Knowing You’ll Be Believed

Y’all, Slarti and I have our go-rounds, but every once in a while I think he’s teetering on the edge of feminist consciousness.

Look at his post today.

Here’s the dichotomy: most women seem to accept [Mary Winkler’s] story at face value and start the discussion from there: “He abused her, but should she have killed him?”.  Most men I know see it differently; the stories of abuse conveniently came forward after she was caught and charged with her husband’s murder.  Many men I know, when she was first arrested, started pools about when she would first claim abuse; it is, in our eyes, quite predictable.

This gives me hope.  Not what Slarti is admitting to–that makes me sigh with despair–but the fact that he is wondering: why is it that a lot of women automatically assume she’s been abused and a lot of men assume the abuse accusation is just her way of getting out of a murder?

I put a little hope in that wondering.  I’ll admit it.  It makes me feel a little hopeful.

Why?

Because the answer to Slarti’s question is out here.  Newscoma’s given it to him straight and other women have given it to him sideways.

Most of us knows a woman who’s had the shit knocked out of her by a man.  And most of us are familiar with all of the reasons why she won’t leave or report it or why she goes back.  Most of us recognize the meaning of heavy makeup or the jaunty scarf in the middle of July.  We recognize the flinch or the plays for attention from men they perceive as powerful.

In other words, we see through the ways that women are hiding what’s happening to us from you.

So, to us, abuse looks like a wide-spread problem.  Everywhere we look, we see evidence of it.  But you look around and see only rare occasions.

****

I was going to go someplace else with this post and we may yet get there, but I want to sidetrack for just a second.

If there’s one thing I think most men don’t get, one big societal difference between men and women, it’s that women are under scrutiny all the time in ways that men aren’t.

Are we pretty enough?  Are we dressed well enough?  Do we fit the mold well enough?  Are we too cold?  Did we lead you on?  Did we provoke this?  Are we lying about what happened to us?  Is our health really in danger?

We get this message, constantly, that our lives are up for examination at any time anyone should want to examine them and that the presumption is that we’re lying.

I think this is why we lie to you about what’s happening to us.  I mean, if I love you and you say you love me, and you punch me in the face, I should walk around with that shiner hanging out there like the accusation against you it is.  But I’m sure (whether or not it’s factually true) that, if I did that, other folks would want to know what I did to bring that on me.

Who can bear that?  To be hurt by someone you love and have your community act like it’s your fault?

I get why that is, though.  I really do.  I think that most men think, hell, most of you all reading this right now think, “If some fucker was beating B., I’d have my ass in this truck so fast…”  If you truly knew I was being hurt, you would feel compelled by human decency to act.

And yet, how many of us want to take that next, violent, step if we aren’t sure?  You want to question me; you want to know for sure that your anger is justified.

Fair enough.

It feels like you think I’m lying.

****

Most women try not to organize their lives around the shitty things that have happened to them.  We want to put it behind us and move on.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if, on one day, everyone wore a t-shirt describing the violence that has been perpetrated against them or someone they love.

I think that we would see how much it sucks to be weak in this culture.  We would see women with shirts full of hurt.  We would see grown men with paeans to the terrible things that have happened to them.

What I mean, is that I suspect the default in our society is violent meanness.  We tell ourselves another kind of story, but I think that’s not true.  We only wish we were kind and good-hearted, all of us.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m down about that.  I actually think there’s something hopeful, as long as it’s not delusional, about seeing us as better than we are.

****

I was at a meeting the other day and we were talking about the Sisyphian task of bringing mental health care to rural women and one of the men in the room raised his hand and said something like, “Are we screening for domestic violence in these situations?”

And every woman in the room turned to look at him, with his smug smile like he’d just thought of the solution to all our woes, and the woman running the meeting said, “Of course.  We have to.  Domestic violence is ubiquitous in the cultures we serve.”

He didn’t even have the courtesy to be embarrassed.

Bless your hearts, I can’t tell you how often I see this–that a problem isn’t really a problem until men recognize it as a problem.

Couple that with the belief that women’s lives are open to scrutiny by whoever wants to take a look around…

****

I’m just mad at myself for the way things went on this thread over at Volunteer Voters.  I totally let myself get sidetracked by this argument that there are obviously some times when a woman just doesn’t “need” an abortion and it should be just fine for “us” to legislate that she can’t have one under those circumstances.

It’s a good argument, from the anti-abortion side, because it is easy to get distracted.  They shout out something like “What about women who just want to look good for swimsuit season?” and you shout back, “What about women who want children and need to abort this pregnancy in order to save her uterus?” and they’re all like “Oh, look, we got you to concede that it’s okay for us to sit around and pass judgment on whether a woman’s reason for wanting an abortion is good enough for us to grant her one.”

****

Which, I think, brings me back to the point I was going to head towards at the beginning of this post.  What if our default was to believe women?

Yeah, sure, some lying liars who lie would slip through and they’d violate our trust.  But, still, I can’t help but hope for a day when, when we tell you the truth about our experience, your default is to believe us.

Sucky on All Kinds of Levels

Amount of time I spent locked out of the house: 15 minutes

Amount of time it took the pizza guy to pick my lock and get me back inside: 3 seconds

Good thing I have a killer dog and a nuclear bomb in here.

Oh wait…

The 100 Least Sexy Men

Via Broadsheet, I found the Boston Phoenix‘s list of the 100 least sexy men of 2007.  Being a man-hating lesbian feminist who hates all other women and only has sex with men so that I can abort their fetuses, oh, and a witch, because I hate Jesus, far be it from me to defend the men-folk from the Phoenix, but god damn.

They put James Gandolphini on their list at number 15.

Let’s just leave aside that moment in the Sopranos when Tony buys Carmela the fur coat and then spreads her and the coat out on their bed in such a manner as to make me long for a fur coat.  If the folks at the Phoenix could watch that scene and remain untingled, I doubt their humanity.

No, instead, let’s address their complaint about Gandolphini: “Two words that came up again and again in talking to women about Gandolfini: nose breathing. Yuck.”

Nose breathing?

Sincerely.  Nose breathing?

Come on!  If you’re going to insult the man, at least insult him right.  We all breath through our noses.  You want to accuse him of being a “mouth breather.”

But more than that, what disturbs me about this list is the amount of men who are on it just because they’re fat, even though they claim that being on the list is about being ugly both physically and spiritually.  Look at how they talk about Bill Richardson:

Chubby presidential candidate has repped the USA in negotiations with some of the world’s scariest and weirdest dictators. Which, unfortunately, leaves the triple-chinned hopeful with precious little time for the treadmill. Chances may improve if he stays hungry — or if he accidentally eats the rest of the Democratic field onstage during the first debate.

Or (and god help me I’m about to say something nice about Jimmy Kimmel) Jimmy Kimmel?

We always appreciated Sarah Silverman’s debased, masochistic sense of humor, but secretly suspected it was all just an act — at least until we found out she was dating a certain chubb-o late-night TV host. After an evening of screwing Kimmel, telling Holocaust jokes must seem like a walk in the park.

And yet, the picture they show of Kimmel shows an ordinary-sized man.

Listen, I know the argument for this shit is that we women have to put up with eight hundred thousand iterations of the one hundred sexiest women list all the time.  But, god damn, if we know shit like that sucks, we should not turn around and do it to others.

Just Call Me Second-Class B.

I’ve said my peace about this over at Volunteer Voters.  (Or did I say my piece?  It just occurs to me that I don’t actually know.  I always assumed “saying one’s peace” was a borrowed religious thing, but maybe not.)

If you’re up for reading more, I recommend

—Dahlia Lithwick’s piece over at Slate, in which she talks about the return of the inconsistent female–Kennedy thinks that, because we might change our minds, the court must protect us from our own flip-floppery.

—Amanda, over at Pandagon, who has useful insight.  I also recommend scrolling through the comments for good discussions on when such a procedure is the most humane and safest way to end a pregnancy.

–And Bitch Ph.D., who has stats and facts and thoughtful outrage.

Y’all know where I stand–if the state can compel me to give birth, if the state can decide for me what happens to my body, I am not free.

There are many ways anti-abortion folks might make their arguments and might advance their cause–ones I might even support, such as accurate information on birth control, comprehensive healthcare, destigmatizing adoption, etc.

None of those involve compromising my rights as a citizen.

But once you start demanding that the law step in and that the State take control of my body, you’ve lost me. 

Did My Lunch Poison Me?

I have been having trouble breathing, just in general, but it’s been a bad spring for allergies here in Nashville.  But, you know, I went to lunch.  I ate some stuff.

I came back to the office.  I had a harder time breathing.  I tried to talk on the phone and was gasping for air.  I got home.  I was so cold.  Like bone-deep cold, shaking and shivering.

I fell asleep on the couch under a blanket.  At some point, before the Colbert Report repeat, I found myself in bed, still shivering like there weren’t enough blankets in the world.

I had this dream that a bunch of librarians were awarding me the “Devil’s Circle” award for Tiny Cat Pants.  I’m not sure what the award was, though the librarians kept telling me that it was an honor to receive it.  Apparently, though, being awarded this prize really pissed the Devil off (as Rachel over at Women’s Health News explained) and that’s why I was so sick.

And I smelled like pumpkins.  I don’t know if this was in the dream or in real life. I was having a hard time differentiating.

But now?  After twelve hours of sleep?  I’m feeling much better.  I kind of feel like I got hit by a truck, but I don’t think I’m running a fever or anything and I have a good cough that seems to be breaking up whatever was in my chest.

So, there you go.