From page A18 of the May 24 edition of the New York TimesWhat do you think? This Bloomingdales ad for Rag & Bone Jeans ($165.00) and silk Equipment top ($178.00) contains the tag line “MEET YOUR NEW MUST-HAVE” and depicts an Asian model staring int…
Ten is the number of bodies that have been found on Long Island’s southern beaches since December. The first four, all found between December 11 abd 13, were confirmed to be the remains of women who had had some experience in sex work. The next was fou…
Ten is the number of bodies that have been found on Long Island’s southern beaches since December. The first four, all found between December 11 abd 13, were confirmed to be the remains of women who had had some experience in sex work. The next was fou…
Are you a union member, or a friend or family member of a union member? If so, please come out. Please identify yourself that way in conversations. Please stand up for unions and for the basic worker rights that they protect.
What does this have to do with sexuality? First of all, without unions there can be no economic justice in a capitalist society, and without economic justice, sexual freedom is impossible in any meaningful way. To fully realize our sexual freedom we need basic economic security.
Second, there is a lot to be learned from the coming out campaigns of the LGBT movement. When we are visible we reveal ourselves, making ourselves vulnerable, but we also become three dimensional human beings to those who have previously seen us as one-dimensional stereotypes.
Third, there is something similar about taking a part of your life, a part of yourself, a part that you perhaps take for granted, and making it a part of your identity. I am not just a professor, I am a union member. I am not just a clerk, I am a union member. I am not just a groundskeeper, I am a union member. Union membership is something we often see as part of the background of our lives, and we need to bring it into the foreground. Again, LGBT activism gives us a model for doing this.
In tough economic times it is easy for people to villify or demonize a small group of people who are represented in the press as greedy, lazy, and selfish. Especially if you don’t have any reason to suspect that real live union members are any different from that representation.
But that’s not who we are, and it seems to me that the only way for unions to turn the tide that is undermining them now is if we each come out of the union closet and identify ourselves to our friends and neighbors so they see us as the hard-working, community-minded, caring and dedicated people that we are.
Harvey Milk is represented in the biopic Milk as saying “They vote for us two to one if they know they know one of us.” (It’s also worth recalling that Milk worked with union leaders and had strong labor backing of his campaigns, and that progressive labor unions and LGBT political unions often work in concert with each other.)
When nonunion workers are facing layoffs and pay cuts and the media tells them its all the fault of unions, it’s easy to see how they’d vote to undercut the power of workers who are depicted as leeches feeding off an increasingly anemic public. But if they knew that we were their neighbors, their kid’s friend’s parents, the people they always nod to at the supermarket, it might be different. If we talk to them about the ways that unions protect not just their members but the basic rights of all workers, they might feel differently. What if, instead of hiding our union membership out of fear of being criticized or attacked, we talk to them about the struggles of all employees and encourage them to seek the strength of unions to protect themselves rather than to tear down the organizations that helped bouy their own raises and benefits just by virtue of comparison?
This week is a week of We Are One events spreading solidarity, raising consciousness, and making demands for economic justice. Take a moment this week to identify yourself in relation to that effort. If you are a union member, or a friend or lover or kin to one, take a moment to tell someone else about that. Tell a story that helps counter the negative impression of union members in the press. Take a risk. We can’t rebuild the labor movement from inside the closet.
I’m a union member, and a union leader, and I’m proud of my role in protecting rights for all workers. How about you?
Value judgements are useful if you you can quantify what makes something good. But what if the actions that you want to evaluate are very subjective?Heather Corinnawrites about the subjective and hard to pin down qualities that might make someone "…
Value judgements are useful if you you can quantify what makes something good. But what if the actions that you want to evaluate are very subjective?
Heather Corinna
writes about the subjective and hard to pin down qualities that might make someone “good in bed”
http://www.scarleteen.com/article/advice/what_makes_someone_good_in_bed
Exactly one week ago I was preparing for a workshop at Creating Change in Minneapolis. The session was led by Ricci Levy, Executive Director of Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and consisted of a panel and story telling exercises.Our goal was to show how p…
Exactly one week ago I was preparing for a workshop at Creating Change in Minneapolis. The session was led by Ricci Levy, Executive Director of Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and consisted of a panel and story telling exercises.
Our goal was to show how powerful story telling is for building empathy and connection with a group of people and communicating about the kinds of change that you care about. Robert Perez, of Fenton (a stellar communications firm) talked about story telling in general terms and offered examples. I talked about the problems of jargon and identity politics. Ignacio Rivera, performance artist and educator, talked about the need to introduce new language and educate people. Carmen Vazquez, long-time activist and advocate for sexual liberation and human rights, talked about the need to communicate about desire, sex, and connection. Then participants had a chance to identify changes they wanted to see, and to begin to create stories that would help them talk about those changes. It was a powerful session.
This is what I said.
Do you remember the smell of new ideas? The kind that make you feel powerful, connected to other people, and suddenly sure of yourself?
I remember the smell of wool sweaters and patchouli in a college classroom in New England during a storm that rattled windows and sent a kind of electricity through a very passionate discussion of sexual justice. My Philosophy of Sexuality class was reading Suzanne Pharr‘s Homophobia – A weapon of sexism, and suddenly the world made sense.
As a student, I learned new words and they changed everything: heteronormative… nondichotomous… Just saying them made me feel better. I learned theories of social constructionism and hegemony, and found frameworks that helped me suddenly understand the difference between how I felt and what was expected of me. I felt powerful with my new words and my new ideas. I joined feminist activist groups and the campus LGBT student organization. I protested. I marched on Washington. I felt like I could change the world.
I wrote my senior thesis on the ways that theories of nondichotomous gender roles could be used to challenge the hegemony of the heterosexist patriarchal nuclear family.
And then I went home.
Heteronormative didn’t mean anything there. My mother is a very open-minded, college-educated woman who moved up and down the class ladder from working class family of origin to upwardly mobile woman working to support her dental student husband, to stay at home mom in professional class marriage, to working poor and lower middle class single mother of two. She’s a firm believer in the need for gender equality and she was encouraging of my gender and sexuality exploration. She certainly wanted me to be happy.
She just couldn’t understand what I was talking about.
I was frustrated that she didn’t know – and didn’t always see the need for – these new powerful words of mine. It took me quite a while to realize that she wanted the ideas without the jargon. It took me a while to realize that the power came not from the words but from the ideas that they represented.
My mother unsuspectingly became my best teacher. She read every paper I wrote in graduate school (at least every one I didn’t put off too long to show her before it was due). She read my entire dissertation, chapter by painful chapter, through multiple drafts. Later she read drafts of articles before I submitted them. And she was brutal at pointing out jargon. “Why do you always say hegemonic when you could just say dominant?” (I confess to harboring a love for the word “hegemonic” but I’ve learned to enjoy it sparingly, the way I would a fine scotch or expensive chocolate.)
Her editing made me a better communicator. I learned that talking with people is different from talking at people, and that conversation requires shared contexts and shared vocabularies. I learned that even people I thought were on the same poststructuralist jargon laiden page as I didn’t always share the same ideas about what our words meant. I once was 5 minutes into conversation with a fellow graduate student about my dissertation on sex work before we determined that she thought I was talking only about prostitution when I was actually talking about stripping, and neither of us was talking about a whole range of work that can be considered sexual labor.
As I worked on communicating more clearly I bumped up against another challenge: finding the right language with which to describe myself. My identity is complicated and multifaceted. I think this is true for most of us! I don’t easily fit into boxes, and somehow it seems harder now, though the boxes are proliferating. I’ve often thought of my identity as if it were comprised of a box of loosely jumbled color forms. Do you remember those? Where you could dress the figure with the princess crown, the firefighter coat and the scuba flippers? Am I “white middle class woman”? “Queer feminist college professor”? “Married queer activist”? It’s complicated.
Identity politics became a personal challenge and I believe it is a challenge to the movement as well, something that must be clear to each of us who has tried to append a new letter to the ever-expanding alphabet umbrella we need to describe it.
The problem is not that there are too many identities under that umbrella. Quite the contrary. The diversity of our movement is what gives us our strength. The problem is that we forget that there are identities that we all share, and we forget that the rights we are all fighting so hard to achieve are ours, born with us, not because we are lesbian or gay, bisexual or queer, but because we are human.
Rae Carey articulated clearly in her State of the Movement address and it’s heartening to see threads of human rights woven throughout the fabric of this entire conference.
I don’t mean to say that our unique sexual and political identities don’t matter. They do. But they matter differently than many of us thought they did in the past. Developing queer political identities was tremendously useful in mobilizing this movement. But identity politics hurts us if it weds us to a civil rights agenda. Those who attack us and prevent us from exercising our rights may do so because we are queer, but the rights they try to take are ours by virtue of our humanity, and only once we have protected them as human rights will we really be free.
Identity needs a new place in our movement.
I think that new place is in telling our stories to one another. You heard it last night at the plenary. Our challenge is to be brave enough to share our stories with people who are sheltered under different parts of our umbrella. Perhaps even more challenging is to be open enough to hearing the stories of those others, whose desires and struggles might be so different from our own.
Yes, our identities matter. They matter for the same reason our sexualities matter. They matter because they are intrinsically part of us and we each have a right to be our whole selves. And we need to recognize and honor one another’s whole selves. Your struggles may be different from my struggles, but I cannot truly win mine if I am not invested in yours.
It comes down to this: I’ve claimed my right to form loving and lustful relationships. I am free to express my attraction to people who fuck with gender, to live openly in love with more than one person at a time, to proclaim a desire to be fisted and a love of making out. I have a right to define the terms – emotional, erotic, financial – of my sexual exchanges. I have the freedom to work and to use my body as I wish. I have these rights and freedoms not because I am queer, but because I am human. And because I am human and I care about these rights it is my obligation to fight so that everyone, regardless of identity, can enjoy them.
It will be by sharing our unique identities, by telling our stories and sharing our desires, by listening compassionately to one another’s struggles, that we strengthen the connections between the diverse constituencies under our umbrella, and thus strengthen our movement. But we will also communicate clearly to people like my mother, who thinks of herself as standing just outside our umbrella, that our movement includes her too. That we are fighting for our rights because they are human rights, rights that should be enjoyed by all, because nobody can legitimately take them away.
Technorati Tags: Creating Change, advocacy, sexual freedom
Talking about sexuality does not increase sexually transmitted infections, despite what non-experts report.
Contact: Megan Andelloux
401-345-8685
Contact: Aida Manduley
787-233-0025
In yet another attempt to shut down access to quality sex education, South-Eastern New England conservative advocates hit the sex panic button in a multi-state, email and phone campaign to colleges all over New England last week.
On February 3rd and 4th, certified sexuality educator and sexologist Megan Andelloux (AASECT, ACS) received word that numerous colleges and university faculty received a document stating that colleges who brought sex educators such as Ms. Andelloux onto their campuses were linked to the increasing rate of transmission of HIV in RI. Furthermore, among other misleading “facts” that were “cited,” the author of this bulletin claimed that Brown University was facing an HIV crisis, which is false.
Citizens Against Trafficking, the face behind the fear-mongering, spammed numerous local institutions from a University of Rhode Island account with its latest malicious missive that targeted specific individuals as well as Brown University. The author of the letter, Margaret Brooks, an Economics Professor at Bridgewater State, suggested that colleges and universities that host sexuality speakers, including those who are professionally accredited, are partly to blame for the four new cases of HIV which have been diagnosed amongst RI college students this year.
Ms. Andelloux states: “My heart goes out to those students who have recently tested positive for HIV. However, there is no evidence of any link between campus presentations on sexual issues and the spike in HIV cases. Rather, I would suggest that this demonstrates a need for more high-quality sex education to college students.“ It is unclear why people at URI or Citizens Against Trafficking, a coalition to combat all forms of human trafficking, is attempting to stop adults from accessing sexual information from qualified, trained educators. What is certain however, is that this Professor of Economics miscalculated her suggestion that a correlation exists between increased HIV rates in Rhode Island and the type of sex education these speakers provided at Brown University: one that emphasized accurate information, risk-reduction, pleasure, and health.
Barrier methods have been shown by the CDC to reduce the transmission of HIV and other STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections). Research has shown that when individuals have access to medically-accurate information, are aware of sexual risk reduction methods, and have access to learn about sexual health, the number of infections and transmission of STIs decreases, pain during sex decreases, and condom use increases. The CAT circulated bulletin is blatantly misleading about many issues, and often omits information that is crucial to understanding the full picture of sex education at Brown and in Rhode Island.
When individuals who do not hold any background in sexuality education speak out in opposition because of their fear or prejudice, society becomes rooted in outdated beliefs and pseudo-science that do injustice to people everywhere. Furthermore, when those individuals personally and publicly attack those devoted to providing sex education with false and misinformed accusations, it not only hurts those who are defamed, but also the community at large.
We ask for an immediate retraction of the vilifying and inaccurate statements made by Ms. Margaret Brooks and Citizens Against Trafficking in their latest newsletter. We also ask that esteemed local universities such as URI and Bridgewater State continue to hold their employees to ethical standards of normal scientific inquiry and require that their faculty hold some modicum of expertise in a field of education before raising the public level of panic over it.
Megan Andelloux is available to answer any questions the press, Margaret Brooks, University of Rhode Island or Citizens Against Trafficking holds. Aida Manduley, the Chair of Brown University’s Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council and Brown University’s is available to discuss the upcoming Sex Week and sexuality workshops held at Brown University.
Signed,
Megan Andelloux
Shanna Katz
Reid Mihalko
Aida Manduley
Sex work refers to a wide range of activity where sexual interaction is explicitly exchanged for something of value.
WSFA firmly believes that human beings possess a fundamental right to develop and express their sexuality.
Sexual Health is a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well being in relation to sexuality.
Sexuality and faith are two of the most deeply important and deeply personal aspects of human identity.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people are entitled to the realization of the full spectrum of their human rights.
Civil rights are one sub-set of human rights that exist equal to and interdependent with multiple fundamental human rights.
Grounded in the human rights framework, reproductive justice refers to all of the conditions necessary for all people to enjoy reproductive freedom.
Every human being deserves access to medically accurate and inclusive information about sex and sexuality.
