feminist blogs

This August marks the ten year anniversary of the murder of a woman whose name I won’t reference right now, to keep it (and others’ names) out of search engines until I can figure out how best to approach this. Nothing I have tried to do, in terms of bringing attention to her case, over the last decade has had any discernable, helpful effect; the consideration of blogging what little I specifically know (little, that is, in reference to the enormity of what I don’t know) is, I would surmise, even riskier than the time I turned in a former boss of mine for child pornography. (At least the Feds raided his office on my day off.) He did federal time for it, and is now out, knows I’m the one who turned him in, has all my vital info (SSN, etc.), and knows where I live. Not comfortable.

But that situation, actually, is extremely comfortable, relative to the potential consequences of my blogging about the murder of this certain woman.

To be clear: I do not know who killed this woman. I believe, for very specific, demonstrably credible reasons, that I know the identity of at least one person who may be responsible for her death, and/or who knows who did kill her. (Oh, and also: I could be wrong. That’s a pretty major caveat - for me, anyhow.)

I write about this here, and a can of worms is opened, and I won’t be able to think straight for another decade or two. Because, unlike the dumb schmo I helped send to lockup referenced above, the particular “person of interest” in this case has a certain… how can I put this whatsoever delicately?… notoriety.

If she’s guilty (whether of the crime itself, or of abetting in some fashion) - and this is an if - people on both sides of a certain ideological divide I am often found hovering just above (picture a thin plank of wood balanced across the walls of an enormous canyon: the so-called sex worker’s rights movement folks on the one side, and the anti-prostitution radical feminists on the other) will go apeshit, bugfuck crazy, and it won’t be long, then, before I’m shaken off my precarious plank, and vultures will soon be circling above my overly politicized corpse.

And then the ideological wars between them will obfuscate any authentic examination of the raw facts (we remember facts, right?) concerning the life, and untimely death, of a certain woman, then my age, ten years ago in Minneapolis, whom very few people cared about then (”another dead prostitute” - etc.), and whom most of the world has, by now, forgotten.

I didn’t even know the victim directly (I knew people who knew her), so there’s an added element here of, “What business do I have?”

But seeing as no one else has stepped up to this (and isn’t likely to): whatever shall I do (or refrain from doing) next? And isn’t silence its own palpably criminal act, in some situations? (Even when there are significant risks that attend the breaking of those silences? And even if one has already risked so much - and has been hurt so much - repeatedly - for other stands one has taken?)

Salman Rushdie’s poem, ‘6 March 1989,’ composed after the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against him, comes to mind. It’s crazy how much I relate to this poem, because it uses rhyme in distinctly unsubtle ways (a habit which, despite all the glories of formalist tradition, tends to unnerve me), and because poetry (as such) is hardly what Rushdie is known for.

But damn, if I don’t absolutely identify with especially the last stanza from the poem (boldface emphasis in second-to-last line is mine):

…Now, misters and sisters, they’ve come for my voice.
If the Cat got my tongue, look who-who would rejoice—
muftis, politicos, ‘my own people’, hacks.
Still, nameless-and-faceless or not, here’s my choice:
not to shut up. To sing on, in spite of attacks,
to sing (while my dreams are being murdered by facts)
praises of butterflies broken on racks.

(For the poem’s full text as reproduced on Granta’s website, click here.)

So I guess what I’m saying about this particular situation (the still unsolved murder of the presently unnamed woman ten years ago this month), is “watch this space,” but not too closely, because it may be a time before I figure out what courses of action I should take (or, I could take courses of action which, by their nature, I may not be able to write about publicly for some time; e.g., if law enforcement officers whom I believed were investigating her case with due diligence advised against it).

Meantime, I’m open to advice, either via comments or privately via email. Particularly, about how to approach this thing as clear mindedly as possible, without allowing the crazy politics of the situation to blur it all up.

(See, now, why I wrote earlier about desperately wishing I could just write fiction?)

At the blog, I’m Not a Feminist, But…, there is a link that says “Take the no porn pledge.” Out of curiosity, I clicked on it.

Here’s what I found:

Thoughts? (From my anti-pornography, pro-pornography and that-specific-issue-ducking friends?)

In a recent post, I included the following tangent: Have you ever gone underground for years at a time, specifically for the purposes of hiding a young battered woman from white supremacist, organized-crime affiliated pimps? And in the process, getting raped in a downtown Minneapolis homeless shelter, thus becoming involuntarily pregnant? And through it all, actually [...]

Disclaimer: Links to others’ writings in this post should not be taken as indicative of such writers’ agreement with statements made here. (Ordinarily, I’d think that was understood, but I’m feeling extra-cautious tonight.) - VM

…Tonight I was reading an entry from January on Blac(k)ademic: why pornography harms women of color, concerning all the hateful, specifically racist and pornographic internet searches that lead readers to her blog. (That the blog’s author, Nubian, is considering quitting the blog - read the interview @ feministing - could not be less surprising, under the circumstances, not least of which is the tired old trend of feminist internecine warfare, in ample evidence in the now-closed comments to said interview. Sheesh, people.)I won’t repeat the specific terms she cites, precisely because I’m not interested in getting a fresh spike in porn-fed (yes, it rhymes with corn-fed) blog traffic. (When, a few months back, I posted something a very brief entry here about an icky, not to mention infuriating search stat, it only made that problem worse.)I will say, however, that Nubian’s post struck me as being emblematic of the struggle many bloggers whose work addresses sexist and/or racist oppression must deal with. Writing (especially online) about certain topics can simultaneously illuminate and obfuscate the issues one hopes to confront. More often than not, I go with paths of least resistance: rarely writing about the very topics I would be, in some cases, uniquely qualified to address, given specific experiences and situations I have witnessed. My default silences can be taken as apathy, and my posts on apparently “lighter” topics taken as unwarranted myopia, failure to engage, or simple privilege… when it’s anything but that.

(Tangent: Have you ever gone underground for years at a time, specifically for the purposes of hiding a young battered woman from white supremacist, organized-crime affiliated pimps? And in the process, getting raped in a downtown Minneapolis homeless shelter, thus becoming involuntarily pregnant? And through it all, actually losing count of how many variously rat-infested and otherwise dangerous squats you had to take temporary shelter in, how you went hungry more often than not, and how frequently you managed, just barely, to avoid getting yourself killed? No? Well then, don’t say a fucking word to me about privilege.)

But I digress.

I spent at least two hours alternating between the racism and porn post by Nubian @ blac(k)ademic, and the Feministing interview of the same author. And tried - desperately tried - to come up with a coherent and comprehensive response.

But somewhere between the shock of reading “brilliant” and “Patrick Califia” in the same sentence in the comments at blac(k)ademic, and reading some moron, commenting as “Eshew Obfuscation” (yes, the misspelling of eschew is in the original), who was attacking Nubian for her allegedly “atrocious writing style (misspelled words, incoherent grammar and shoddy support for your arguments)…” I had to stop reading and take a breath, for fear that my head could actually explode.

Then, thinking I’d take my mind off all that by reading something of a less overtly political nature at MetaxuCafe (a literary blog network), what I found was this: Debra Hamel’s review of Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion, a memoir by Jennifer Saginor.

Mind you, I have no beef with Hamel’s review (and anyway, I like to actually read the books others review, before I get into those sorts of exchanges - crazy, crazy me), nor with what I was able to glean of the substance of Saginor’s memoir.

What I left that website reeling from, rather, were the advertisements, obviously targeted (by bots, rather than immediately available humans) for inclusion on the site, based on specific keywords in Hamel’s review, an excerpt of which would be illustrative here (I’ve placed certain keywords in boldface):

…Saginor’s father, “Dr. Feel Good,” was… a doctor with a thriving Beverly Hills practice, famous for dispensing pills to models and Hollywood starlets. He was also Hugh Hefner’s personal physician and Hef’s right-hand man for more than thirty years, a fixture at the Playboy Mansion. Saginor’s parents were divorced when she and her sister Savannah, two and a half years her junior, were very young. Saginor’s father had custody of the girls on Thursdays and alternate weekends: he started bringing them to the Playboy Mansion when Jennifer was six…

And wouldn’t you know it, alongside the review text, the following ads (posted here as image files only) appeared:

…Which means, of course, that for all the labor put forth by women to articulate the brutalities of sexism (a microcosm of which is readily found in the sex industry - including those corners of the industry where women pimp other women, and then pass themselves off as “feminist” “sex workers” - but that’s another years-suppressed diatribe, for another day)…

For Saginor’s efforts in her memoir, for Hamel’s work in her review, and, of course, for Nubian’s writing on a broad range of issues… there remain any number of cretins out there, positioning themselves to profit from, and/or get off on, our collective pain.

(And I’m not going to pick apart Hamel’s decision to use such “targeted” advertising; writers deserve to survive as writers. My stupid review of local espresso shops, printed four years ago in Style Weekly, earned me more money than I’d ever gleaned from writing, until that time - a whopping $70! - and I’m sure a good portion of those meager funds came from porn ads in the back section. Fuck it, that $70 was groceries.)

I just need to scream this, here and now (even if I go quiet again later, or return to writing more on less overtly political matters): I hate the way systems of oppression, interlocked and interlocking, trigger a kind of cultural cannibalism among us. The attacks on Nubian in the feministing interview were heartbreaking. So, too, is the notion that she may be too battle-worn to continue writing (at least, in the blac(k)ademic venue).

But as much as I want/need to scream this, I also long for silence. Is that self-preservation, or a cop-out, or both?

Again, from Adrienne Rich’s North American Time (I should just get the entire poem tattooed across my back already…):

Sometimes, gliding at night
in a plane over New York City
I have felt like some messenger
called to enter, called to engage
this field of light and darkness.
A grandiose idea, born of flying.
But underneath the grandiose idea
is the thought that what I must engage
after the plane has raged onto the tarmac
after climbing my old stairs, sitting down
at my old window
is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.