Market Street in San Francisco, 01-18-2003

What was it that occurred, precisely? 

It was simultaneously such a success and such a failure — it couldn’t have looked more like a successful, classic protest in the public square. So many people, so many thousands of people, seeping into the city from all corners of the state. We believed in our own power, we were reminded of our sheer mass and volume. And we repeated the experiment, month after month after month, until we wearied and lagged.

In spite of its many successes — the catalyzing of morale, the creation of an awareness of our collectivity, the viscerally-perceived demonstration through massed bodies of our very existence as a significant, motivated, dissenting population — we failed to do what we believed at first we could do. At the outset, we believed we might stop the war from beginning.

And it was our very success in manifesting such awe-inspiring demonstrations that made our utter failure to be visible in the larger national discourse all the more glaring and chilling. We failed to make an impact on the nation that was proportional to what we had achieved in the streets of our own cities.

“Chilling” is such an apt word for the sensation I felt; perhaps it might also be described as a “sinking feeling.” The very clear discrepancy between our success in the actual public square and our success in the virtual one – it set many of us back on our heels. The experience undermined any whisper of faith we may have had that we were living in the kind of democracy in which the will of the people could not be ignored.

I think many of us felt compelled to “go back to the drawing board,” or at least to back away from full engagement with something we realized at last had become alien to our knowledge. What kind of animal was this political society? We’d all been trained, through the rhetoric of k-12 civics lessons to believe that “it was our own.” But the training in “how it worked” had obviously been based on obsolete specs.

This was four and a half years ago, now. Have we rested up? Is it time for the dormancy to be over? Do we know, now, something we didn’t know then about how to sneak up on the monster?

Evan Thinks I’m a Fascist

Joking! Just joking. But we have been having a bit of an email exchange.

Rapeshit Revisited: Cry Wolf, Fire, Rape, Whatever.

As much as I’ve tended to embrace the value of (post)feminist self-critique, there’s a problem with lamenting women’s collective inculcation in the rhetoric of our own vulnerability and endless, spiraling victimhood – specifically the danger of finding oneself ludicrously bemoaning how we’ve become victims of a culture of victimhood. Unfortunately, the language of woman-as-victim is the language that traditional Western feminism best knows how to speak.

A common line in self-defense or rape-prevention guidelines is the always-unsubstantiated claim that, when in public and under attack, it is better for a woman to shout “Fire!” than “Rape!” or “Help!” Here are the two most oft-replicated phrasings of this assertion, used in identical form in numerous university, and community-organization publications on the web, and undoubtedly in print as well:

(1) “If you shout ‘help,’ some people will tend not to want to be involved in someone else’s problem. ‘Fire’ concerns them, and they are more likely to respond.”

(2) “Shout ‘fire,’ as people are more likely to come help if you do that than if you shout, ‘help.’ Fire is something that effects everyone, where as if you yell, ‘help’ people may be hesitant to get involved.” 

Rapeshit: They tell me the boys are all right.

I’ve been doing a lot of walking late at night, usually intoxicated, but sometimes without the distraction of music plugged into my ears. I’m a woman, and my mind wanders occasionally towards the logistical problem of my own vulnerability. This in spite of having taken measures to undo effects of the fear-mongering that passes for “rape awareness” in schools and the media (the media being 1980s feminism’s ‘strange bedfellow’).

I’m rarely nervous anymore, but if I were to feel that old frisson of anxiety, I could remind myself that I am as large as most men. I give minimal outward impressions of vulnerability, and can speak some of the verbal and non-verbal language of domination that is supposedly “male,” and constitutes what rape is all about. Furthermore, I have a more capacious well of rage than most persons of any gender in Portland, which tends to be a mild, timid, temperate town. I would not go gently in such a fight.

Potty Training, or, Shitting in the Marines

A co-worker told me this account of one former Marine, now father to a two-year old. The two year old rather precociously enjoys privacy while pooping in his diaper. While the kid was ensconced in the bathroom, focusing on the task at hand, the father shook his head and said, “That kid would never make it in the Marines.”

He then went on to explain — when he was training in the Marines, they shit when they were told to shit. Or, at least, they were supposed to. They’d come to the end of whatever they were drilling, and the drill instructor would bellow, “Now: GO TAKE A SHIT!”

She’s been haunting me lately…

 …feel the burn.