feminist blogs

I was all set to dig into some unpleasant political blogging when I got a surprise text from my old friend Julie Tangelder on Kauai. She and I went to high school together - Kapa’a High, Class of ‘88 - and were pretty close then; since that time, we’ve had curiously parallel lives even while never speaking to each other or exchanging correspondence until quite recently.

And amid the rapid-fire texting back and forth, came some unfortunate news; our former classmate (though he was a year ahead of us) Keoni Lucas died recently in a car accident in Santa Monica, California.

I didn’t know Keoni all that well, but, along with Julie (and another friend, Jeremiah Johnson, who died in a diving accident last year; I wrote about this tangentially here, and still have not managed to complete a much longer work in progress about him), we rode the same bus to school.

This was, mind you, quite a distance - about 25 miles, one way, from where Jeremiah and I lived in Hanalei, and at least 30 from where Keoni and Julie lived in Ha’ena. And given that there was such a distance involved, all of us on that bus got to know each other to some degree. The bus had a culture all its own, with various cliques (none of which I ever fit into, of course) - and Keoni was one of the The Beautiful People.

That is to say, he was not only stunningly gorgeous in appearance, but graceful in his movements - owing, in great part, to his already considerable experience as a surfer.

But unlike his close friend, the very differently gorgeous Lyon Hamilton (brother of the now quite famous big wave surfer Laird Hamilton, whom I wrote about here), he seemed relatively unselfconscious about his own beauty. He was simply radiant.

And now, I learn that from the North Shore of Kauai, Keoni had gone on to study filmmaking at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and eventually moved to LA to pursue a career in that industry (even while he remained active as a surfer, and helped start a clothing line).

Here is Keoni happily behind the camera recently in Bali (click through to Flickr for image attributions):

Now there are a great number of people in mourning for him. A memorial service attended by nearly 500 people took place in Malibu on Sunday, while a ceremony back on Kauai is now scheduled for Sunday, April 20th.

I won’t be there, of course (I’ll be lucky if I can scratch together the money to attend my 20th high school reunion in June), but I did want to post something in acknowledgment of his passing. And it seems fitting in doing to recognize some of the success he had begun to enjoy in the film industry, with this clip from his supporting role in the (hilariously titled) independent film, Pee Stains and Other Disasters. He plays the prisoner:

Rest in peace, Keoni.

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Links:

• North Shore Kauai: Respected Kauai Local, Keoni Lucas, Dies in LA Car Accident (Note: this is a reprint of a Surfline article, but has section for comments)
• Kauai Garden Island News: North Shore surfer dies on Mainland (Note: Article gets details wrong, such as Keoni’s age; he was 38, not 35)
• Donate to Keoni Lucas Memorial Fund

I have been waiting impatiently for the video for OTEP’s Confrontation to come out - and it’s a fire-hot, unapologetically political follow-up to 2004’s Warhead. (Did you not catch that when it first came out? Hit that previous link; I’ll wait here while you listen and watch.)

Again, it hardly matters if you’re into metal or not (or, if you are into metal, if you’re possessed with some weird idea that women are not capable of fully owning the genre); this is just some really powerful music. (But do know that I’ve been listening to this album for months now, so my perceptions are based on that more than the video per se; between Confrontation and Warhead, the video for the latter packs a different sort of punch; Confrontation leaves the viewer a little uncomfortable, I think - which, quite possibly, is the point.)

And the album from which Confrontation is drawn, The Ascension, is unbelievable, lyrically and otherwise¹.

Eet the children, for example, is like an anthem both for abused children and those deemed mentally ill as a result of such abuse. It begins with these haunting, almost whispered lines:

Hush little baby
Don’t make a sound

This is gonna hurt
Me more than you…

Following which there is a kind of aural explosion, vocalist Otep Shamaya’s lyrics continuing with these lines:

If I’m a danger to myself
Just think what I would do to you…

Really, listening to that track is for me like the auditory equivalent of reading certain of flawedplan’s posts in the ‘child abuse’ category at Writhe Safely. (Even though punk is more her thing than metal, but I’ll tell ya, Otep’s music transcends a lot of boundaries.)

But back to Confrontation.

Here are some of the lyrics, followed by the video.

More capitalist crimes,
More enemies than allies

No WMD’s, who gives a fuck
If they die

Just kill em all, watch em fall
Skin the world with their lies

Its a rich man’s war
But it’s the poor that fight

Stand up
Speak out
Strike back…

They don’t know
What they started

CONFRONTATION…

(Note: Further lyrics include those that inspired the title of this post; listen via the link below.)

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¹ The album is also available for (legal!) download from Amazon and iTunes (in its DRM-free “iTunes Plus” format).

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.

In the event this was you earlier tonight:

Accessing, specifically, 12 pages primarily in the Matriarchs and The Family Cactus categories, before I took my blog offline for awhile, please, for both our sakes, go away*. If I wanted to be in communication with you, I would be in communication with you. I’ve worked hard to make sure you can stay in touch with your granddaughters (and thankfully my husband is willing to serve as proxy in this matter), and I’m happy to send gifts at all the right holiday occasions (have you noticed I’m much better about that since we stopped speaking?), but there is a reason I haven’t been in touch since early in 2006 - it’s because I don’t want to talk to you.

I feel much better about, and emotionally generous toward our involuntarily shared history, when we’re not in touch. I like that. It helps me to remember the good stories. It helps me remember that I love you.

If you have some instinct to re-state, icily and indignantly, that you just don’t get it - what happened? why? - I’ve been explaining the what and the why for decades, and only clued into the fact that you would never hear me, much less change, a relatively short time ago.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly yet expecting different results, then consider this my declaration of significantly improved mental health.

Now it’s possible that wasn’t actually you tonight (in which case, apologies for the mysterious and now obstreperous behavior, everyone else), just as it’s possible it wasn’t my ex the other day, accessing 22 pages mostly in the Exes category from the ISP of the specific place I know she frequents (which may explain the other recent outage to others of you out there).

I know this is the internet, and I’m the one who put all of this out there. I get that.

But if you want to show me that you care about me at all (I am not, of course, counting on this), please respect my privacy anyway. Do me that favor, if you do nothing else for me.

You have two granddaughters, and yes, you usually only get to see them once a year or whenever a conference takes you to the mainland, but there were plenty of years of my childhood when I only saw you once a year, because that was how you wanted it.

You didn’t want me; you made that incredibly clear. I was the inconvenience standing between you and any number of adventures that were more exciting than childrearing. And yeah, there were fringe benefits for me (like riding out Hurricane David with you in a St. Thomas warehouse, what a vacation visit with my mother that was!).

But I don’t want anything like that kind of life for my daughters. Relative to my having attended in the range of eight schools between kindergarten and the second grade alone, my eight year old daughter still lives in the house where she was conceived. Ours is a run-down house, and a rental to boot, but I’m damned proud of the fact that I have now lived in one place for ten years - four years having been my previous record. (One reason why, though I only lived there from 1984-1988, after my dad and stepmom kicked me out and you had to take me back - I do, in my heart, regard Hawaiʻi as one of the places I can somewhat authentically think of as “home,” despite the acute postcolonial guilt I felt, even at thirteen, though you, of course, never did).

And really, it’s okay. Hell, I’m the one who gave you this book, a sympathetic memoir about a woman who’d left her children. Maybe in your perusals of this blog, before I turned the lights out earlier tonight, you got to this part:

A normal person would be able to move (construct a new bridge, repair the old one, navigate some other path across), but I have never been like that, nor has my mother been, or she would not have surrendered her custody of me, with no observed reluctance, on so many occasions when I was young - seeking new locales, lovers, and “lifestyles” as she saw fit.

I don’t begrudge her that, any more than I begrudge Maria Housden, author of Unraveled, who, after the death of one of her four children, stunned everyone she knew by seeking a divorce, granting full custody of her surviving kids to her ex-husband. She then struck out on her own, initially, for an artist’s colony, of all apparently self-indulgent sites. Her story placed in sharp relief the double-standards by which women are viewed as parents, relative to how fathers are judged. No one questions that men need identities beyond marriage and parenting. Housden got hers; so, too, did my mother.

My God, do you see how far I bend over backwards to find honorable, even feminist analogies via which to generously reconstruct my own childhood experience? Did Maria Housden share with her kids the joys of fishbowling when they were quite young? And then tell, at each Thanksgiving, the hilarious story about her young daughter being so stoned that she turned to the hippie next to her in the cramped car, and, after saying “I’m going to eat you up,” bit into the guy’s kneecap? I’m guessing not.

What’s even more curious? How you’d give up custody of me, more often than not, while simultaneously pursuing an option that would have given you custody of Lori Jo, your brother Billie’s daughter. Because he and his wife were alcoholics, and you were so much better than that. During one of my visits, you even showed me a draft of a children’s book, Evra, which in some fashion concerned Lori Jo. (Interesting how you always had a searingly sharp sense of irony, except when it was your behavior that was ironic; then you were just being rational and benevolent!)

You had a special kind of devotion to children’s issues, it’s true. But I was peculiarly excluded from this category, “children.” You made this even more clear when you took a nude picture of me (seated in the lap of one of your lovers from the period immediately following your leaving my father), and an artist’s reproduction made from that, and hung it from every one of the countless houses you lived in, while also sending copies to everyone we knew, and frequently discussing how, in the picture, I looked so sultry, beyond my years, etc. (Incidentally? Before his death, Billie told me about how he always thought that was inappropriate).

I’m not trying to get my childhood back. It’s gone, and that’s fine. But I’m not going to deprive my daughters of the intrinsic value of this time in their lives. Which is what would happen, to some degree, if you and I were in touch, because the effort is always uniquely draining.

Listen, I do care about you. And I’m really not obsessing on all of this stuff constantly. But you have no clue! And I doubt you can help it. You are, after all, your mother’s daughter (though God knows, you improved on that template).

And yes, I am yours. But I’m the one who did break the pattern of us. I’m the one who did not abandon her children at any number of points on the map whenever whimsy (in your case) or drunkenness (in your mothers) happened to strike.

The bottom line - that it’s my daughters who deserve and require my attention, not you - hasn’t changed from when (this most recent round in) our estrangement began. (And if they decide to become mothers, I hope they’ll do their part to improve on the generational template. No doubt, by the time they are grown, I will have given them plenty of things to legitimately complain about.)

You always joked how it was no accident, your moving all the way to Hawaiʻi, while your mother remained in Virginia. You don’t suppose it’s merely because airfare is expensive (although of course, there’s that too) that I haven’t been back to Hawaiʻi since 1993, and that I ultimately came back to Virginia, do you?

There may be a time when I’m ready to talk to you again. If you push it, it may never happen. And there is nothing I want less than I want that. (Re-read last sentence as needed. Now do you get it?)

I love you. Now please leave me alone.

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* Or if you must read here, for the love of God, have the decency to use a feed reader.

Dear Dr. Gilliam,

I was stunned to learn only tonight of your passing. I had just worked up the nerve to make a new appointment after having not seen you for months; Linda Love from your office called with the news.

If I understand correctly (not a sure thing, as my sharp, jagged sobs punctuated that conversation), you were at Mardi Gras - one of your favorite celebrations in this world. You’d had a fine meal and some ice cream, followed by a third course of Massive Heart Attack. You died instantly, moving straight into the next mystery. (Your schedule always was pretty busy.) I can only imagine that realm’s cuisine and music and art. Or, if it’s too formless for that, then its textures and resonances, faintly echoing sound waves. Whatever it is that might characterize that place (or lack of place), I hope it’s rich, full of whimsy and depth.

If you found God, please verify for me that S/He has an offbeat sense of humor. S/He might appreciate, perhaps, that just above where I’ve written “I hope it’s rich, full of whimsy and depth,” that at first, I accidentally wrote “death” instead of “depth,” which would have been fairly horrifying to me had I inadvertently uploaded such text to the guestbook accompanying your obituary (we are so modern now we have online funerals!).

I want to say here that I’m grateful to you on quite a few counts:

• You were objective. When I told you about certain events, where you had knowledge of some parties involved, you did not let that knowledge color your judgment; you listened to me and you believed me. (Also, you’ll be proud of me: today I finally worked up the nerve to consult with a lawyer. This time, I’ll follow the process through, however far I still can, given the various statutes.)

• You didn’t try to cram the complexity of me into any kind of one-size-fits-all treatment model; you were fine with discarding what wasn’t working (for example, the course of Ambien that had me driving to Wal-Mart and making strange vegan casseroles in the night - not to mention leaving long, loopy voice mails for various friends and ex lovers), and adapting stuff that seemed like it might work. You gave me the space to work through things at my own speed.

• There were, over the last 3-4 years, various gaps (sometimes lasting months) between our appointments. You pushed me in ways I needed to be pushed. And backed off when pushing wouldn’t have helped.

We speculated, once or twice, as to whether we might be some kind of distant kin, both our families having roots in the Appalachian segments of Virginia and Tennessee, and with the name of “Gilliam” having made at least one appearance in my own family tree. It may or may not have been, but it did not matter nearly so much as the fact that I felt safe with you, at a time in my life when I felt safe with almost no one. (Linda gave me a few names of other doctors to call. Already, I feel sorry for them, considering the tests I put you through.)

If you carry into the next world some C.V. concerning your accomplishments in this one, please feel free to include among the numerous details this item: that you helped to save my life. S/He can call anytime for a reference; I haven’t moved and am not likely to, until such time as my living here might also come to a natural rather than unduly hastened end. Perhaps also in the context of vacation. (The grammarian in me feels compelled to note, here, the root of ‘vacate’ in this word; damn if you didn’t take this most recent ‘vacation’ quite literally.)

Rest peacefully, Dr. Gilliam. My best, also, to your partner Roy (another fine and gentle soul), and to your children, friends, colleagues, and patients.

We were all quite fortunate to know you.

___

More on Dr. John Hilliard Gilliam:

Richmond Times-Dispatch: Obituary
Bipolarity: The mental health community has lost a hero
Dr. John Gilliam: Memorial page

[See note re: problem w/ text size*.]

In lieu of the still-unfinished essay referenced yesterday, I give you this**.

My mother with Barack Obama, December 16, 2004, Honolulu, HI.

Someday I’ll find, and post, the one with my maternal grandmother and her hero, Oliver North. (Because I’m nothing if not fair and balanced.)

Plus the ones of my paternal grandpa (who raised me on C-SPAN, God bless him) with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Ford.

For more goofiness, see this old post with pics of the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone, who went to high school with my dad; Wellstone’s mom and my grandmother also worked together in the cafeteria; the families also got together, on occasion, outside of school functions. (Did I mention the young Mr. Wellstone - for whom, years later - I did in fact vote, when I lived in Minnesota - looks quite fetching in a skirt?)

For better and for worse, the political thing has always been in the blood.

Not to worry though, the chances of my running for office are pretty much nil. Not only did I experiment with some blow while I was a teenager in Hawaiʻi, I also have an arrest record.

Ironically, the Olympia, Washington cop thought I had cocaine on me at the time; I didn’t. Rather, I had unlabeled capsules of another white powder in an unlabeled plastic baggie. Somehow he didn’t believe that the capsules contained boric acid: a homeopathic remedy for yeast infections. So they kept me locked up until they’d tested every last one of them. Following which he sheepishly emerged from the lab, asking whether I had any more capsules back at my dorm, so I could take care of my, ahem, “little problem.”

Needless to say, I was itching to get out of there.

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* Tech note: WordPress is doing something weird with text size, which renders the individual post with too large text, and the post as it appears on main page of blog with size of title’s text too small. No idea why, trying to figure that out now. Will delete this note after troubleshooting.

** Intended also as a follow-up to a conversation that started here. Because this is the fun response, and I’ve given plenty of energy in recent times to political discourse that is, necessarily, painfully serious.

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.

There are lots of reasons for my relative silence of late. If I could explain them - well, I guess I wouldn’t be silent then, right? It’s all I can do right now to move from day to day, occupying my variously contradictory and emotionally draining roles - writer, mother, daughter, wife, etc*.

I’ll be okay. And honestly, there’s a lot about my life right now that is going right. But this whole struggling- for- integration- amid- perpetual- sources- of- dissonance situation that afflicts, I think, most women writers (or writers, period) is an incorrigible beast - one I live with every day, and have even made peace with to some extent.

So, for whichever among my blogospheric friends might still be reading me (and who may be rightly offended that I’m so off the grid that I’m no longer reading them, much less posting any viable material here; sorry, right now it just cannot be helped), please know there is nothing to worry about.

That said, I’ll proceed with what I actually sat down to post.

–

The following began as a response to, of all things, an early 90s pop video posted on YouTube. Wisely, that site’s designers forbid commenters from posting messages in excess of 500 characters, so when my little comment became utterly unwieldy (but was too obviously relevant for me to just delete), I had to put it some place.

The song is Ooh Child, and in the video it is covered by some band called ‘Dino.’ (In my internet wanderings tonight, I’ve discovered this song’s been covered by countless artists; this blogger has the lyrics for a recent Beth Orton version; the original, as best I can tell, as explained further below, was performed by the Five Stairsteps.)

Now, I can’t embed the video for Dino’s version (that feature was disabled by the guy who uploaded it - one ‘eightiesdood’), but those curious may view it by clicking here. (For some indication of its obscurity in the ensuing years, Wikipedia’s ‘disambiguation’ page for Dino, as of this moment, lists a total of twenty four things or people the term can refer to, among which this band is not one.)

Here’s what I would have posted, space permitting:

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Good Lord. This song figures in a (true) story I’ve been trying to write, and stumbling upon this answers a question that had been nagging at me. It was, indeed, 1993, and this song had been on the radio while I was living with my girlfriend at the time in Fargo, ND. I liked it, but my girlfriend found it offensively trite. Too “pop.” And I got her point. But I still quietly hummed along to it whenever it came on the radio.

We had a really miserable existence there - we’d moved to Fargo, in a huge rush, from Seattle because of some explicitly life-imperiling trouble she was in, which I was trying desperately to get her out of. Alas, said “trouble” followed us there, too, and on one mad July night we had to flee our apartment. We took refuge at this scary shelter downtown, where we didn’t know if we would be safe or not for the night - we were sort of holding our breath. The agency was going to try to get us tickets on the Greyhound to Minneapolis, though they weren’t sure, yet, how soon it could happen, since it was already late at night.

After we got settled in, we had this huge fight (the kind of fight two people have when they love each other but they’re trapped in a completely impossible and terrifying situation), which ended with me telling her that I didn’t know how or why, but we were going to get out of that mess - we were going to make it to Minneapolis alive, and we were going to shake this bad situation for good - eventually.

Then we started walking around the facility - being too scared to sleep, while we waited to see if indeed this agency was going to follow through with getting us the bus tickets. The hallways were dark and we were tip-toeing, trying not to wake any other of the emergency guests, and we saw light coming from a door. As we walked toward it, we could hear music coming from the room, growing louder as we approached, until we could make out the song.

It was, of course, “Ooh Child.” But NOT the goofy 90s version that had been on the radio weeks before, the lyrics for which I’d quite liked (for obvious reasons, I guess), while its execution in that format had been found so reprehensible by my girlfriend (who fancied herself to be an R&B aficionado**). It was clearly a different version, a truly soulful version, and (having no awareness of the original, as performed by the Five Stairsteps, as I figured out only tonight from Wikipedia), I wondered if I was having some sort of auditory hallucination - interpreting both our current circumstances and the music we were hearing in wishful ways which, objectively speaking, were wholly unwarranted.

And then we were at the door, surreptitiously peeking through it. And there was this old man there, the janitor, quietly mopping the floor. And he had a little radio plugged in on the counter behind him, so little it didn’t seem like that rich sound could possibly be coming from it, yet it was. And we just stood there, listening and watching.

He never saw us, but his presence that night somehow made us feel less alone and terrified. And a little while later our tickets came through, and we got the hell out of Fargo. (Needless to say, I’ve never been back.)

Since that night - most of which I still can’t write about, even though more than fourteen years have passed; it is to me as Dresden was to Kurt Vonnegut - I’ve heard the R&B original “Ooh Child” on several occasions, but never, somehow, the particular version that had played in our apartment earlier, which for whatever reason my girlfriend and I had bitterly argued over. Thus, while in that shelter in July of 1993, I wondered if I’d lost my mind at hearing the original for the first time, I later questioned my memory as to whether the cheesy remake I’d heard first was something I’d imagined. Because when we as human beings endure terror, every bit of sensory input passes through that terror’s filter, coloring it inexorably. In the weeks before we’d had to flee (with almost nothing save for ID, a negligible amount of cash, and the clothes on our backs), things were so tense between us, we would have fought over anything, real or imagined.

Finding this song tonight helps me to put a few puzzle pieces together. Maybe one day I’ll be able to write the rest of what happened that night, and over the ensuing weeks - which we did, both, survive, although not unscarred.

That idealistic “Ooh-oo child, things are gonna get easier/ Ooh-oo child, things’ll be brighter” lyric - with its apparently Providential timing and grace - helped to get us through the worst night of our lives. It wasn’t enough to keep us together forever (walking “in the rays of a beautiful sun”), but it served as a bridge, from the near-inevitability of a certain torturous hell (the trouble she was in, by all rights, should have gotten us both killed that night) through to a series of subsequent purgatories, before we finally split four years later.

It’s a magnificent song. Even when delivered by early 90s pop stars not heard from previously or since.

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* Notice I am not currently listing ‘activist.’ That term would imply, you know, a state of being active, which, for reasons truly beyond my control right now (and which I did not forsee when I was embarking upon the Ohio conference, which I do have thoughts about that I will eventually share), I cannot presently engage.

** Translation: She had, on occasion, lived with black folks.

Note to my readers: If, after reading this, you would like to support me in getting to the upcoming Prostitution, Sex Work, and the Commercial Sex Industry conference, please avail yourself of the “donate” button. More information on why I am seeking your support can be found here. Thanks.

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Recently at Amber Rhea’s blog, I felt compelled to comment on what seemed to me a bizarre mischaracterization of anti-prostitution feminists. Citing a heartbreaking and enraging news item, Pakistan ‘prostitutes’ beheaded, she had provided this notation:

Militants did this to (and I quote) “end obscenity.” Mmm-hmm. Now see the problem with that kind of shit? Oh but I thought Patriarchy totally loved sex workers. Riiiiiight.

My response, in part:

I’m confounded that you would take the interpretation that anti-prostitution feminists have some notion that “Patriarchy totally loves sex workers.” All the anti-prostitution feminists I know are pretty blisteringly aware that women in the sex trade are utterly despised by patriarchy - that indeed, much of the sex trade is centered around/caters to that specifically patriarchal hatred...

Yes, there are indeed some who call themselves feminists and/or radical feminists who harbor notions that what women who identify as sex workers are doing is some intentional act of collusion with patriarchy, with said collusion somehow being engineered to specifically harm other women (e.g., those not impacted by and/or participating in the sex trade). When I hear that, I call bullshit really loudly. That’s utterly antithetical to feminism, and it’s offensive. (More about the “whorebaiting” problem among some self-described radical feminists some other time.)

Well, I guess today is ‘that other time.’

Recently, at Jill Brenneman’s blog, I read an interesting comment by Gregor, who describes himself as a “male second wave pro -radical feminist.” Here, he is quoting Renegade Evolution (who in turn, had been, from what I gather, extolling the virtues of gonzo porn):

“The human animal is not all happiness and shine, there is dark and savage there…thats what I see in it.” Yeah and you see it again and again and again, and you make sure others see it again and again and again too..

I replied thusly:

This is an unfortunate example of what I call “whorebaiting.” It’s wrong, and it’s anti-feminist. I understand and am utterly sympathetic to your antipathy toward the sex industry on the whole, but this is not helpful. There are more effective (and ethical) ways to get your points across, comrade.

He commented back:

I think my statement is *not* antifeminist. I don’t know where you get that from. I will forward it to 2 senior feminist women for verification. I am certain, but as a male pro-feminist I will do this to make sure.

(AHEM.)

Insert pregnant pause here, as I consider which “senior feminist women” to whom my criticisms may have been forwarded. Maybe Melissa Farley, who’s been pretty cool toward me ever since I told her about the grossly unethical circumstances in which Evelina Giobbe’s “research” on pimps was actually conducted*, questioning the ethics of her relying on that data**?

(NOW BACK TO JILL BRENNEMAN’S BLOG)

Enter now into this discourse Gretchen:

Why is Gregor’s statement “whorebaiting”? Ren is making a decision to film, watch and be paid to do dark and savage sexual acts that an audience consumes and debately*** the films may reinforce misogyny. Gregor has a right to point that out to her and frankly should.

I’m unclear though from your post if you are sympathetic to the porn industry or not?

To which, with much exasperation, I replied back:

You obviously don’t know me, and neither does Gregor, whom I called ‘comrade’ without any sense of irony.

If I have to explain to you why his comment was ‘whorebaiting,’ then, damn. It’s quite possible there would be no getting through to you. The cognitive dissonance between recognizing the harm that the sex industry, largely controlled by men, perpetuates against women and then choosing, more often than not (it seems to me, from what I’ve read here thus far), women in the sex industry as targets for your ridicule is pretty confounding.

Of course, no woman’s experience in the sex trade is going to be ‘equivalent’ to anyone else’s. I’ve written a great deal about the various stratifications among women in the sex trade, which are inexorably intertwined with systems of oppression. In terms of the women I’ve known in the industry, Ren is hardly representative. A comment from ’sojourner’ on this old thread at Feministing speaks my mind here: “Yes, there are women out there who choose sex work… But I also think that trafficked women, women beaten by their pimps or raped by their customers, heroin addicts, and women lying dead in ditches don’t get to write about their experiences on blogs.”

Nonetheless, as a survivor (and I should not fucking have to declare that), I can’t abide by the phenomenon of people who haven’t been in the sex trade (can I safely assume that? if not, tell me) directing their patriarchy-hating vitriol (of which I also have a great deal, btw) at those of us who have been there.

And calling out Ren’s comment as anti-feminist would be sort of like calling out the sky as blue. I expect better from the anti-prostitution and anti-pornography activists with whom I am tactically, personally, and politically allied.

So, are we clear on the concept of “whorebaiting” now?

If my allies in the anti-prostitution and anti-pornography movement would like to stop being slandered by the ’sex pozzes’ (or whatever we’re calling them these days), it would be damn helpful if they’d stop giving them such good ammunition****.

__

* At the time, Giobbe had a sixteen year old foster daughter, known to me a few years later as “Lee,” who had come into contact with her as a client of WHISPER (for Women Hurt In Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt, the erstwhile Minnesota nonprofit), when she was struggling to get away from her convicted murderer pimp. Giobbe essentially used Lee for PR purposes, showing off her charge at meetings of radical feminists who naturally cooed over what an awesome rescuer she was, while at home Giobbe was abusing her physically, sexually, and emotionally. (The fact that she sent Lee on her drug runs is barely the tip of that iceberg.) When she was doing her research for the “WHISPER Oral History Project,” she interviewed a number of pimps, and insisted on conducting at least some of those interviews in the home, while specifically introducing the pimps to Lee (against her stated wishes) and bragging about how she’d “gotten” her. This was part of a pattern Giobbe had of regularly threatening Lee that she could be turned back out on the streets at any time, which, of course, she ultimately did, on the night before Lee had final exams at the high school she’d finally been able to enroll in (about which Giobbe had said, “Education is a privilege - not a right“), which naturally resulted in her ending up back in prostitution. Giobbe, of course, would later lie to her colleagues about this, claiming that Lee had run away - “what else can you expect from these girls”?

** Note that I have no argument with the validity of Giobbe’s data. I just wish to God it could have been collected in a way that was not to the exhaustively demonstrated harm of one particularly endangered prostituted teenager. Every single member of WHISPER’s (long since defunct) board knows what Giobbe did, because I personally drafted the 33-page complaint on behalf of Lee and myself and distributed copies to each of them. Andrea Dworkin got a copy, too.

***This is obviously a misspelling (there were others in both her and Gregor’s comments, which I’ve corrected in this text), but I’m unclear on what she actually meant to convey, so I’m leaving it as is.

****I will not be particularly surprised if I am accused of being the one supplying such “ammunition.” It’s our movement’s dirty laundry, people: the kind that has caused many anti-prostitution survivors to essentially ‘defect’ from the cause, and you know you don’t want that - where else will you get your crunchy anecdotes for your grant applications and books? So, time to deal with it.

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.