Friday Reads: Odds and Ends and discarded women

Good Morning!

I have to warn you that I’m in a pretty strange mood so the links today will probably be a bit strange too.  I’ve been waiting for the new season of Game of Thrones and reading the books. Dr. Daughter tries hard not to spoil it all for me but has that conspirator smugness that comes from getting me addicted to the entire thing in the first place.  I was told I’d love the series and love the women.  (This from the child that asked for help writing her senior theses on the Lady Elaine and the women in the Arthurian tales and who Betty Friedan and Kate Millet blessed in my belly.)

The world of the Seven Kingdoms seems a bit more of an honest reality than our own, even though there are dragons and white walkers. It is all about power and strategy and people who will to kill to have power and wealth. The ones who value honor get killed constantly.  I’ve heard that President Obama is a big fan and gets early copies of the HBO series.  It’s well known for taking out every one and dismissing the value any reader places on any one character.  That has got me thinking.

Why is it our society finds some lives to be of more value than others?  And, it always seems the girls get the shortest of the sticks. The girls don’t always draw the short sticks in the 7 Kingdoms, but they almost always do so in the good old US of Religious Superstition and Nonsense.

This is a horrifying story of a girls home that operated for many years just outside of Shreveport, LA.  There were many, many signs that should’ve lead to a full scale raid on the place.  That never happened although they shut its boys’ counterpart down because of the brutality. (Two legs bad, three legs better.)  Some how, the sexual assault and violence against these girls that came from horrible homes was never taken seriously.  Read it with the warning that you will be mad, sad, and very upset.

For three decades starting in the early 1970s, New Bethany took girls no one wanted. It was the outreach ministry of Mack Ford, a high school dropout who worked for a time as a tire repairman before he said he heard God’s call to preach.

He once told attorneys he was inspired to build New Bethany after meeting two blonde  twins who had been impregnated by their father, a drunk.

“We are reaching out as a mission project to the incorrigible, unwanted rejects,” Ford told attorneys in a 1997 court deposition. “Destitute, lonely, prostitutes, drug addicts … These kids haven’t been loved and haven’t had a chance in life.”

Until its final closure in 2001, hundreds of children and young women from across the state and country arrived at the high chain-link gates of the school, tucked off a rural highway in north Louisiana about 50 miles east of Shreveport.

Timeline: Read about the history of legal issues surrounding the New Bethany Home for Girls

The census at the girls’ home fluctuated over the years, according to news reports and legal documents. The number of girls residing there was said to be as low as a couple dozen at times and as high as 250 at others.

To some who heard of its mission — and others who encountered the school through its traveling girls’ choir — New Bethany seemed a charitable cause worthy of support and prayer.

But as often as the girls charmed congregations with songs of praise and testimonies of salvation from darkness, records, interviews, news reports and other documents show they sometimes also went to extraordinary lengths to seek refuge from the darkness they say enveloped the compound.

Stories of physical and mental abuse plagued New Bethany for almost as long as it was open, documents and news stories show.

I would like this in depth story to see as much daylight as possible.

But back to girls that fight the powers that be.  Ask my mother.  I could be incorrigible.  I was a TomBoy Extraordinaire.  Some time I wonder what the world would be like if more girls had actually been like me and fought to be better than the boys around her at everything.  As I grew older, this turned into a sexual swagger that was some times compared to a man. Sexual swagger is something that confuses men when it comes with breasts and a clitoris.  I have no issues about owning your sexuality and whatever that means to you. I am the mother of daughters–not dragons–so I know what that means.  But, read Katha Politt’s take on legitimizing sex workers in this piece. There’s a big argument going around about a new book that discusses what legitimizing sex work would do for women.  Let’s just say that it’s controversial.

On the left, prostitution used to be seen as a bad thing: part of the general degradation of the working class, and the subjugation of women, under capitalism. Women who sold sex were victims, forced by circumstances into a painful and humiliating way of life, and socialism would liberate them. Now, selling sex is sex work—just another service job, with good points and bad—and if you suggest that the women who perform it are anything less than free agents, perhaps even “empowered” if they make enough money, you’re just a prude. Today’s villain is not the pimp or the john—it’s second-wave feminists, with their primitive men-are-the-enemy worldview, and “rescuers” like Nicholas Kristof, who presume to know what’s best for women.

The hot new left-wing journals are full of this thinking. Right now on the New Inquiry website, for example, you can take a satirical quiz called “Are You Being Sex Trafficked?” Of course, if you are reading the New Inquiry, chances are you’re not being sex trafficked; if you’re a sex worker, chances are you’re a grad student or a writer or maybe an activist—a highly educated woman who has other options and prefers this one. And that is where things get tricky. Because in what other area of labor would leftists look to the elite craftsman to speak for the rank and file? You might as well ask a pastry chef what it’s like to ladle out mashed potatoes in a school cafeteria. In the discourse of sex work, it seems, the subaltern does not get to speak.

Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore, published by Verso and co-edited by Jacobin, is a good example of this phenomenon. It’s got a lot of Marxist bells and whistles—OK, OK, sex work is work, I get the point!—and is much concerned with the academically fashionable domains of language and representation, the portrayal of sex workers in movies and ads. “Sex workers should not be expected to defend the existence of sex work,” Grant writes, “in order to have the right to do it free from harm”—whether arrest or violence or the stigma of a fixed identity that can never be escaped. School teacher Melissa Petro discovered that when she lost her job after theNew York Post got hold of an essay she had written about her time as an escort.

All fair enough, but the real world is more complicated. Grant has a great time beating the dead gray mare of 1980s anti-porn feminism but doesn’t seem to notice any difference between those vanished crusaders against smut—was any cause ever so decisively defeated?—and today’s campaigners against commercial sexual exploitation, who include former sex workers. Supporters of the “Swedish model” of outlawing the purchase but not the sale of sex—arrest johns, not sex workers—are “carceral feminists.” Women who fight sex trafficking are in it to build nonprofit empires, “jobs for the girls,” and are indistinguishable from paternalistic rescuers like Kristof.

Tellingly, Grant says barely a word about the women at the heart of this debate: those who are enslaved and coerced—illegal immigrants, young girls, runaways and throwaways, many of them survivors of sexual trauma, as well as transwomen and others cast out of mainstream society. Poor people, like the Chinese- and Korean-speaking women who are bused every morning from Queens to work in Nassau County massage parlors, or drug addicts doing survival sex in the Bronx, or the Honduran teenagers trafficked by a popular, politically connected New Jersey restaurateur—these girls and women are nowhere to be found in her pages. Nor does Grant concern herself with women like those Liberty Aldrich of the Center for Court Innovation told me she works with, the vast majority of whom would like to leave sex work but need help to do it—to get a GED, a place to live, connections to people who care about them.

Is sex work just basic labor and can it be separated from the millennium of treatment of women and girls as property?  Is freeing it of that history part of the future of freeing women? 

Melissa Gira Grant’s new book is causing all sorts of discomfort among liberals who are just flat not comfortable with thinking of sex work as labor. Katha Pollitt’s latest piece is an excellent example of this. Unfortunately, while Pollitt is writing in the language of second-wave feminism, she’s also writing in the language of prohibitionism. She tries to stigmatize a reality of the world as immoral, but in fact just reinforces a system by which women are in fact victimized. Even the poor women she accuses Grant of ignoring are not helped by keeping sex work illegal. If you legalize sex work, you are going to make it harder for underground sex operations that treat women terribly to continue because a major reason why they exist is that sex work is illegal and therefore stigmatized. That’s not to say sex work is great–it’s a bad job—but keeping it illegal does not promote the equality that Pollitt wants to see.

This is where I come back to waiting to see what the future holds for Daenerys Targaryen and the other Shero women of Game of Thrones.  There are a few women in fiction that manage to escape the bonds of being sold into marriage, breeding, and property status that do manage to go beyond expectations.  But then, I read about places like the Bethany Home for Girls and the latest Republican attempts to control women’s bodies and minds in the name of some kind of purity bondage. There are of course the women that will gladly sell themselves and every other woman for some form of acceptance and self-gratification/loathing. Women do grift and sell more than just their bodies for male reward.  Be sure to swallow your beverage before you read about Princess Dumbass of the North.

The hotly contested Senate race in Georgia was all about the political power of women Thursday, with Sarah Palin defending GOP hopeful Karen Handel against dismissive remarks by a male rival and Handel arguing that she’d nullify any Republican war-on-women talk by Democrats in the high-stakes November election.

“I would really love to see (Democratic hopeful) Michelle Nunn drop the ‘war on women’ on me,” Handel said to big applause at a luncheon with Palin for a county Republican women’s group. Handel gained notoriety as the former Susan G. Komen for the Cure executive at the center of a public outcry over the breast cancer charity’s decision, later reversed, to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood.

But Nunn, the likely Democratic nominee, has so far steered clear of the theme that proved effective for Democrats in 2012. In her first ad, released Thursday, Nunn instead appealed to Georgia’s independent voters by touting her leadership in the nonprofit Points of Light Foundation and mentioned its inspiration, President George H. W. Bush, by name.

Palin and Handel saved more of their ire for Republican rival David Perdue, a top candidate in the crowded GOP field who apparently put down Handel’s qualifications during remarks captured on video.

In the footage, the former Dollar General CEO discusses the economy and the federal deficit and notes Handel’s lack of a college degree. “There’s a high school graduate in this race, OK?” he says. “I’m sorry, but these issues are so much broader, so complex.”

Palin, the 2008 vice presidential nominee, former Alaska governor and GOP star, leapt to Handel’s defense.

“She pulled herself up. Nothing was handed to her on a platter, fed to her on a silver spoon,” Palin said of Handel during a campaign event Thursday. “For those who would criticize and mock that, it really makes me question their judgment.”

Handel, a former secretary of state, has said she left an abusive home as a teen and has used a message of overcoming obstacles as a key element of her campaigns. With Palin looking on, Handel took issue with Perdue’s comments.

“Some in this race think the problems in Washington are a little too complex for a gal like me,” Handel said. “I’m here to tell you that solving the problems in Washington is going to take guts and resolve.”

What is amazing to me about these two women in particular is how they play the strong women card when it suits them.  Obviously, some sisters are more equal than others in their little universe.  Princess Dumbass would have no chance in any kind of game with Arya Stark who even looks like I did at that age. It does seem that fiction, fantasy, and entertainment have caught up with the idea that girls should be empowered in whatever ways they can, but is the United States of Religious Superstition there yet? I don’t have grandaughers, yet, any way.  I think I’d be even more frantic if I did.  

Republicans are having a tough time shaking the “war on women” label, probably because they can’t stop themselves from sounding — and voting — like a bunch of raging misogynists. But when they do try to deflect this particular brand of sexism, it usually goes something like, “[Women are] more than just a set of reproductive organs, and I’d like someone to talk to me about how they’ll help my pocketbook and keep my health care plan that I like.”

Despite evidence to suggest that plenty of Republicans very much view women as a set of reproductive organs, this is verbatim what a Republican strategist told the New York Times last week in an attempt to challenge the idea that the GOP is a party of caveman bigots. It’s also what Mike Huckabee tried to communicate when he argued that the GOP opposes insurance coverage for contraception because it trusts that women can “control their libidos.” Rand Paul — a man who a majority of conservative tastemakers believe should be the next president — views the GOP’s problem with women as something of a nonstarter, mainly because there arelots of them enrolled in his niece’s veterinary program.

And you can be sure that this is the message that the organizers of CPAC were shooting for with a panel called, “Why Conservatism is Right for Women: How Conservatives Should Talk About Life, Prosperity & National Security.” (Undercutting their pro-woman rhetoric was the fact that the conference only featured a handful of women speakers on the main stage, and the organizers’ decision to go heavy on outdated cartoon villains like Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter rather than relevant conservatives like New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez.)

I just long for the day when Betty Ford was the very model of the Republican Woman.  How times have changed and not particularly for the better.

If you need more proof, look no farther than Mississippi for the same old same old about women and sex.

According to the Los Angeles Times, teachers in Oxford, Miss., are asking “students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became.” Says Marie Barnard, a public health worker and parent: “They’re using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she’s had sex—that she’s been used. … That shouldn’t be the lesson we send kids about sex.”
Comparing women to disposable foods or personal hygiene items is an old abstinence-only scare tactic that’s still occasionally passed off as education in schools around the country. Last year, a school district in Texas instructed teachers tocompare people who have had sex to dirty toothbrushes and sticks of gum. “People want to marry a virgin, just like they want a virgin toothbrush or stick of gum,” the guide read.

But, at least girls that read DC comics will see a new superhero that represents the best in what they could be!  She is Cree and she is mighty! Best of all, she is based on a real Canadian shero!  

The result: along with the Justice League’s Canadian relocation comes the brand-new heroine Equinox: a 16-year-old Cree teen from Moose Factory named Miiyahbin, whose power stems from the Earth and changes with the seasons.

“Creating a teenage female superhero was interesting to me because, generally, most superheroes are white males. We need diversity and we need different personalities,” Lemire said.

“You need very distinct voices for personalities on the team or else you just start writing the same character in a different costume.”

Multiple research trips north proved illuminating and rewarding for Lemire. He spent time in grade school classrooms, soaked up the local scene (including an abandoned NORAD base and trap-line visits) in Moosonee and Moose Factory and got feedback on his ideas from residents.

Yeah, she’s draw by a dude.  Oh well.

Girls still get so many mixed messages.  If anything, they get more than I did when growing up because now they have the added burden of being told they can do anything when society actively works against them.  Some times I really wish I had three dragons flying around.  I have a number of places that I would love to send them with the orders to just burn the suckers down.  But, until that time, I live through the mother of dragons and remain the mother of a two young women who still have to fight the same damnable things I did. Just wait until I get my hands on some grandchildren!

Anyway, that’s it for me today. Just stick ’em with the pointy ends!!    What’s on your reading and blogging list?