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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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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Black Girls Rock!

That they do. And you can help black girls rock even harder by supporting the 4th Annual "Black Girls Rock" Awards fundraiser this Saturday, October 17 at the TimesCenter in NYC. The event is co-hosted by Regina King and Tracie Ellis-Ross. Award honorees include: Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Dr. Sonia Sanchez, Naomi Campbell, Raven Symone, Janelle Monae, DJ Spinderella, Iyanla Vanzant, Dr. Mehret Monfredo and Anthony Hamilton.

The tickets may be steep but it is directly inspiring young people around New York City. Black Girls Rock is a Brooklyn-based non-profit, founded by DJ Beverly Bond, provides mentorship along with arts and media education to "at-risk" teenage women of color, focusing on cultivating self-esteem and positive self-imagery, during a critical time in their lives. Whatever your situation (it is a recession), you can still donate via their website.

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