feminist blogs

CAUTION: Those of you who read me via feminist blogs (and are also really uptight) might want to run along now. For the record, my dropping the b-bomb here has nothing to do with gender; had the lyin’ ass individual who is the subject of this post been a dude, I’d be calling him a lyin’ ass prick (or something similar). Anyhow, you’ve been warned.
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Every now and then I Google various of my past tormentors, because apparently the initial torment wasn’t enough. Now it turns out that the woman, formerly my close friend, who, in Olympia, Washington (1991? 1992?), swiped from me (on Christmas Day no less, which I spent without seeing another human being even in passing, while seriously contemplating suicide), my one decent girlfriend¹ (which is a gross simplification of the situation, whose full explication would require a book-length manuscript, so cut me some slack), is now, I shit you not…

A therapist (cough, hack, wheeze, gag, hurl, giggle, snnnnorrrrk²) listed on (are you sitting down?) a website for polyamorists³ as a “Poly-Friendly Professional.”

An edited version of her listing:

[Name & Certifications Redacted]; [Redacted] Counseling; [Redacted] (at) [Redacted] (dot) com; [Redacted], Seattle, WA. 206-[Redacted], http: [Redacted]. Individual counseling available to people of all sexuality and gender identifications using talk and art therapy. BDSM, D/s, and polyamory folks welcome. Specializes in anxiety, depression, life transitions and PTSD. Insurance excepted.

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And since, in addition to being a petty, backstabbing, heartbreaking, lyin’ ass bitch [would that a video were available on YouTube for Fishbone’s song that got me through that travesty of triangulation], the woman couldn’t spell to save her damned life, I’m pretty sure the last bit of the listing, “Insurance excepted” isn’t a typo on the part of the website owner.

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¹As many of you know, I have had, throughout my (now long since past) dating life, the most extraordinarily bad luck with women. That’s not why my spouse of the last seven years is a dude - but considering my track record of ex-girlfriends who tended to fall somewhere along the spectrum from “sociopath” to “ruinously hateful life-destroying plain old meanie, with only the occasional redeeming quality,” no one would really blame me if I had specifically fled from my dashed illusions of lesbian utopia into the arms of the nearest Big Hairy Man for that reason. (And yes, he is a Big Hairy Man, but he’s good to me, and I actually do love him, so whatevs.)
² I am so suckerpunched by the hilarity of this situation that I am forced to make up words.
³ No offense to the polyamory crowd. I’m not dissing you, I’m dissing this specific lyin’ ass bitch.

Aileen Wuornos, prostituted lesbian and child sexual abuse survivor, would have turned 52 today, had she not been executed for the murder of convicted sex offender Richard Mallory. (Few people can count February 29th as their birthday, so, inevitably, whenever that day rolls around, I think of her.)

Inaccurately* branded as a “The first female serial killer,” Wuornos ushered a total of seven (variously abusive) tricks into the next life. Meanwhile, the sexist and heterosexist press got tons of mileage out of comparisons between her and the actual serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.

Because of course, a prostituted lesbian, who acknowledges having killed in self-defense (a claim from which she never wavered; whether or not you believe all seven of her killings were in self-defense, as I do), is obviously interchangeable with a cannibalistic killer who preyed on gay men and boys merely for the apparent “pleasure” of doing so. (And, seriously, fuck anybody with the nerve to characterize Dahmer as “gay.” That makes approximately as much sense as classifying an individual who eats hamburgers as a member of the bovine species.)

In the end, everybody got their own “pieces” of Aileen. Her lover (whom I’d prefer were classified as a pimp), Tyra Moore, sold her out to the cops, who in turn sold her out to Hollywood. There were at least three movies: Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, starring Jean Smart (following which I took to calling the actress Jean Stupid), Nick Broomfield’s Aileen: The Selling of a Serial Killer, and the Oscar-award winning Monster (which, among other distortions, characterized Tyra Moore as a victim).

Ironically enough, a piece by Phyllis Chesler (mentioned here recently), Sexual Violence Against Women and a Woman’s Right to Self-Defense: The Case of Aileen Carol Wuornos is among the more profound and truthful examinations of the Wuornos case. (Which makes my heartbreak over Chesler’s apparent transformation, lately, from “kick-ass feminist” to “neo-conservative” all the more excruciating.)

Rest in peace, Aileen.

Burn in hell, Richard Mallory, et. al.

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* The designation is inaccurate whether or not one views Wuornos as a true serial killer (which I don’t), as there actually have been quite a few true female serial killers, both before Wuornos’ time and since.

Yesterday I wrote a long post about fragmentation in women’s lives, as magnified and, in some ways, healed through developing technologies. When I wanted to make an analogy concerning false assumptions that have been made about me based on some political and social justice work I’ve engaged in, I turned to the matter of sexual identity.

In retrospect, that section of the narrative would have fared better as a stand-alone post; in the post (where it was only intended as a reference for comparison) it gets a bit lost. And I realized earlier tonight it’s actually one of the clearer (and mercifully succinct) things I’ve written on the matter, addressing my irritation with people who:

assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

(This, in turn, had developed after articulating on Twitter last week, “It shouldn’t surprise me, but getting hit on via MySpace bc my profile says “bi” irritates the shit out of me. Do they not also see MARRIED?” - Which is one thing I appreciate about Twitter; through the articulation of what are, in themselves, mere fragments, one opens pathways to deeper considerations of the same material later.)

…And now, twenty-four hours later, I’m cleaning out the comment spam from the Askimet filter, and lo! There was the following item (relevant link removed)

As a member of LGBT, I always keep my eyes on the matter of gay and lesbian. “There is no difference between LBGT and straight people when it comes to true love. We know how to love and cherish a person.”It is what we all bisexual get after the discusssin at [STUPID SPAMMY SITE] . And all these words is what we would like to let others know for the bottom of our heart. We only hope don’t make it special for us LGBT. We do love others as you straight do.

Now I know that no one from the website that attempted to place the above spam on my blog didn’t actually read what I wrote (actually, the quality of their prose - and spelling - suggests that improved literacy could do much to improve their marketing prospects) - their processes, such as they are, are automated and rely on keywords in the text of the attacked site, but fuck all, y’all, this is exactly the kind of stupidity I was railing against in the first place. (I held my nose and briefly visited the site; it was, of course, not about the lofty ideas and community dialogue suggested in their scrambled spam-text; it’s a porn/dating site.)

Oh, but they did say it was from (oh wait, for - for?!) “the bottom of our heart.” Well I guess that makes it all just dandy, and I should allow their links to appear here out of dedication to “the matter of gay and lesbian.” “We all bisexual” “love others as you straight do.” Sheesh.

Or: Not to worry, I’m as sick to death of my blog posts in the “Fragments” category as are you.

Or: An answer to the question, “Just what in the hell is this thing called Twitter?” (A feminist literary mama’s excavations of this technology’s relative merits.)

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Hi there, I’ve been ensconced in the realm of Twitter for a while now (wherein users exchange messages of no more than 140 characters); if you know of what I speak, then you do (feel free to follow); if you don’t, go read Clive Thompson’s article in Wired, which will give you the gist.

Still with me? Cool.

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Recently I characterized Twitter as being “like the alternately idealized & never-good-enough lover you can’t help but be infatuated with at all times.” On one level (I’ll get to the other level shortly), it’s genius: social media at its best, connecting people in variously casual and profound ways across all sorts of divisions of geography, politics, lifestyle, and identity. One thing I’ve been amazed by is the prevalence of moms on Twitter, which seems particularly apt. In the course of a day, a mama has to deal with a lot of crazy, inherently fragmenting stuff. That cliché about a woman’s work never being done? Well, it’s not a cliché; that shit is real.

So what are a mama’s options for staying in touch with the world, between the phone ringing and the baby crying and the husband whining and every other damn thing? (Note: sadly, this may apply almost as often to moms who work outside the home as to stay-at-home moms, given the unequal sharing of domestic duties between male and female partners, which persists despite the necessary gains of feminism and even when both partners have paid employment.) Maybe you don’t have the luxury of Virginia Woolf’s rightly-recommended “Room of One’s Own”; or maybe you had that room once, but then the baby came along and you had to make a nursery somewhere.

Now, it’s not impossible for a woman writer who is also a mother and who lacks certain resources (time, solitude, individual space, money, etc.) to develop engaged, sustained narrative; Ariel Gore, founder of hipMama, nails that truth in the first three sentences from How to be a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead:

Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: you need money and a room of your own if you’re going to write. But I’ve written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out thirty-five issues of my zine without either one. If I’d waited for money and a room, I’d still be an unpublished welfare mom…”

So: not impossible, except in the existential, miraculous sense that for us mamas, everything can be pretty impossible, but we figure out ways to pull it off anyway. And we do it, every day.

And of course, we struggle. And much of what we struggle with is the matter of fragmentation. For the same reason that many women gravitate to poetry over prose, many of us, these days, gravitate toward mediums in which we can express ourselves (and connect with other mamas) even in the milliseconds between erupting crises - whether those crises are deemed “domestic,” e.g., involving the material needs of the bodies of those with whom we cohabit, and/or if they concern our broader engagements with the Body Politic. And Twitter is rapidly becoming that medium, to an even more influential extent than blogs individually.

This is true not least because, in Twitter, one may exchange not only individual, succinct observations, but one can also share links to more sustained narratives elsewhere: whether in blogs, online news media, or audio, video and photo sharing sites (not to mention “mashup” venues which braid such forms together, into fresh amalgamations which, when successful, are worth more in value, by far, than the face-value sums of their parts).

What Twitter does, for many of us, is create the possibility of an alternative to silence. People who have been reading this blog over the years, in its numerous incarnations (from “My So-Called Writer’s Life” in 2003 through “Perpetual Exile,” “Southern Discomfort,” “Vortex(t)” and now this most recent inscrutable moniker “Anachroclysmic“), through its umpteen template overhauls, usually only 25% realized (often with disclaimers posted about the run-down state of the thing, the ever-borked blogrolls and so forth): you know how I struggle with silence.

I might stay up for a few nights in a row, posting stuff that’s incredibly difficult, complex, huge.

Then I’ll shut down, and I won’t post anything for days, weeks, or even months.

Twitter is the technology that has been helping me to stay connected (and keep my sense of humor, which, if you only read my Deep and Serious posts here, you might not know I had) between those rare days of effusive, often brutally honest communiqués. Because, of course, life doesn’t stop just because one is (whether for internal or external reasons, or some combination of both) unable to write about it.

And the feature of the WordPress plugin I use - Twitter Tools - enables me to post a digest of each day’s Twitter entries (”tweets”) in the form of a bulleted list.

The good news: This does, indeed, fill in significant gaps between my other writings here. And, perhaps, gives you a fuller sense of who I am. I’ve had my share of miserable fuckwits take a passing glance at some of the very volatile issues I write about (particularly those pertinent to the sex trade) and make flabbergastingly inaccurate and bizarre assumptions about me which, depending on the extent of their fuckwittedness, they otherwise might not be quite so quick to make. That is, if they understood that the woman here who writes, occasionally, about pimps who are richly deserving of some very swift comeuppance (if not in the form of a prostituted woman personally dispensing righteous justice, then courtesy of the perpetually-imperfect Law), is the same woman who writes joyously and unapologetically about what is, after all, her absolutely marvelous sex life. (Or, alternately, complains bitterly if she’s not getting any.)

Which is not to say that I owe anybody - least of all the pro-sexcapitalism fuckwits - any explanation.

But, just as I am driven apeshit by people who, for example, assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix*), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

…So to am I driven apeshit by people who make other sorts of baseless (sometimes quite innocent, but at other times quite malicious and misogynist) assumptions about me.

So, with these accumulated “tweets,” whoever is still reading this blog (all 4 of you, I think it is) have some opportunity to have a clearer sense of where I’m coming from.

And here’s another merit: It’s a wonderful, fun, geeky challenge to see just how much meaning one can pack into 140 characters. Indeed, a game called “Twooshing” has developed among the particularly hardcore Twitter users, wherein the challenge is to express oneself in precisely 140 characters; yours truly is, at this moment, at the top of the Twoosh Boards. There is levity and, of course, significant triviality being indulged with this activity, but the compressing challenge of the form - as with strict poetry forms - can also lend itself, sometimes, to art. (No, really! I’m completely serious.)

And, it’s good practice; one becomes extremely proficient in cutting away whatever is extraneous in narrative, so that even when one is writing something of more length and complexity, it has a better chance of packing a nice, walloping punch. (And then, whatever adjectives you do choose are like precious delicacies, distributed with care throughout one’s prose which has already been trimmed down enough to convey descriptions well.)

And sometimes the 140-character form is just wonderfully pragmatic. For instance, I recently went to see Cloverfield. I wouldn’t have been emotionally invested enough afterward to write a substantive review of the film - but I did want to weigh in with something, given its present popularity. So, while still in the theater (using my cell phone), I did:

Shorter Cloverfield: Post-9/11 anxiety + generalized fear of unknown + patriotic iconography + fuzzy dialogue/ barf-inducing film technique.

(And really, that’s about all you need to know about that film, in my humble opinion.)

And now, the bad news: (the above-referenced other level): If you’re not on Twitter, some of what gets posted (particularly the items beginning with @[username]) in this manner isn’t going to make a lick of sense to you. (And if you are on Twitter, then you’d probably rather follow all that stuff via Twitter’s own UI, and reading anything here is a bit redundant.) And of course, because individually these “tweets” can only pack in so much in the way of nuanced communication, I do run the risk of being seen as suddenly trivial and light (me!) when I’m writing about certain issues. Do I wish, for example, I’d had more time to develop a fully-realized essay on why I’m supporting Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Democratic Party’s nomination? Of course. But if you were reading here and trying to ferret out the basis of that support, you might not be particularly moved by 140-character crystallizations that, necessarily, can only communicate so much.

So that’s it, my imperfect system du jour. (Which I may well turn upside-down tomorrow.)

Tweetcha l8r.

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*This was on a short-lived blog called Queen of the Bean; someday I’ll recover and make some substantive use of the old posts.

• Sorry, @VioletheVerbose, I won’t lie. Younger children ARE disease vectors, but in time, issues emerge that make one nostalgic for snotnoses #
• @QueenofSpain HU - FUCKIN - RAH! #
• Giant screaming happy dance w/ teenager on news of Obama win in Virginia. Way to rock the muthafuckin vote, oh benevolent state of my birth! #
• I’d turned off news earlier while updating iPod… So, yes, Virginia (as it were!) - I learned of Obama win via Twitter (thx2 @QueenofSpain) #
• @ajfortin - Happy to oblige. Now do your part for Hawaii and we’ll have a virtual party in the ether betwixt us after Obama wins nomination! #
• @acomputerpro - Never underestimate the twooshing powers of a woman high on election season and caffeine. This too shall pass, I promise! #
• Never underestimate the racebaiting powers of some Clinton allies: http://tinyurl.com/2ev2vb (With friends like these, HRC needs no enemies) #
• Napped after the news of Maryland, woke up, had to pinch myself. Did Obama really just sweep VA/ MD/ DC? Why yes he did! Freakin’ brilliant. #
• @CurtMonash - Yeah, there’s no excuse for that misogyny. Just bc I support Obama doesn’t mean I think HRC’s not brilliant & capable - she is #
• @girlinblack - You’ve quite a nerdy quandary there - hilarious! Oddly, I also tweeted today on library karma matters: http://snurl.com/1zmck #
• @QueenofSpain - Fuck the hatas. I commented there for first time tonight - thought your post was good, but can see how it’d be misconstrued. #
• RVABlogs.com has option to pick 3 “most hated” blogs to NOT show up in feed (when you’re logged in); I SO wish feministblogs.org had that… #
• When I hear about the WGA people being back on the job (yay!), my first thought is cynical: “Now they’ll all come down with writer’s block.” #
• @valeriedoucette - No suprise the chefs of Veganomigon thanked whoever dealt w/ Post Punk Kitchen, deleting threads on honey & dating omnis! #
• @valeriedoucette - (BTW, that was Tweeted as a vegetarian, maybe eventually going vegan, who does not plan to divorce my omnivorous husband) #
• I’m delighted to note that some peeps I know (IRL friends here in Richmond and elsewhere) are migrating from MySpace to Facebook. Thank God. #
• @phaedral - I would most likely never be on MySpace but lots of our friends are in bands and such, and MySpace is geared to that. Sucky tho. #
• Call me crazy, but I’m more interested in watching news on the war, the CIA and torture policy, hell even ELECTIONS than I am in baseball… #
• @VioletheVerbose - Oh shit, Valentines Day. I totally forgot. Damn elections! Must get some cards tonight (I’m not ambitious enough to make) #
• Curious as to what @gapingvoid could possibly be referring to here: http://twitter.com/gapingvoid/statuses/708761702. Spill those beans, plz #
• Nothing more reassuring than hearing crashing sound from kitchen, followed by eight year old daughter hollering, “It’s okay, nothing broke!” #
• @phaedral - Dunno that adding ME is going to enhance your MySpace coolness (to whatever extent there is such a thing), but knock yerself out #
• @phaedral - Also, there’s a greasemonkey script for Firefox that enables one to turn off most “noise” from MySpace pages - it’s quite handy! #
• It shouldn’t surprise me, but getting hit on via MySpace bc my profile says “bi” irritates the shit out of me. Do they not also see MARRIED? #
• @phaedral - Actually that look’s somewhere between apathetic & grumpy. I didn’t want to smile (& I don’t list “hooking up” under “here for”) #
• @bip0larbear - That’s hilarious. The Coop! I got followed by him after posting some snarkage about MSNBC (tho I’m still not sure that’s why) #
• @QueenofSpain - At risk of becoming a certifiable Erin Kotecki Vest minion, I dugg ya. (Which sounds kinda wrong. But you know what I mean.) #

Given the time sensitivity of this matter (if you are moved to respond, please do so before tomorrow morning!), I won’t elaborate much about this bill, except to pass along the alert I received from Equality Virginia, and share my own email to my Senator Walter Stosch (R). More info here; go here to find out who your state Senator is.

From Equality Virginia:

…The measure, patroned by Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple (D-Arlington) passed an important vote today, but on a very strict party-line vote when many Republicans voted for the bill last year.

Your Senator is listed below, and is one of the Republicans who voted for similar legislation before. Please call your Senator at 1-800-889-9745, or email them, before Wednesday morning to remind them that they voted for identical language in 2007 and to please support it again this year.

Read more about this measure.

Don’t know your Senator? http://conview.state.va.us/whosmy.nsf/main?openform

Targeted Senators

Sen. Harry Blevins district14@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Ryan McDougle district04@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Thomas Norment district03@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Mark Obenshain mark@markobenshain.com
Sen. Fred Quayle district13@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Frank Ruff ruff@kerrlake.com
Sen. Ken Stolle vasenate08@kenstolle.com
Sen. Walter Stosch district12@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Frank Wagner fwagner21@aol.com
Sen. William Wampler district40@sov.state.va.us
Sen. John Watkins jnwatkins@aol.com

Here was my (hastily composed) letter to Senator Stosch:

Dear Senator Stosch,

As a supporter of equal healthcare rights, as well as the right of localities to expand vital services available to their constituents, I am writing to encourage you to show the same integrity you showed last year in supporting similar legislation.

At the present time, I am fortunate in that my children and I have access to healthcare through my husband’s insurance, available through his employer. But there was a time when, while we were in a committed, life-long partnership, it was not yet feasible for us to get married; consequently, neither I nor my eldest daughter could be covered on his policy. Had we been in a situation where we could have accessed benefits for our entire family through his employment, it would have been enormously helpful (and would only have strengthened our family, and further encouraged our movement in the direction of legal marriage).

It saddens me, deeply, that our friends and loved ones who either cannot yet legally marry because they are gay or lesbian, or who are not yet at a place in their lives where entering into legal marriage is feasible for them, are more vulnerable than are we to healthcare crises because of the manner in which appropriate, lifesaving, and family-friendly benefits are inaccessible to them. Of course, the measure under consideration at this time will not solve all these problems (as it would only benefit specific types of employees in individual localities), but it would be one positive, measurable step in the direction of what would be, I believe, the greater good for all Virginians. (Equality Virginia has more information on why this is a just and helpful measure.)

Thank you for your consideration, and please feel free to share my remarks with others if this would be helpful.

Warmest regards,

Victoria Marinelli

Every so often I do online court records searches on my sociopath ex, Amy Lynn Sales, in hopes that she has gone and gotten herself locked up again, to the benefit of lesbian and bisexual women everywhere (her preferred targets). Thing is, she’s into fraud and theft in addition to raping and battering women, which is awesome since the state cares much more about property crimes than about violence against women (particularly violence against sexual minority women).

Her sentence on a conviction for domestic violence? Ten days in jail, and a $250 fine.

Her sentence for “unauthorized use of a credit card < $1,000″? Two years in prison, three years probation, and a $500 fine.

Now, granted, with regard to the latter charge, she ultimately served very little of the actual prison term (sentence was suspended), but still.

I remember all to vividly how difficult it was for me to attempt to hold her accountable for her behavior sixteen years ago. (The fact that I’m still looking this shit up from time to time, after all these years, speaks volumes about the extent of the trauma she is given to inflicting.) The county court judge I dealt with seemed confused as to why I needed the protection order, but she nonetheless granted it - thereby causing an enormous scandal in our local lesbian community - though it was me, not Amy, who was branded a pariah in the process. If Amy violated the order’s terms, police were mandated to arrest her. The first time she violated the order, I called the cops and she sweet talked her way out of being arrested. (The cops, for their part, were as baffled as the judge had been about why the order was necessary, and it didn’t seem to register for them that they were required to arrest her.) The second time she violated the order, I finally succeeded in persuading a cop to at least drive by her house, by which point she’d skipped town.

The thing is, by the time she found me, she already had a record for attempted murder - albeit as a juvenile, meaning the record was sealed and not whatsoever of use to me. And when she’d first moved to Olympia and began insinuating herself into the lesbian community, she’d started volunteering right away for Safeplace, the only battered women’s shelter in the area - one which I subsequently received some help from, although it was an extremely contentious situation, and I was all the time having to deal with “advocates” telling me how much they’d really liked Amy and had found her so charismatic. (Plus, of course, Amy knew exactly where the “confidentially” located shelter was.)

And in the process, I did everything humanly possible to pursue criminal charges against her for both domestic violence and sexual assault and was literally laughed at by the “feminist” detective I dealt with at the Oly PD (said detective also being a highly-regarded volunteer for Safeplace).

As far as I can tell, she has only ever been prosecuted for domestic violence once, after this situation as reported by The Daily Iowan in 2004:

Authorities received a 911 phone call from a “hysterical” woman who told police that someone was trying to break into her home. Sales, the alleged victim’s ex-girlfriend, had entered the home and broke through a locked apartment door.

During the incident, Sales, 34, allegedly grabbed the woman and threw her onto a bed, refusing to release her. The woman suffered scratches, bruises, bumps to the head, and a possible broken nose.

The couple had recently broken up; they had lived together within the past year.

I can’t begin to imagine what hell this woman went through in order to get Amy prosecuted. For a serial batterer and rapist, ten days in jail. It’s a fucking disgrace.

*UPDATE 11:45 AM 8/14/06*

Okay, this is hilarious. This post is getting a lot of hits (but, interestingly, zero comments thus far) from this blog’s feed at RVAblogs.com, a lovely site that aggregates various Richmond, Virginia-based blogs. Recently, the site’s editor set up a neat tagging system enabling readers (rather than the bloggers themselves) to add descriptive tags to the posts. When I looked earlier today, I saw, for example, that the tag ‘race’ had been added to my post. Okay, that’s fine… but then later I looked again and a brand-new tag had been added: “only white people are racist“.

Um… Sorry, but I never said that. Or even remotely implied that! I’m writing here about racist shit white people feel perfectly happy with sharing with other white people. That was all. Of course people of all ethnicities can be racist! (See, for example, see this post on the Asian feminist blog Reappropriate about an Asian woman’s racism against a black man in making hiring decisions.) I won’t go so far as to assume that the person who tagged my post in this manner is some embarrassingly defensive (and racist) white person, but damn, it sure looks that way.

Okay, I now return you to the original blog post…

This evening we went to visit some friends, Chip and Lisa, who’d recently bought a house in a neighborhood near ours. There are quite a few homes for sale in that area so we poked around a bit, peering in the windows of those places that had For Sale signs (and which weren’t presently lived in… we’re not out to invade anybody’s privacy). Later we were talking with Lisa (who, like Chip, is white) about the neighborhood, who she’d met and what her impressions were. She said their neighbor next door, an elderly white woman, had seemed friendly at first. When Lisa asked what the woman knew about her neighbor on the opposite side of their house (whom Lisa had only briefly met before), the woman’s first response was, “Well, he’s colored.” As if, perhaps, Lisa had somehow not observed the fact that this neighbor was black, and needed to be informed - no, warned - of this fact! (How Lisa reacted to this startling observation, I neglected to ask.) Next, the woman said about the man, “Well, he’s been here for a few years.”

Later, Lisa met the man again and it turns out he’d been living there for, oh, twenty-seven years. Whereas the racist white lady had been there for only a few years longer than that. Yet, her perception was that this man was some recently invading (”colored”) interloper. Time to get over it, lady. Particularly since the neighborhood on the whole seemed about evenly white and black. Her racist nostalgia for a day when, presumably, it was much more exclusively white is just plain embarrassing.

I’m reminded of the time when, a few years back, a white waitress at a local Shoney’s, after we’d paid and were getting ready to leave, making friendly conversation, decided for some reason to share how annoyed she was about The Blacks (a phrase she uttered with significant venom) who kept using the Shoney’s parking lot, while they were apparently patronizing the business next door. What was most obnoxious about this was the way in which she said it, leaning over the counter and speaking in hushed, conspirational tones suggestive of some kind of racist shared reality between us. Of course I told her off on the spot (”In front of God and everybody” as we sometimes say in the South), explaining to her and then to her manager why the fact that she’d made this racist comment meant we would never again set foot in that business establishment (we had been, at that point, regulars, eating there at least once per week). I don’t know which of them looked more confounded, the waitress or the manager.

Later, in speaking to the same manager and subsequently his regional manager over the phone (at my initiation, not theirs), I failed to get through to them about why the woman’s comment had been racist, and moreover, why it had been so offensive to me. The regional manager actually asked me if I was white. Had I been thinking more clearly, I’d have hollered why in the hell does that matter here? But instead I just said, well, yeah, following which he seemed even more baffled as to why I’d been offended. Why would I challenge (even in this truly infinitesimal way) the very system of racism from which I derive privilege? I can’t imagine that the waitress would have said what she said to us in front of non-white customers. (While I can easily imagine her treating such customers differently, perhaps with racism of the less overt variety.)

A bit more than a decade ago, as a struggling young mom on welfare in Minnesota, I had another interesting experience with this sort of “whitey-to-whitey” conspirational racism, this time at a grocery store. Can’t remember the chain, but it was sort of like Ukrops here in Virginia… think it began with a B, which is to say it was somewhat high-end. (At the time, my girlfriend, my daughter and I were actually homeless, temporarily crashing out in the basement of someone we vaguely knew who lived in that area, hence shopping at the improbably high-end grocery store, because that’s all there really was.) The cashier smiled widely at me, saying, so pretty much everyone in the checkout line could hear, “Oh, you’re on food stamps?” As if that weren’t humiliating and irritating enough, she went further, asking, “So how do you like being on welfare?” To which I responded with something bright like, um, it’s okay, since, even if I’d been able to come up with some lucid, on-the-spot analysis of the particular intersection of class and disability politics* that had led to me being on public assistance (my girlfriend was disabled, her SSI was forever pending, and I had to take care of both her and my daughter full-time), A) it was none of her damned business and B) it would have been over her head anyway.

But wait, there’s more! Then the cashier launched into a rant about how she could totally understand someone like me needing to be on welfare and that was cool, but what she just couldn’t stand was These Black People who were forever coming in and buying steaks! Yes, steaks with their food stamps, when you could plainly tell they had plenty of money from all those gold chains They wear! In response to which I could, at that time, do nothing except stare at her in horror, grabbing my groceries as quickly as possible and heading for the door. Later, I called the store and told the manager what had happened. That time, at least, I didn’t have to explain why I was so offended; the manager profusely apologized and promised to take immediate action in addressing the problem with the cashier. (Of course, I don’t know what actually happened after that point; for all I know he may have done nothing.)

But what continued to haunt and gall me after the fact was how this woman had spoken to me in this conspirational way, from that place of presumed shared racism, and, what was more, as if she had any idea whatsoever what my life circumstances were. Plenty of people, of every possible ethnicity, scam welfare systems in one way or another (and there are lots of reasons why this is so, which I won’t get into here, but suffice it to say I would never automatically condemn someone who did that, because survival itself frequently requires such activity). Why did she automatically assume I was deserving of these benefits, based on our few moments of acquaintance in the (okay, now I remember the name) Byerly’s checkout lane? Only, of course, because I was white. Ugh.

*Actually, there’s an intersection with queer politics here, too, in that if Lee and I had been able to marry, I could have gotten a job and Lee could have subsequently qualified for the medical insurance she desperately needed while we were waiting for her SSI to be approved, a process which ultimately took four unbelievably anguishing, poverty-afflicted years. So even if she could not have been contributing economically to the household, I could have cared of all of us on one income; insurance could have paid for a personal assistant to help her with things I was staying home (or, as the case sometimes was, at other peoples’ homes) to take care of for her.

Reading today about the I-35W bridge collapse, I am reeling with memories. It’s been years since I left, but I specifically associated that particular area, near the border between St. Paul and Minneapolis, with freedom.

At the time, I was hunkered down with Lee at Job Corps in St. Paul, where the idea was to stay there until her ex-pimp who wanted her (and by extension, me) dead, lost interest in stalking us (or at least, became convinced that she wasn’t going to rat out said pimp’s criminal networks over specific murders in Chicago and Wisconsin about which she had knowledge). The place had the feel of a prison, with various of its practices modeled on corrections systems and/or the military… I can recall the signs up that barked, “Every day is inspection day!” and language like “KP” (for kitchen patrol).

But we welcomed it because it meant we were locked in almost all the time, and anybody who stepped on the grounds would be immediately descended upon by security. If anybody suspected us of using that place as a de facto battered women’s shelter (since of course none of the actual “feminist” battered women’s shelters would take us, as our situation wasn’t the standard hetero DV situation, and plus, we were lesbians) - or of us being dykes - their suspicions were eased significantly when I turned up pregnant, as a result of what had happened to me (involuntarily) at the notorious 410 homeless shelter in downtown Minneapolis right before we got into Job Corps. Sometimes we laughed about the subversiveness of it all - being two scrappy, radical young lesbian feminists using The Man to get away from The (even more overtly oppressive and murderous) Man. And meanwhile, miraculously growing a new life. (I could have had an abortion, but I didn’t want one. More on that here.) But mostly we festered in our respective post-traumatic states.

But there was one small bit of relief for me, when I managed to get a little side job as a housekeeper for a woman, Kathie Simon-Frank, who happened to be the director of academic advising for the department of Sociology for the University of Minnesota. I’d take the bus from Job Corps in St. Paul to Minneapolis and would set to work cleaning her toilets and whatever, then afterwards we’d end up talking about poetry and social justice and whatnot. An awkward situation, to be sure, but Kathie was a genuinely kind woman, and the fact that I got to - not had to - leave Job Corps once a week all by myself (in the process, getting away from Lee who was taking out all her terror on me*), in order to clean this nice woman’s house and have sane conversations that didn’t involve any of the underground insanity I was embroiled in, was a gift**. To the best of my recollection, the bus route I took didn’t specifically cross that bridge, but where Kathie lived was fairly close to it (within 2 miles), and today has found me scrambling for her contact information to make sure she and her family are okay. (I’ll update this post later with anything I learn… meanwhile I was very grateful to learn that a dear friend of mine, whom I actually knew from back in San Diego and who later moved to the Twin Cities, was not directly affected.)

I’ve been thinking today about these lyrics from an Indigo Girls song, Ghost:

And the Mississippi’s mighty
But it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across
With five steps down
And I guess thats how you started
Like a pinprick to my heart
But at this point you rush right through me
And I start to drown

And I am struck by how, for me, so much literally begins in Minnesota; the place where that bridge fell is like a nerve center for me, and now the whole nation as we look on in horror for the victims, hope for the survivors; I am haunted both because of my individual experience and because of this broader, collectively traumatic experience.

Those able to help please donate to the Twin Cities chapter of the American Red Cross.

*For more, see my poem “How the Fugitives - Two Women Writers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive,” in Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 6, No. 11 (November 2000).

**In a bizarre twist, Kathie later ended up being an adviser to Kelly Holsopple in her controversial report, Stripclubs According to Strippers: Exposing Workplace Sexual Violence. (Which, of course, later appeared in an anthology along with some of my own work, a fact I rather regret, but that’s another story.) Kelly, of course, was the plaintiff in the sexual harassment lawsuit against Evelina Giobbe (scroll down to ‘public domain’ subheading on this page) - a suit to which Lee and I contributed supporting documentation, since of course Lee was Giobbe’s former foster child, and she had lots of memories to share like being sent by her “wonderful anti-prostitution activist foster mother” on drug runs and the like, all the while Evelina crowed at how rad it was to be collecting money from the state for all her trouble - it was a better gig, she maintained in so many words, than actual, overt pimping.

Quoth my thirteen-year-old:

If I ever get married - and if I marry a man - he’s going to have to understand that I will will always be completely crazy about A Series of Unfortunate Events [the book series].

Well, she may or may not remain as exuberantly enthusiastic as she is now for that particular book series, but I love that without thinking about it, she does not see heterosexual marriage as an inevitable norm; nor is this, for her, whatsoever in contradiction with the fact that she is as typically “boy-crazy” as plenty of other girls her age. Currently, objects of her young fannish affection include the dashing Corbin Bleu (she literally screams whenever his countenance appears on the television screen) and Liam Aiken, not least of all because he stars as Klaus in the movie based upon the above-referenced book series.  Further, at her own profile at fanfiction.net,* she includes this line: Marriage is a human right, not a heterosexual privilege. Add this to your profile if you agree.

She really is an extraordinary kid.

*For her privacy, I won’t link directly to her profile or to any of the stories she writes, but suffice it to say I was a proud and amazed mama when I learned she was posting her stories at that site, and that she has her own little following!