How Privilege Comes to Your Door

I was on the elliptical today watching ESPN because the news depresses me at the gym. Fortunately, ESPN showed a snippet of their “Outside the Lines”* interview with Redskins team owner, Daniel Snyder. He took this interview not to defend his team’s shitty preseason performance but to defend his football team’s name because it’s a rich tradition and he has never met a Native American who objects to the name. He somehow missed the Oneida Indian Nation, the Hoh Indian Tribe, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and the other twenty tribes and fifty Native American groups protesting the name.

To be fair to Mr. Snyder, everyone understands the importance of tradition. The Native Americans slurred in his team name probably understand and appreciate tradition better than anyone. Their tradition is a little bit different than wearing another culture’s ceremonial headdress to celebrate adult men giving each other concussions. Their tradition is one of persecution and subjugation under people who look and sound an awful like Dan Snyder. Different traditions, but both special in their own ways.

Dan Snyder’s position is one of privilege**, standing on the field, wearing a shirt he was given for owning a team he inherited. He has never known poverty or being mistreated for the color of his skin.

But we learned today that, though it helps, you don’t have to be a white man to enjoy privilege. CeeLo Green, songwriter of the ironically titled, “Fuck You” and previous co-host of The Voice pled no contest last Friday to giving a woman ecstasy during a dinner date. The woman alleges she was slipped the ecstasy, passed out, and woke up in CeeLo Green’s bed the next morning***. A rape charge wasn’t filed due to lack of evidence. Mr. Lo Green then tweeted the following:

Followed by: “If someone is passed out they’re not even WITH you consciously! so WITH Implies consent,” which I think means that awake, I’m allowed to decide but if I’m passed out (whether I got myself there or was helped by a spiked drink) I’m a hollow shell to be used as any man sees fit. Also, maybe that just being with a man means you’re DTF. I slept through my inarticulate rapist classes in college, so I’m not sure if I even agreed to take them. The tweets and his account have since been deleted.

Bieber committed his crimes in Canada today, so i don’t have a great celebrity candidate for abusing white privilege. Even without a figurehead, many of us enjoy the privilege of not being hassled by police just because of the color of our skin. We enjoy walking up to a porch looking for help when our cars break down without being shot to death. We enjoy the right to protest without being harassed and moved to multiple locations without being told why we were in police custody. Black Americans face a systematic betrayal by the American justice system day in and day out. I do not have the authority to speak about systematic racism but I will say that not shutting up about Ferguson (both the death of Michael Brown and the subsequent mistreatment of protesters there), Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, and countless others is key. Talk about all of it. If you’re among the privileged, those conversations will be uncomfortable and guilt inducing. That’s pretty small compared with being denied equal rights; privilege at its core. Enjoying a privilege denied to others is profiting from systematic prejudice. And tolerating any kind of privilege legitimizes all of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Respect for ESPN’s pun game.

** A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.

***To be fair, if CeeLo’s date had never gone out with him or if she’d worn date rape drug detecting finger nail polish or not been audacious enough to have a vagina at all, she might have been fine.

 

Ahem.

I was far too busy last night to watch the Golden Globes, but I am a lemming who will always click on an article asking whether or not a celebrity was drunk while presenting an award as surely as my spirit animal will follow its brethren off a cliff. So I did watch a clip of Diane Keaton accepting the Cecile B. DeMille award for a certain director.

Let me start this off by saying that I have never seen a Woody Allen film. At first, I just wasn’t that interested; too young. Then I sort of thought I wanted to wait till a really special movie came along, something that spoke to me. And now…any time I tell someone that I’ve never seen the world through the lens of the word’s most famous neurotic I got shock and horror. “Not even Annie Hall?!!???!” My former potential friend gasps as he/she clutches his/her pearls and averts his/her eyes.

And I’m ok with that. I was twelve when Woody Allen married his much younger former stepdaughter; old enough to assess how fucking disgusting that is at the disgust level only a tween can feel. Like disgusting. While they’re still married and only they know their love blah, blah, I can never see a picture of him without getting a little creeped out and the idea of sitting through a couple of hours of his view of women and the world gives me honest heebie jeebies.

I only recently learned that he allegedly also abused his seven year-old daughter and was caught MORE THAN ONCE. He was found innocent in a court of law, but imagining how difficult it is for a victim to come forward, let alone a child, I am inclined to side with said victim.

All that said, Mia Farrow, you need to reflect.

Did Ms. Farrow, as she watched Diane Keaton laud the man who made her famous despite the fact that he definitely did something wrong and maybe something really, really wrong, feel a twinge of familiarity? Because she continues to stand by Roman Polanski, despite the fact that he raped a thirteen year old girl. Like Keaton and Allen, Farrow and Polanski enjoyed cinematic greatness together. Like Keaton and Allen, Farrow has been complicit in a powerful Hollywood figure’s ability to be bigger than the law and justice as recently as a 2005 law suit brought against  Condé Nast for an article published in Vanity Fair, which had to be attended remotely by Mr. Polanski himself for fear of being extradited to the United States to face punishment for his famous child rape.

Sex crimes are not morally relative.  You don’t get to be mad at the guy who did it in your house while giving the guy who made you famous a pass. The victim you know is not more important than the one you don’t. Obviously, Mia Farrow is a huge fan of the site and will no doubt read this and reflect and change her whole life. I’m not suggesting for one moment she shouldn’t be apoplectic with rage at the man who victimized one or more of her children, but that perhaps that outrage is worth extending beyond your own four walls.

I’m Not Ready To Make Nice

Literally every time a male Republican politician opens up his mouth to say, “Rape? It’s not so bad,” I feel like Rick in Walking Dead when he wakes up in the hospital and the entire world has been inhabited by zombies. I am horrified beyond belief. I can’t understand how as a society we got to a place where elected officials could say on national television that women should be grateful for their rape babies or that the female anatomy is somehow capable of shutting down rape sperm, as though our uteruses had a guy at the door keeping out unscrupulous characters.

Being violated by a stranger or worse a friend or your husband is a nightmare. To have it proudly trivialized by politicians, who know they are being recorded, is mind-boggling. You probably can’t suss this out from reading my blog, but I am a Democrat. Never in my life did I expect that rape would become a partisan issue. Never could I imagine one party would be the “How raped were you really?” party and be lauded for it.

I understand the inclination to vote Republican. A lot of people like the “what’s mine is mine” party line. I especially understand if you are a way rich Republican and the voting is in this election. Mitt Romney has got y’alls’ backs. But taxes don’t just go to public television and Planned Parenthood. Taxes pay for the roads that we drive on and the schools that we learn in. The parks we play in and the people who keep us safe. Further lowering them will only get us further into debt.

I respect that we are different. I disagree with you, you disagree with me: the beauty of free speech. But in this election, if you are a woman voting for a man who is wishy-washy on pro-choice rights and ambivalent about how raped is raped (not just Romney; there are so many candidates at all levels of government running on this shit), I cannot understand what you are thinking. Rape, abortion, and inexpensive access to birth control shouldn’t be up for debate. These are not “social issues.”* They are issues that keep women in the kitchen and out of the work force. These issues decide how fast and hard we have to work through an increasingly cloudy glass ceiling. Voting against these issues is voting dangerous back-alley abortions back into existence. It’s voting sexual predators back up to “ladies’ men” and voting thousands of unwanted children into a world that has no resources to provide for them.

No pictures today. Panda out.

 

 

*I hate that term. “Social issues” should refer to getting crabs or whose country club you’re going to use for tennis, not who gets to marry whom or what I chose to do with my own body.

I am Woman Hear Me Roar

I need like 20,000 hugs. Today should have been a funny blog day, but it is not to be. Mexico is in a drug war with terrifying violence that escalates every day. In the United States, we are having actual discussions about what constitutes “legitimate rape.” Avril Lavigne is marrying that guy from Nickleback (has she finally found her Sk8er Boi?), so Canada’s having a rough time too. Maybe we all need 20,000 hugs.

The debate over whether abortion should be legal in some cases and not in others is a slippery slope. For a politician to think it’s his (or her, Sarah Palin) right to decide what I do with my body is disconcerting enough. And when the 14^th amendment is invoked to defend these politician’s right to protect zygotes over people, my head nearly explodes. These are the same politicians who are okay with the death penalty (despite the number of innocent people who are posthumously absolved), withholding equal rights from tax-paying homosexuals, and debating the definition of rape as a way to legislate how a victim copes after a violent crime. That’s a fairly uneven application of equal protection under the law. Most members of the GOP have publicly condemned Todd Akin’s comments, but Mitt Romney is slated to condemn abortion even in cases of rape and incest at the RNC and Todd Ryan co-sponsored a bill with Akin on to limit victim’s rape victims’ rights to abortion. Akin’s statements aren’t fringe ramblings of a rogue politician, but deeply entrenched party dogma that the GOP was hoping to quietly slip in.

It is no longer possible to vote along your fiscal beliefs and neglect your social conscience because currently, our national political pendulum has swung to drastic extremes. Both parties are governed more by the donors and lobbyists who fund them than they are by any sort of political dogma so fiscal policies are deep down mostly the same. Social issues are the real divide. I wish that I were the sort of person who could calmly debate these issues. I can talk about a lot of things with a calm detachment, but not rape. No one who has witnessed the aftermath of sexual assault can be objective about it.

We, as women and as a country, deserve better than the same debates that have been holding us back for generations. A woman should have the right to choose what happens to her own body always. The GOP is thrilled with Akin because they can act appalled by his actions while secretly passing legislation that legitimizes them to the fullest. Kirk Cameron is also thrilled because it means he got to be on TV again. Anything that puts Kirk Cameron on TV after April 25, 1992 is bad for women and bad for America.