if the white people understood what the alternative was that they would be more inclined to listen to your husband. And so that’s why I came.”

In other words, Malcolm X was offering to use his radical reputation to pull the Overton Window --what the public would accept--in the direction of civil rights.  This would move MLKJ’s more moderate views towards the center of the window, garnering him more public support.  

A more local example of this concept is Dan Savage, Seattle LGBTQ activist, who explained his role in moving the Overton Window for LGBTQ rights in an interview with Seattle Met last year.  As he put it, “When you’re trying to move the center, you need people at the edges screaming and yelling.  You need the unreasonable people for the reasonable people to move in.  This is my life.”

When it comes to gender in the past few years, particularly with women’s reproductive health, the Overton Window has had a lot of weight put on the conservative end. 

Ted Cruz, presidential candidate who opposes abortion in all cases, even incest and rape. 03072015_TedCruz_001_3x2_1080 by iprimages is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Women’s health clinics being violently attacked and intimidated.  Politicians making misogynist comments with little consequence to their career. False Planned Parenthood smear campaigns (which have been disproved).  Leading 2016 presidential candidates demanding to ban abortion in all cases, even rape and incest. Our government threatening to defund women’s health services.

These actions are extreme.  What’s worrying is that they seem mainstream.  A sure sign that the Overton Window has been pulled sharply in a conservative direction, and away from gender equity.

Can you think of any actions on the other side that are this extreme? Any individuals or groups that are as radical?  It’s quite difficult to draw many to mind. Though the radical feminist movement had quite a large participation rate in the 1960s and 70s, with explicit goals to achieve personal and political equity, that movement has dwindled. This can be seen as a success in some regard, because the things they were fighting for have become normalized.  But certainly not everything. 

We cannot ignore the fact that we're slipping back.  Rights we thought we had firmly won have become eroded.   We’re starting to think that restricting women’s sexuality and reproductive health is normal.

So yes, we need radical feminism.  We need those people at the edges to drag the center forward.  Though we may not always agree with everything they do, as feminists, we cannot, we must not, dismiss them.  Even if we don’t agree with each other 100% of the time, we still must respect and acknowledge their role in the movement towards gender equity.    

What’s the call to action?  I’m not sure yet.  I was hoping you would help me out with that one. 

In part, it’s a call to the media to cover more radical feminism stories.  In fact, to make women’s voices heard more overall. There is much more action around gender equity than we are aware of, because our media chooses not to cover those stories.  And that, in itself, is an act of misogyny.

In part, it’s a call to our political representatives to actually represent us women—not represent what they think we should be. 

In part, it’s a call to us, feminists, to be radical, and to support radical feminism.  We tend to be hard on ourselves, and each other, in the feminist movement, and I think we can work on that. 

In part, it's a call to everyone, to be politically active and demand change that actually works for us. We tend to think we're powerless when it comes to politics and determining laws.  We're not. 

Let’s get our window back, bitches. 

Defined From Birth

By Alec Connon
Edited by Martha Burwell

Male preschool teacher Alec Connon discusses how strict gender roles act as a limitation even in early childhood.

"Img_1748" by Cappugino . is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

“You can’t be a teacher,” said Erin, a widely smiling four year old and my newest pupil.

“Why?” I asked, understandably enough, given that I am in fact a teacher.

“You’re a boy,” she replied, not missing a beat.

In my 6 months working as a male pre-school teacher, comments such as Erin’s have not been rare. “I can’t put on my bedsheets. I’m not a girl,’ said three year old Julian. “You can’t wear a bracelet,” four year old Juliette informed me confidently, “You’re a boy.”

Now it should hardly need explaining why such concrete perceptions of gender and binary gender roles are apparent in kids as young as three: parents’ and teachers’ conscious and unconscious modeling of gender stereotypes, the mass media portrayals of gender-specific roles and the gender-based gendered assignment of colors, toys and clothes all play a role in creating gender specific expectations from a very young age – sometimes even pre-birth.

“Too quickly kids are placed on either a blue or pink path. And they are expected to follow it” writes author and gender activist, Lori Duran. And my own experience of spending 6 months working in a Seattle preschool only vouches for this claim.

To follow the logic of many pre-schoolers today, a man cannot be allowed to flourish in a role such as a teacher, a man cannot wear a bracelet (even a tattered, old and faded one like my own) and, rather cripplingly, a man cannot even be expected to put on his own bedsheets. The limitations this puts on me as a man are, of course, significant. I will forever have to sleep on a bare mattress, I cannot wear jewelry, and I cannot work in a role such as a preschool teacher where skills such as empathy, patience and compassion are salient.

The fate for women is even worse. A woman must forever be putting on bedsheets for incapable men, she should wear jewelry, and she cannot excel in sports (just last week a five year old informed me that she wasn’t playing with the soccer ball because “that was a boys’ game.”)

"Child with hopes & dreams..." by Zaqqy is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

A five year old thinking in this way is, of course, a tragedy. It is natural that as life progresses doors will be closed on us forever, opportunities will be lost. Life is funnel-shaped and the list of our potential futures, aspirations and our sense of the achievable only grows ever narrower as we get older. That is perhaps unavoidable, and to an extent there may even be nothing wrong with that. But for us to live in a society where the doors of opportunity are being closed on children as young as three because of how we define gender is, in my humble opinion as someone who is charged with the teaching of our children, a deep and truly grave wrong.

Now, this does not mean I’m advocating to dissolve gender altogether.  People often imagine scenes of gray, uniform androgyny when hearing this argument.  Like some kind of dystopian future where we all wear monotone jumpsuits and have the same haircut.  But in fact, what I’m suggesting is the exact opposite. I’m envisioning a world in which we don’t put such stringent and uniform limitations of gender on our children, and instead, remove some of the restrictions of our expectations and see what amazing, vibrant identities they create for themselves.

Our children are as wonderfully diverse and unique as the infinite variations of colors in a prism, and instead of limiting them to blue or pink, let’s consider that all colors are for everyone.  

But we should note that this needs to work both ways.

As a culture, we’re far more comfortable allowing girls to act and dress like boys. But we must also start allowing our boys to explore and portray traditionally feminine traits. The reasons for this are clear: 79% of all suicides in the US are men who are not culturally allowed to ask for help; our jails are filled with men who were not taught to express their emotions except through anger. We need to make it okay for young boys to do humble things like put on their own bedsheets, to know that they can work in vocations that require empathy and compassion - we need to let them know that it is not unmanly to be caring, loving, and gentle.  That it is not unmanly to ask for help.  And likewise, we need to let our young women know that it is okay for them to be strong and confident, to be fit and funny, to be assertive and to play sports.  

So, as caregivers, teachers, and parents, as siblings, friends and peers, let’s pay attention to when the doors are slamming shut on our young children, and work to prop them open instead. Let’s challenge our own perceptions of gender roles daily, and ask why? Why is this type of clothing only for girls? Why is this game only for boys? Why do we not feel capable of doing a certain type of chore? Let’s stop saying (and, as importantly, showing) limiting things like “boys can’t do this” and “only girls can do this,” for things that clearly any child could do, if given the chance.  

Let’s continue to evolve and develop what it means to be feminine, and what it means to be masculine. Because, quite simply, what it means to be human is far more significant.  

"Children Playing" by Sanshoot is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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Learn more:

“Dear Parents, let’s talk about kids and gender roles” an article by The Good Men Project

A quick clarification.  When I’m talking about gender, I mean the social construction of what it means to be male, female, or another sex.  The specific biology or anatomy is referred to as the sex of a person. 

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About the Author, Alec Connon:

Alec’s first novel, The Activist, is due to be released in summer 2016 by Ringwood Publishing. Alec is also a founder and organizer of Gates Divest, a Seattle organization that is calling on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to divest from fossil fuels.

Alec has also published "Patriarchy and Climate Change" on EqualiSea. 

www.AlecConnon.com

Why I Don't Carry Pepper Spray

USACE Park Rangers Train for Self Defense by US Army Corps of Engineers is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I remember in 6th grade fighting the Red Man. 

No, it wasn’t some racist activity where we played ‘Cowboys and Indians.’  The Red Man was literally a man dressed in a puffy red foam outfit that we, sixth grade girls, had to "escape" from.  The scenario was that he was grabbing us to kidnap/kill/assault/rape us.  And we had just learned all our defense moves, which we were now supposed to practice on this poor guy, whose job it was to spend all day pretending to attack 11-year-old girls. 

Eye poke. Throat punch.  Palm to the nose, upwards, to shove the bone into the brain. Knee to the scrotum.  If he has you in a neck lock, wiggle so your throat is in his elbow and you can breathe.  Then use your heel to kick in his knee, or slide it down his shin and try to stomp his toes till they break.  Luckily for him, the Red Man was wrapped in foam and we couldn’t actually do him any harm.

But this was terrifying to 11-year-old me.  Which is why I remember it so well to this day. 

And the boys?  I don’t know how they got to spend that afternoon, but it certainly wasn’t being taught how not to kidnap/kill/assault/rape girls (or even how to physically defend themselves, like the girls). They never had a class on what consent means.  Or what healthy relationships look like.  Or what to do if you see someone being harassed.  They definitely weren’t taught how to recognize if they themselves, or their friends, are harassing or being violent. And what they learned on their own, through pop culture, porn, friends, and family, clearly left a lot of them dangerously confused (or even feeling entitled), based on our appalling rates of violence against women.

"120619-Z-MG757-014" by Camp Atterbury Joint Maneuver Training Center is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I don’t necessarily think it was wrong for Monroe Middle School to teach girls self-defense. 

But in neglecting to educate the boys, they put the responsibility of avoiding violence on girls and women.  Rather than putting the responsibility of not being violent on boys and men. This planted the seed of fear in us girls that only grew as we aged and began to see the horrifying statistics of violence come true in our own groups of friends.

And as practically all women (at least in the US) will tell you, that fear is still a daily part of life, and we have good reason for it.

They’ll tell you that they put their keys between their fingers if they’re walking alone.  They’ll tell you about how excited they are for the new app that tells your friends when you get home safely.

They’ll tell you that every dark walk down an unfamiliar street means you automatically scan for a safe escape.  Where can I run?  Is my phone accessible? What weapons do I have?  Who would help me? 

An example of the "Stop Telling Women To Smile" series: Street Sign 2 by Jeffrey Zeldman is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I myself, like most other women, have often changed my route while walking home to avoid harassment.  But harassment is so common that it’s sometimes not even avoidable.  In fact, if I want to go out at night on Capitol Hill (where I live in Seattle) I have to factor in whether I have the energy to deal with street harassment that night, because it happens almost Every. Single. Time.

Carrying fear of violence is so ingrained in women's minds that it is almost unconscious.  And it’s an enormous drain on ourselves, as countless women have told us, such as "Stop Telling Women to Smile" artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, and as blogger Gretchen Kelly wrote recently. 

So over the past few years, I began to think, why is it my job to avoid harassment?  Why is it my job to change my route?  Why is my job to spend money on self-defense items?

This is why I don’t carry pepper spray. 

Because for me, carrying pepper spray is like letting those who would harm me win before they ever lay a finger on me.  It would be a physical reminder dangling from my keychain that I should always be afraid, always be ready. 

Not carrying pepper spray is my way of saying “you can’t win. I can choose whether to be afraid, and how much to be afraid.  And I’m choosing not to be *as* afraid every day.”  

It doesn’t mean I’ve somehow solved the problem of street harassment.  It means that I’m becoming more conscious of how we, women, have been conditioned to be afraid, and it means I’m not letting that fear drag me around as much as I’ve been trained to.

Of course, every person deals with this issue differently, and I’m absolutely not judging those people that do carry pepper spray or other defense mechanisms.  Everyone handles harassment differently and there is nothing wrong with carrying pepper spray or getting trained in self-defense if that’s what works for you!

But for me, when I need some inspiration, I like to think of this passage from Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild. Near the end of her iconic solo hike along the 2,650 mile-long Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), she’s joking with her 3 male friends about how she got the nick-name “Queen of the PCT.”

Best Book of 2014 by Heather is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

(Queen of the PCT is your nickname) “ ‘Because people always want to give you things and do things for you,’ added Rick. ‘They never give us anything.  They don’t do a damn thing for us, in fact.’

I lowered my sleeping bag and looked at them, and we all laughed.  All the time that I’d been fielding questions about whether I was afraid to be a woman alone—the assumption that a woman alone would be preyed upon—I’d been the recipient of one kindness after another.  Aside from the creepy experience with the sandy-haired buy who’d jammed my water purifier and the couple who’d booted me from the campground in California, I had nothing but generosity to report.  The world and it’s people had opened their arms to me at every turn.”

I want to help create a world that has open arms, a world that is safe for all.  And so instead of carrying pepper spray, I’m asking us to educate boys and men, and even more, I’m asking boys and men to educate themselves. 

Will you join me?

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Learn more:  For teaching boys and men about consent, see “The Good Men Project,” which has quite a few teaching guides for all ages, including this one.

Take Action: If you’re a parent or involved with schools, call your school and ask them if they include quality training for all children about consent and avoiding violence.  If they do not, urge them to include this critical topic in their health classes or special curriculum.  If they continue to only have self-defense training only for girls, explain to them the danger of leaving boys out of the conversation.  

Take Action: If you identify as male, I encourage you to explore Seattle’s own Wholehearted Masculine, which provides a dialogue about masculinity and how we can widen the definition.  Dan Mahle, the founder, offers occasional workshops in Seattle on masculinity. 

Patriarchy and Climate Change

By guest author Alec Connon

The narrative that has led us to modern day climate change can be said to have begun in the early 1600s, where it can be found in the opinions of men such as Francis Bacon and the world’s first scientific organization, the Royal Society. It was here that the world was told, for the first time, a new story: Nature is not something to be revered and feared as it has been for all of human history; rather it is something that can be controlled, manipulated, dominated. Nature is but a machine and it can be made to bend to our will, we were told by these confident men. We are the masters, they insisted.

James Watt Statue by DncnH is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

For the century that followed, however, this remained but an idea. Ships still required wind to sail, factories still needed rivers to run. But some 100 years later, James Watt found this idea its perfect expression. It was the marriage of a revolutionary idea to a revolutionary technology: the steam engine. And from there the world, and our role in it, was forever changed.

After a history of remaining beholden to the whims of nature, for the first time, we were free; liberated from the Earth that created us. By piercing the Earth with our industrious power we could extract from it all that we needed. We could sail without wind, we could build our factories wherever we pleased. Soon we even learned to fly.

This new-found power only served to bloat our already deeply ingrained traits of patriarchy and imperialism: arrogance, selfishness, dominance, egoism.

First we, men, told ourselves that we could dominate women. Then we created a similar story to try and justify the subjugation of entire nations. Before, finally, we told ourselves that we could conquer and dominate nothing less than nature itself.

And for a couple of centuries that is what we did. Whole forests fell in days, entire mountains were dispensed with, the deepest oceans were breached. We had become Gods.

But just as the hubris of patriarchy and imperialism led us to the deep into the bowels of a truly dark and dangerous place, so too has the ideology of dominance over nature failed us and brought us disaster. Islands have already been swallowed, countless species have already vanished, hundreds of thousands have already died. By any humane definition of the word, catastrophic climate change is already here. And yet every year, more records are broken. Ever year, the floods, the droughts, the heatwaves, the storms get worse.

And just as women and girls have always faced the brunt of patriarchy, so too it is women and girls who disproportionately feel the full and brutal force of global warming:

“Climate change increases challenges to women’s and children’s health. There is more likelihood of women and children suffering and dying from problems such as diarrhea, undernutrition, malaria, and from the harmful effects of extreme weather events, including floods and drought. While women and children have made comparatively small contributions to historical carbon emissions they bear the brunt of the health effects of climate change, both now and in the future.”

These words come from an authoritative report that was published by a coalition of groups including the United Nations Foundation, the World Health Organization and Save the Children.

The London School of Economics found that women die in consistently higher numbers than men both during and after natural disasters. The 1991 Bangladesh cyclone and flood killed almost five times as many women as men; but across the world regardless of whether the event hits in the world’s poorest corners or in the richest nation in the history of the world, casualties are disproportionately women.

The aftermath of Haiyan: 31 Tanauan Church - 2 by SSD Office of Adventist Mission is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

And it isn’t solely in the shortening of their lives that climate change will have an unequal effect on women and girls. According to U.N. studies when food is scarce, as it will be as crops increasingly fall to drought or flash floods, it is women and girls who go hungry first.

In most of the developing world, the job of gathering water is women’s work. The trek often robs them of the chance to earn money, learn skills or engage with their communities. For these girls, as the reality of their climate growing drier hits, education will remain nothing but a distant dream as their water gathering duties become ever more arduous and take ever longer.

Arrogance, selfishness, dominance, egoism.

These are the central human traits that have driven patriarchy. They are the central traits that have driven imperialism. And they are the central traits that have driven human-caused climate change.

But what does this realization mean to us today? What should it mean to today’s feminists and climate activists?

Well, one thing it should mean, I believe, is that to be a feminist in today’s world means being a climate activist; it means acting to prevent the climate change that will so disproportionately affect women and girls.

But it also means that to be a true and effective climate activist one must confront the underlying causes of anthropogenic climate change. And that means confronting, head-on, the narrative that has dominated our world for centuries. It means confronting the selfishness, the arrogance, the dominance, the egoism; the key drivers of the narratives that have enabled empire, slavery, endless war and human-caused climate change.

Or to put that another way, being a climate activist means facing down the traits that have come to define patriarchy. And that, of course, means nothing less than being a feminist.

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Alec’s first novel, The Activist, is due to be released in summer 2016 by Ringwood Publishing. Alec is also a founder and organizer of Gates Divest, a Seattle organization that is calling on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to divest from fossil fuels.

www.AlecConnon.com

Newsflash: PayScale Releases Big Data on Gender Pay Gap

From Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, “Awkard Black Girl” to NBA Cheerleaders, people have been talking about the gender pay gap. 

Now, we’ve got some new numbers to arm ourselves with when your coworker says women get paid less because of their individual choices.   

Seattle-based PayScale.com just released a study on the gender pay gap, in which they drew from their large database of salary information to compile data from 1.4 million full-time employees in the U.S. 

The report used a proprietary algorithm to compare wages between women and men based on industry, marital status, whether they were parents, and other variables. This information was taken from survey results that full-time workers submitted over the last 2 years. 

Though much of the data confirmed what we already know, there were some interesting, if disheartening new statistics. 

"Lucie & ses parents-4" by Thomas Sauzedde is is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

For example, it’s known that being married and having children unfairly penalizes women in the workforce.  But did you also know that a family actually gives a career boost to men? The PayScale data shows that married men with children were the highest wage earners in the country ($67,900 for married men with children, $60,800 for those without children), while single mothers earn the lowest wages in the country.  Those that need the pay the most earn the least.

Yet strangely, the data also showed that men prioritize home and family responsibilities more often than women.  How could this be? We know that women still spend more working hours each year taking care of children and family obligations.  But remember, the PayScale data was based on survey responses.  The answer becomes clear in another piece of information: “The more often a woman tells us that she prioritizes home/family over work, the larger the controlled gender pay gap becomes, even when compared to men with similar characteristics who say they prioritize home/family over work with the same frequency.” 

Ah.  There it is.  Women cannot even say that they would prioritize their family if they had to, because they are penalized for it. 

"bodycare, clinic, clipboard, doc, doctor, female" by www.audio-luci-store.it is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Unsurprisingly, some of the industries with the highest gender pay gap were male dominated ones such as mining, oil and gas extraction, and forestry.  Yet even within female-dominated industries such as health care and social assistance (79% women), there still exists a large pay gap. This reflects how we devalue women’s work overall as a society, regardless of the industry.  Currently, the PayScale data showed a 24.3% “uncontrolled” pay gap, and a 1.7% “controlled” pay gap for healthcare.

1.7 percent! That doesn’t seem so bad, does it?  Let’s take a look at what that actually means.   PayScale offered two data sets for each item they examined.  One was “uncontrolled” in which they simply looked at all full-time wages, regardless of job level, experience, etc.  The other was “controlled” in which they only compared wages that had the same job level and experience.  It’s tempting to want to celebrate the smaller wage gap for the controlled data.  However, it does not communicate one very critical point: much of the wage gap exists because women are blocked from advancing into higher positions.  It also misses out on the fact that jobs of equal skill and education level are valued less if they are jobs traditionally held by women.  So the uncontrolled data shows what women’s wages are in a more complete sense.

Another finding new to me was the age at which worker’s pay plateaus.  From our first jobs, our wages continue to increase until we reach a certain age, when they flatten out or even drop.  According to PayScale, men can expect their wages to keep increasing until they are 50-55, while women, shockingly, can only expect their pay to rise until they are 35-40.  What does this say about how we value women as they age, compared to men? 

Finally, I wonder if the data includes the most marginalized industries, which are often female-dominated, and/or have a majority of people of color, such as housekeeping and home care.  Does the data include those pieces of the population?  Who don't have access to the PayScale survey, don't speak English, or don't use a computer?

However, the big data PayScale compiled is still telling. So what do we do with it?  How can we use it to make the pay gap smaller? 

It should be seen as a wake-up call.  We tend to think that we are somehow ‘past’ the gender pay gap.  That it’s a choice.  That women should just work harder or be more confident.  But this data shows that it’s much, much more than a personal journey.  It’s an enormous, ingrained bias that we all hold (women too!).  But even more so, it's our systems and the way our businesses and industries are defined. This data helps us understand the pay gap in our own industries.  So how about instead of changing the women, we upgrade the workplace?  Other developed countries are doing this with practical things like paid family leave (not just maternal leave), more time off, better benefits, and affordable childcare.  We could utilize 'unconscious bias training' and hiring techniques to diversify leadership roles. The U.S. is still lagging behind.  But if our labor laws aren’t changing fast enough, individual businesses can step up and implement change themselves.  Because it’s not just the right thing to do.  It’s also good for business. 

To view PayScale’s report, visit http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/gender-pay-gap

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