This Is What a Feminist Looks Like Blog Carnival

I’ll begin by saying I genuinely hope this is the last time I am forced to write this kind of bitch-fit. I mean really, I’m getting tired of repeating myself as I’m sure my fellow young fems can agree. For variation, I won’t scream “I’m RIGHT HERE!” this time. As a feminist who’s not always comfortable or accepting of identifying as a feminist, I can speak to why young women do not always claim the title for themselves.

Young women refute the term “feminist” because they have been systemically excluded from the movement; clearly since a number of us are blogging about it today. But as a young woman of color who’s been in various feminist spaces, I know how exclusionary the movement can be. I can’t say how many times I looked at my boss with “that face” saying, “I’m the youngest person in the room. AGAIN” or “Uh, we’re the only brown folk here.” Of course, this is without counting the number of times I’ve been tokenized. Let me give some background: I was the Program Assistant for the Pro-Choice Public Education Project, a national reproductive justice non-profit organization. I worked with PEP for 3 years, since I was 17 and played a viable role in the organization. I was very privileged to have the opportunity and made the absolute most of it. And still there were one too many instances where colleagues were introduced and I was at the receiving end of an “oh-how-nice” and a condescending smile. So yeah, I’ve had a problem calling myself a feminist when the very movement I’ve worked vigilantly for refuses to respect the role I’ve played.

Beyond the exclusion and tokenism are the discrepancies in what older feminists choose to label “feminism”. I’m neither employed nor really affiliated to a feminist organization at the moment. I can’t remember the last time I signed a petition. But I am an English Lit major with a concentration in gender studies. I tweet everyday on women’s issues and hold conversation with my friends – and my partner – about these topics. See, young women, myself included, think “feminism” is an ugly term because the older generation tells us we can’t wear pink and be a feminist; we can’t take our spouse’s last name and be a feminist; we can’t have our activism reside in online social media and be a feminist. Feminism has always been about choices. We work to provide the means by which all women can choose how to live their lives. This includes the traditional feminine roles as well as the unconventional roles. Feminism was created not to eliminate every “traditional” lifestyle, but to create new ones, to give women more options, and to provide them with the spaces to prosper, both with and without men. So when a feminist tells a college-educated, professional young woman that taking her husband’s last name is un-feminist, she’s won’t think feminism is very pretty. And when the older feminist movement tells us tweeters, bloggers, and organizers that we don’t exist, you get a blog carnival dedicated to calling the haters out.

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Hating on Twilight and Young Women: STFU

Last semester I wrote my final paper for my feminist theory course on Twilight and feminism as it pertains to girls and young women and their autonomy. When choosing the topic for my paper (it was an open assignment), I thought it important to write on something I knew about and found important. In this case, it was Twilight and young women. I found myself deeply offended by a good number of sources I read for my paper. My position was to defend Bella as a viable example of a powerful young woman. As Stephenie Meyer said herself, feminists are consistently attacking this young woman’s choices, and isn’t the basis of feminism about having the right and tools to make your own choices? What angers me the most is feminists’ critique of Bella and Edward’s relationship. Recently, I was linked to this article regarding young women, real love, and marriage in response to Bella and Edward in Twilight. That this piece is offensive to young women like me is an understatement. Rita Arens writes,

True love -- the kind of love that lasts for fifty years -- isn't based on hormones or pheremones or even intellectual stimulation. True love -- the kind of love that lasts for fifty years -- is based on mutual trust and respect for each other's lives, interests, health and happiness. And I'm just going to come out and say it: Few people have the maturity to recognize those qualities in their youth. Not when there are so many sexy and selfish young thangs running around wanting to hook up and be seen together.

Someone please explain to me what’s on this woman’s biscuit, because I can’t even begin to understand. It’s evident to me that the real problem that older women and feminists have with Twilight is that they can’t believe that young women have the maturity to consent to such a powerful and real relationship. They can’t comprehend that Bella’s choices regarding her relationship with Edward were made on the basis of what’s best for herself and her love. And they can’t agree with that being a demonstration of power and autonomy for Bella.

The attacks on Bella have become a personal attack for me. I met my first real love at the age of seventeen. I am twenty-years-old and am engaged to the man I fell in love with two-and-a-half years ago. My relationship IS based on mutual trust and respect. But it is also based on youthful desires – whatever that may mean to you – and on the dreams I had about love when I was seventeen. My relationship is, in fact, quite similar to Bella and Edward’s. My partner is older, quite protective, and fervently believes in the importance of my college education. He also wants to marry me and have a family and holds these as values in our relationship. He is always involved in the decisions I make regarding school, work, AND my reproductive choices. I have never considered these actions to be anti-feminist, since they are choices that I have made and have been given the opportunity to make with the man I love, based on what’s best for me and for him and for us.

I refuse to re-evaluate my relationship because older feminists cannot view my form of autonomy as feminism, or because they think young love is not real. If you don’t like Twilight, that’s your choice. But please, don’t think that you can get away with attacking young women’s desire to love. It is a human right and every young woman has the ability to choose who and how she loves. If you don’t believe or support that, you are the one missing out on powerful allies and experiences. True love is timeless…and ageless.

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My Contraceptive Journey

Part of Latina Week of Action for Reproductive Justice

I have been aware of contraception since before I was sexually active. Before any of us had even kissed anyone, my friends and I knew about condoms, birth control pills, diaphragms and other contraception. We attended a progressive Catholic school in New York City, where our sex education classes went into great detail about birth control methods. It was also the late 80s, and AIDS was ravaging our communities, despite President Reagan’s persistent and immoral denial of the disease and its toll. Just as important in shaping my ideas around sexuality was the fact that by my freshman year in high school, I had several friends who became pregnant and struggled with their decisions about whether to parent, place for adoption or terminate the pregnancy. I knew then that preventing pregnancy and STDs would be an important part of my life for a long time.

I became sexually active in my teens, much earlier than my mother would have wanted, and if I am honest, earlier than I was emotionally ready for. I was in love for the first time, and my boyfriend and I were pretty inexperienced (read: virgins). At that point, condoms were my contraceptive of choice. They were cheap, accessible and my mother did not need to know about them. (Let’s not even discuss my father’s knowing anything about my sex life.) Condoms also meant that my boyfriend could and would share in the responsibility of keeping us both free from disease and pregnancy. The latter was still a more real and terrifying thought to me than the former, even at the height of the AIDS pandemic. Condoms continued to be my go-to birth control method until college.

As an undergraduate, I continued using condoms, this time with spermicide. It took me a while to realize that I the irritation I was experiencing was an allergic to nonoxynol-9 , the spermicide used in several brands of condoms. On to the next method. Like my friend, Bianca I tried withdrawal. I even tried the sponge – yes that sponge made famous by the character Elaine on Seinfeld. I felt clumsy inserting it and wasn’t confident that I had done it correctly. Not a good starting point for a relationship with a contraceptive.

Finally, I made an appointment with my campus health services to get a prescription for birth control pills. It seemed like the right birth control method for the relationship I was in. They were only $5 a month through University Health Services, and I didn’t have to worry about my mother finding them. I suffered few side effects and overwhelming relief that I’d found a birth control that worked for me. Sometime after college, I got tired of taking the pill. I wanted to share the burden of preventing STDS and pregnancy with my partner, not carry the whole responsibility myself. I was also a little concerned about putting hormones in my body. So the pills went on hiatus, and I went back to condoms. This time it was an eye-opening experience. Had I forgotten what condoms were like? Or had my body changed? Or was my current relationship different from the last time I used condoms? I wasn’t sure which it was, but now condoms were yucky, uncomfortable, and a complete turn-off. How had this happened? Condoms had been my go-to birth control method before, but I realized that they weren’t right for me in the relationship I was in. The hiatus was a short one. While I still wanted a more equitable sharing of the responsibility for birth control, I was not willing to sacrifice a happy sex life for it.

Things went along like this until my 30s. My husband and I were thinking of having children, and we stopped using birth control altogether. We didn’t get pregnant, and we were okay with that (and still are). Since we hadn’t gotten pregnant, we figured we wouldn’t get pregnant and kept using nothing. Then I went in for my annual check-up with my OB/GYN. I love my doctor, who I have been seeing for more than 10 years. Like me he’s a cyclist, and he admires the work I do. He also appreciates seeing my husband in the waiting room during my visits to him. Many of his patients come by themselves, even well into their pregnancies. Doc was aware that my husband and I had tried to have children and weren’t successful. He very gently suggested that it just might not happen for us. When he asked me about birth control, I was confused. Hadn’t he just said that “it just might not happen for us”? Then he asked me if I was prepared for an unexpected pregnancy at this stage of my life. “NO!” I almost screamed.

That question and the subsequent conversation I had with my doctor convinced me to consider yet another contraceptive method – the IUD. I had my initial misgivings about it – political, medical and social. Doc talked over my options with me and made clear that I should take time to think and talk with my husband. I went home with the brochures and did some research on my own. Once I had spoken to friends about their experiences with the IUD and sufficiently answered my own questions, I realized that the IUD was the right choice for me. My doctor’s office also made it easier by looking into what my insurance would cover. Luckily for me, my insurance paid for all the costs.

That was a year-and-a-half ago. I feel really good about my decision to get the IUD. My goal at this stage of my reproductive life is less to prevent STDS than to prevent pregnancy. That doesn’t mean my contraceptive journey is over. I’m only 37, and who knows how many more years I might be able to get pregnant (and not want to). I look back on my sexual and reproductive life and see that I made some really good decisions about what was right for me at any given time. I had access to good information, financial resources and support from my partners, family and friends. Shouldn’t everybody have the same?

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What I Wish Pro-Choice Leaders Knew About Young People

In my years working with young women, particularly young women of color, there is one lesson I take away above all others. Young people don't need anyone to speak for them. What they need is people to make spaces for them to speak for themselves, to share their truths and support them as they translate those lived experiences into different forms of activism. Young women of color don't need me to tell them what is important in their lives, or why they should care about reproductive justice. They live these issues everyday! And young people are developing their own responses to reproductive oppression. As an ally, what I can and must do is lift up their voices, support their leadership and call our movement out for its continued inattention to their concerns and de-valuing of their contributions (Yes, I'm talking to you, Nancy Keenan and NARAL!) Young people are not part of the problem, they never were. They are part of the solution, if we would make space for their voices, experiences, ideas and leadership.

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Health Care Reform, At Whose Expense?

Despite the headlines and excitement over the signing of the health care bill, yesterday was not a great day for many of us. After months, and let’s be honest, years of struggle to reform America’s decayed health care system, we got…what, exactly? Yes, young people can now stay on their parents’ insurance until they are 26, assuming that their parents have insurance. The legislation expands Medicaid to cover family planning and other preventative reproductive health care. Insurance companies will no longer be able to charge women more than men or deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. So, yes, women and our families gain a lot from the passage of this bill but at what cost, and at whose expense? This law makes the most vulnerable among us – young women, women of color, immigrant women, low-income women, and transgender women – more vulnerable. And I don’t consider that a victory.

I have already heard it argued that this bill was the best progressives could get. I absolutely reject that. The President was elected along with majorities in both the House and the Senate to pass health care reform that removed barriers and improved access to health care, for all of us, not just the most politically palatable. Many of us who believed in the ideals of hope and change thought that we could achieve universal health care, if not in policy, then certainly in practice. That didn’t happen. Poor people, immigrants, and women, among others, were all used as bargaining tools from the very beginning.

As often is the case, women’s bodies and health, was the ultimate battleground. The Stupak Amendment and then the Nelson Amendment in the Senate banned the use of public funds for abortion. Both were unnecessary and redundant because the Hyde Amendment (http://www.hyde30years.nnaf.org/), which has been renewed every year since it was first introduced in 1977, remains in place. But that wasn’t enough. Stupak and Nelson went further by also barring women who would use the exchanges from getting insurance that would cover abortion. When that still did not satisfy Stupak and his anti-choice cronies, the President agreed to sign an executive order barring public funding of abortion in return for their support for the overall bill. Women’s health was traded away for a handful of votes.

Some people contend that these funding restrictions are not new, but rather they reinforce the status quo. That thinking lends legitimacy to the idea that the long-standing bans on federal funding for abortion are just. The status quo is immoral and it is wrong. Hiding behind that argument as the rationale for including it in health care reform and then expanding it, is not only craven, it is also unjust. These restrictions are harmful to women and their families. They will limit access to abortion for low-income women, who tend to be disproportionately women of color, immigrants and young, as well as women who may purchase insurance through the exchange. These funding bans will further codify discrimination against poor women for being poor. Finally, they will continue to stigmatize abortion and isolate it from women’s overall health care, because let’s be clear: abortion is basic health care.

Other colleagues and allies in the reproductive health and progressive movements contend that the executive order will have very little impact; that it is largely symbolic. Well, symbols matter. And what this symbolizes to me is that as a woman, my health needs are less important, my ability to make my own health care decisions is suspect, and my vote for who I believed was a pro-choice President certainly doesn’t amount to much. Our political leaders in the White House, Senate and House of Representatives sold out women not just in the legislation, but in the process itself. There remain many questions about the implementation, oversight and real-life effects of this health care bill. However, one thing is clear. Until women’s lives and women’s health are not used as trade goods for votes, we will remain vulnerable and invisible.

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Growing Up With Roe

I first became aware of abortion around the same time I became aware of many things related to sex and sexuality – during puberty. It was 7th grade, and I was nursing both a broken heart and raging hormones. One day during a break between classes, my best friend slipped me a piece of paper. On it were the names and numbers of every family planning clinic in NYC. Neither of was us was sexually active – YET, but we both understood the risks of becoming pregnant at such a young age. Although we were aware of HIV at that time, an unplanned pregnancy still posed the greater risk to our educations, happiness, and possibly our very lives. We all knew of girls who were beaten, forced to drop out of school, thrown out of their homes, and expected to get married because of an unplanned pregnancy. When we became sexually active, we needed to know where to go for information, advice, and yes, abortions.

At the time, abortion represented survival to me. As a little brown girl from the Bronx, I knew what the statistics said about girls like me and our chances of “success”. If I knew one thing, I knew this: I was not going to come home and tell my mother that I was pregnant. I was not going to have to tell my father that I was pregnant. And I would do anything to make that true. So I was always practiced safer-sex (my first boyfriend, poor guy, had to wear two condoms the first time we had sex). I limited the number of partners I had. And for years, I kept that piece of paper Selene gave me. For me, abortion meant a chance to go to school and get a job – to create the life I had dreamed of. Abortion gave me the chance to be a mom when and if I wanted to be, not just because my body said it was time. Abortion represented the chance to live.

During high school and college, abortion represented the awakening of my social and political consciousness. I argued on behalf of women’s rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination. I raged when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court for many reasons, the foremost being his opposition to abortion rights. In fact, for a great deal of my life, abortion was an IDEA. I placed a lot of my identity, political, social and cultural onto my support for abortion rights. In my view, if you didn’t support a women’s right to safe, affordable abortion, then you didn’t support women. No discussion needed. That line was drawn in not in the sand, but in concrete. That was my one non-negotiable.

As I began my 30s and my work in the reproductive justice movement, I carried all the past history with me. And I realized for all my ranting and raving, I had lost sight of the most important part of the abortion experience – the woman. On any given day, I could count more than two dozen women in my life that had had abortions: family, friends, acquaintances, sorority sisters, classmates, co-workers, and neighbors. Each experience was unique, and I was deeply thankful that each had legal access to abortion. My focus shifted from abortion as survival or political to abortion as a lived experience. The innovative work of Exhale and the life-saving efforts of the National Network of Abortion Funds and many other amazing organizations, reminded me that ultimately abortion is about each woman doing what is right for her.

Despite the barriers to access, the constant legislative and legal challenges to abortion, and the ongoing cultural warfare over abortion, I remain grateful for the rights granted under Roe v Wade. And as I approach my own 37th birthday I am more committed to Roe than ever before.

Originally posted at

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Breast Cancer Awareness…#FAIL

Did you know about that amazing viral campaign that raised awareness about breast cancer? Of course you did. If you are a Facebook user, then you probably noticed a curious phenomenon last week. Rather mysteriously, women were updating their status with colors. There was beige, lots of black, red, some purple and pink, even stripes. Nothing else, just colors. The point of this was to raise awareness about breast cancer. Now let that sink in. The point of this exercise was to raise awareness about breast cancer by women sharing what color bra they were wearing that day. What? You didn’t know that was actually about something serious? Yeah, well, join the fucking club.

This was such an obvious educational campaign FAILURE, let me count the ways An educational campaign can’t lay claim to raising awareness if no one knows what the campaign was about or even that a campaign was underway. Most people I know thought this was a joke. And to a certain extent it was. The message that I got on Facebook was this, “Some fun is going on.... just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men... It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. See how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status.” The problem was, is and remains that most people were not in on the joke. Women were changing their status and friends were reading them without necessarily making the connection to breast cancer. The “campaign” (I use that term loosely here) didn’t provide enough context for people to make that leap from beige (or pink or purple) to breast cancer awareness.

I ‘m not criticizing the campaign for trying to be different, fun or flirty. Or that even guys got into the act. I wasn’t concerned about women objectifying themselves by sharing the color of their bra. My issue was with the lack of any genuine awareness-raising or educating about breast cancer. As a next step, the campaign could have asked women to post statistics about the prevalence of breast cancer or steps on how to conduct a self-breast examination. Organizers of the campaign, whoever they were, could have suggested that women follow-up with blog posts explaining risk factors for breast cancer or first–person narratives from breast cancer fighters and survivors. In fact, among all these status updates the words “breast cancer” didn’t appear. Not once. And so we lost a major opportunity to educate millions of people, especially young women, about a disease that will strike 1 in 8 women over the course of her lifetime, including my best friend’s mom who died from complications due to breast cancer in 2008.

Another major failure of the campaign was raised in this post, by WHYMOMMY. How many people stopped to think about the fact that many women could not participate because they longer wore a bra, because of breast cancer? In trying to raise awareness about breast cancer the campaign managed to isolate and silence the very people who are MOST impacted by this disease. The campaign cannot claim to stand in solidarity with breast cancer fighters and survivors, if the effect was to do so at their expense, further marginalizing them and adding to the tremendous stigma that still surrounds the disease.

I spend a lot of time thinking about cancer. Since my Mom was diagnosed fourteen months ago, not a day goes by that I don’t think about cancer, the 12 million people around the world that will be diagnosed with it this year or what I can do to fight it. But if we are going to really educate people about breast cancer, this bra campaign isn’t going to get us there. We need information, resources, and services. Otherwise, it’s just a joke that most of us aren’t in on.

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Sexual Trafficking-In Your Neighborhood

(Photo from AMNY.com: Rachel Lloyd, founder of a program to help juvenile prostitutes get off the streets, with 'Kerry' and 'Marcia'. Photo by Lane Johnson / April 30, 2006)

Repost from CultureID and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-g-yerman/ivery-young-girlsi-looks_b_170843.html:

"Very Young Girls" Documentary Looks at Sexual Trafficking in New York City

With the economy in a major downward spiral, not-for-profit organizations are being hit in a major way. I recently received an e-mail from Rachel Lloyd, the Director and Founder of Gems Girls. She stated, “I am writing this from my desk at 2 a.m.”

She went on to share the following:

“Tonight we received a crisis phone call. A young woman, Stacey, was desperately trying to escape her pimp and had no one to turn to and nowhere to go. Stacey was recruited when she was 15 years old, and is now 21. Throughout her six years as a domestic trafficking victim, Stacey has experienced daily violence and abuse and tonight was simply tired. Tired of being scared, tired of being abused, tired of being sold. Several weeks ago, Stacey saw our film on Showtime, Very Young Girls, which helped her realize that there was a way out. Tonight, she came to GEMS with only the clothes on her back and asked us to help her.”

Very Young Girls is a documentary about Lloyd’s organization, which works to get teenage girls off the street and out of the life of prostitution. Currently being featured through March 3rd on Showtime On Demand, it was a matter of luck that Stacey saw the film.

The average age of girls getting pulled into prostitution is thirteen. Lloyd knows the score, having been there herself.

I first met Lloyd at an event in downtown Manhattan. She spoke to those gathered about her experiences and her mission. The presentation showcased her dynamism, energy, and commitment to saving the lives of those that others have deemed marginal. Throughout the documentary, you follow her as she offers hope, help, and love to struggling teens, along with a strong dose of realism. Sometimes she is successful, other times…she isn’t.

Several story threads make up the narrative. In a chilling sequence, we see a videotape made by two young men who filmed their exploits as rising pimps, with hopes of snaring a reality show. The streets of New York City have never looked bleaker.

In another segment, the camera accompanies Lloyd as she travels to Florida, to help a girl break away from the pimp she has followed south. Through a cinema vérité format, you experience the ambivalent forces consuming the girl about which direction she should take. In the closing credits, you learn what choice she has made.

GEMS stands for Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, but also references through its acronym, the intrinsic worth of each individual girl that has been impacted by sexual servitude. Existing as the sole New York state non-profit that is working with domestically trafficked and sexually exploited girls and young women, it was founded by Lloyd in 1999. They target the 12-21 year age demographic. The organization states its task as helping victims of sexual exploitation “to exit the commercial sex industry and develop to their full potential. They provide counseling, job training, crisis housing, and health to 250 clients. Their outreach has touched over 1500 people. Not bad, considering that a study in 2007 concluded that New York City had more than 2000 sexually exploited children under the age of 18.

Lloyd is an untiring warrior. Now armed with a Master’s degree in Applied Urban Anthropology, she has been on the cutting edge of the fight for legislation recognizing the inequities of a justice system that treats girls as “adult criminals.” On September 26, 2008, Gov. David A. Patterson signed the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act. It will take effect in April 2010. Child prostitutes will then be recognized as victims, not perpetrators. A conviction as a “juvenile delinquent” will be traded for services, including counseling and shelter.

Very Young Girls has been a catalyst to bringing visibility to what Lloyd succinctly describes as “kids bought and sold by adults.” I spoke to the film’s director, David Schisgall, by telephone about the current exposure for the movie on Showtime. “Our goal,” he told me, “was to change the master narrative about prostitution in our country.” Not an easy task when Pretty Woman and the Academy Award winning song, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” are prominent in the popular cultural consciousness.

Schisgall, reflecting on the power of Very Young Girls, talked about being the “butterfly that creates the tornado.” He noted, “I feel like the film is really making a difference, at the micro level and the macro level.”

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