April: Sexual Assault Awareness Month

Thought I would take some time reflecting on one of my favorite months. As most of you may know, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. (SAAM)

My organization, Students For Sexual Consent, planned a whole month filled with events for SAAM.

It started with a 'Survivor Panel'. This is where survivors of sexual as

sault talk about their experiences. They are strong women and I can not even imagine the courage it takes for them to do this.

The 'Survivor Panel' was well attended. Another event we put on was our annual Clothesline Project. This is a National project done through out communities and campuses in the whole country. Survivors of sexual assault make T-shirts as a healing process and each April we display them in a public place to represent the prevalence of sexual assault. I think a lot of people are amazed just how often sexual assault occurs. To find more information, check out the national network website.

Here are some photographs from our project:

The last event that I participated in was 'Denim Day.' I picked up the story off the Denim Day in LA website.

An 18-year old girl is picked up by her married 45-year old driving instructor for her very first lesson. He takes her to an isolated road, pulls her out of the car, wrestles her out of one leg of her jeans and forcefully rapes her. Threatened with death if she tells anyone, he makes her drive the car home. Later that night she tells her parents, and they help and support her to press charges. The perpetrator gets arrested and is prosecuted. He is convicted of rape and sentenced to jail.

He appeals the sentence. The case makes it’s all the way to the Italian Supreme Court. Within a matter of days the case against the driving instructor is overturned, dismissed, and the perpetrator released. In a statement by the Chief Judge, he argued, “because the victim wore very, very tight jeans, she had to help him remove them, and by removing the jeans it was no longer rape but consensual sex.”

Enraged by the verdict, within a matter of hours the women in the Italian Parliament launched into immediate action and protested by wearing jeans to work. This call to action motivated and emboldened the California Senate and Assembly to do the same, which in turn spread to Patricia Giggans, Executive Director of Peace Over Violence, and Denim Day in LA was born. The first Denim Day in LA was in April 1999, and has continued every year since.

Here are pictures of our Denim Day which was held this past Wednesday:

Overall, it was a great month and I really think this helped people see that this is an issue to pay attention to. Awareness is only the first step to stopping the problem.

Silence

[Trigger warning]

Words are powerful. But why doesn't any one ever use them?

When people die, we are not afraid to cry. We are not afraid to tell people how angry or upset we are. Some people grieve loudly, full of words and words and words.

When people are violent, we scream. We yell at the highest volume we can reach. We are not afraid of what people may think.

When people receive a diagnosis of cancer, we share our fear. We talk about the 'what if's' or the prognosis. We are not afraid.

When people are harassed or attacked sexually, we shut up. Suddenly, it's like the world is quiet. Victims are told to deal privately, to not bring it up. To not report it because the attacker is going 'though issues.' Isn't the victim going though issues? I mean, the person was attacked, harassed, wronged in more ways than you can imagine. Sometimes they change, so drastically, that everyone around them avoids them. "She's different," they say "weird."

Unless you go through an assault or an experience, you never know how scary it is to say something. And you never know how painful it is not to say anything.

You can't describe the pain you go through everyday. You lose the trust in people, in humanity. You stop believing you are real. You change so that it will never happen to you again. Sometimes, you isolate yourself, refuse to move, to socialize. Maybe you turn to harmful substances, cutting, suicide. Maybe you forget how it is to own your sexual experiences. Maybe you never even had the chance to own them in the first place.

Your closest confidants look at you differently. They treat you like a fragile glass slipper. You want to tell them to stop, to just forget that it ever happened. You want to be normal. You try so hard. You have dreams at night where you are. Where it never happened. But that's the closest you can ever get to being normal.

Sleepless nights, where the dream doesn't come, brings bags of circles under your eyes. You wonder if those nights would go away if you just told someone. You fear that you may lose the only thing that keeps alive, those dreams that keep you normal.

I encourage the survivors I meet to report it, to talk about it, and I don't even follow my own advice. I provide survivors the support I never received in hopes that they can be strong enough to face the fears of talking. I push survivors through recovery treatments, to counseling. I assume every woman I meet has had an sexual experience that was not wanted. I hate that I never tell these women that I've been though it. That it happened to me.

But I stay silent.

(Submitted by a friend)

In the words of a Swarthmore graduate

A woman told Betty Friedan in the 1960s that Friedan later published in "The Feminine Mystique" that her work was 'worth the unhappiness.'

She was one of the rare women in Friedan's book that was creating dreams different from becoming a wife and having children. I related to this statement very much.

Last semester when I was a boring business management major, when my studies did not inspire me to think, at all and when the only thing I looked forward to was my Women's Studies class. I had this one may call it epiphany.

Why should I be unhappy in my personal life and my work? That's not very productive. I remember laying in bed thinking that I was destined to unhappiness.

The epiphany came in Accounting class. As I was sitting there, doing my German homework and half listening to the professor drone on about debits and credits and accounts receivable. I just realized that my life was not meant to be dealing with hard, precise facts and selling or buying stocks. It was not supposed to be spent at an office desk everyday from 9 to 5. I needed something challenging, something that made me feel like I was alive, make me think that I was around to, well, do something.

So I made the decision right then and there that I was just going to go with it. I was going to be a women's studies major. Since then, Friedan interviewee explains the rest so well:

"Your mind begins to expand. You find your own field. And that's a wonderful thing. The love of doing the work and the feeling there's something there and you can trust it."

WS 445 Final Project

I had the chance to do a great project for my women's studies class called 'Women and Computers.'

Part one was about visual aids and activism. Click on the link to check out my prezi. I published the videos in my blog before, here and here. I found that there was no research to see how much just how visual aids effect activist causes, but I did a good job trying to see what the effect would be.

Part two was about visuals about -isms. I wanted to see what google images turned up for the words I choose. Were they accurate representations? Sometimes. But sometimes it wasn't. Check it out. I was orginally inspired to do this part of the presentation, by "What does feminism look like?"

Happy Exploring.

Movies && Pregnancy

I am moving away from porn today and on to 'real' hollywood movies.

I have been using my mom's netflix account to watch movies lately. (Thanks, Mom!) I've been watching a few movies that have to deal with woman and their reproductive system. In other words, these women are normally preggo. Since some women choose to have children, I thought this would be interesting to share what I thought of these movies in a slightly feminist perspective.

Baby on Board
I started with a movie called "Baby on Board". I know, I know, I should have known it was going to be bad from that title, but I wanted to give it a chance. The movie was hands down a waste of my time.

Even though the writers tried to make Heather Graham's character a career woman, she was far from one. She stated she put her career first over her personal life, but the movie showed her constantly having to put her career on the backburner for her husband. Typical.

Her marriage, which was described as "perfect" in the description, was a trainwreck from the beginning. The relationship between her and her husband is immature, not developed and lacks adult communication.(I hated the fact that the husband 'forgot' to put on protection while they were having sexy time. Not cool. Divorce him. )

Frankly, I thought they had spent more time on Graham's hair then the writing of the script. And even though the movie is supposed to be about Graham's characters pregnancy, they spent more time on the husbands law partner extramartial concerns.

The People I've Slept With
I thought I would be more impressed with 'The People I've Slept With' then 'Baby On Board' and although it was a 'more feminist movie'. I do have some concerns.

The main character is Asian American and very independent on her own. When she finds out she is expecting, her decision to keep the baby is because her sister told her 'she's getting old and someday it will be harder to conceive'. She works for an art store and is an aspiring artist.

I didn't understand why she was so concerned with finding a 'husband'. She seemed fine on her own and did not buy in to a lot of the crap her older sister was feeding her. It did not seem to me that her father and sister and friends would let her and her child on their own. Which made me think that her search to find a husband was just a plot for the film. It was unbelievable, so to say.

BUT after you get through the 1950s themed part of the movie, it ended in a feminist, modern way. And it was always focused on her choices and conflicts, not the rest of the people around her.

Women In Trouble
If you want to see women sexualized, degraded and in stereotypical roles and relationships- this is the movie for you. It minimizes woman's issues and leaves most of the issues unresolved. There is a few funny lines in this movie, because most of the women are perceived to be unintelligent. For example: "No one thinks it can happen to them, but anyone could get a Ph.D. Make sure you get tested twice a year."

Barry Munday
The last movie that was about modern day pregnancy was 'Barry Munday'. Although this focused on a man's viewpoint, I think this was the best movie I've seen in a long time. Since it started with Barry getting punished for being a womanizer, I felt like that was an extreme way to forgive Barry's womanzing behaviors.

The movie was really sweet. But it's sad to think that a guy has to lose his 'balls' in order to be a respectful and decent man.

What am I trying to get at in this post?

These movies are about an extremely personal issue that affects women. But yet, you can sense, or know, a male presence in all of these women's lives. And I'm not saying that woman should be selfish and make it all about them, but shouldn't there be more women perspectives about this issue in movies?

I'm just a little sick of watching movies, thinking that they are going to be about real life women and hearing offensive sexist remarks, watching stereotypical characters and finding a male-centered cast. Way to put us women in our place, Hollywood.

Can Porn be Women-Positive?

I hate porn.

I'll admit it. The little porn I have seen had me reeling back in disgust.

Hanging out with my guys friends after our first year of college was interesting because it had seemed they had lost all filters with me. They explored the internet in front of me and laughed at the disgusting porn they came across.

I laughed from what I could see in between my fingers, too. Then I remembered that they were real people and that most of these people were getting hurt.

I don't think erotic images are bad. And I do not think sexualization is necessarily a bad thing.

But I think women who are porn stars or 'escorts' or strippers are doing it wrong.

Yes, you heard me. They are doing 'it' wrong.

It's common fact among scholars that investigate the sex industry that most women in the sex industry may not see a lot of what they earn. Porn stars have agents, Escorts have johns and strippers...well, strippers are stripping in a joint that is usually owned by someone other than them. Most of their money that they earn go to those 'third parties'.

Agents, Johns and Owners of strip clubs are usually men.

So women are selling their bodies to men, to give more money to men.

That doesn't sound very sexually liberating to me.

As I searched for statistics on how much a women in the sex industry makes in a lifetime, I realized that I wouldn't find a lot of results. Sites like this one focused on how much money the 'porn industry' makes overall and who pays for it.

They didn't split up where this profit goes. My guess is that most of the money goes to the producers of these films, not the actresses. My guess is that these producers are mainly men.

My point? Women in the sex industry need to take control. They deserve most of that profit that the porn industry brings in. In order for these career choices to be liberating, they need to be making the majority of the big bucks.

Yes, I'm saying that women need to be the owners of porn companies. Why? Because they are the one being degraded, used, and sexualized on computers and televisions screens across the world.

When I brought this up to my guy friends, they scoffed at me. "Women don't know what a man wants in bed." They told me. I looked at them with disgust, "You're telling me that you've never been satisfied by a women in bed before, now that's kind of sad." Yes, women know what you want in bed, women satisfy you, why can't they take over the porn industry?

I believe that women can use their sexuality to get ahead in life. I believe in choices and that in the right cases, women can be financially stable and fiscally responsible from the porn industry. It's a women's body and her choice to make, but let's make sure it's a good choice to make and that she isn't being cheated.

But let's do this right. Let's make the sexualization of women's body's our choice and to our benefit. That's a fair compromise, if you can't beat them, make money off them.

(Note: I focused on straight porn, I tried to find studies on gay porn because I heard that gay porn is more 'healthy' in the terms of income for the actors, I could not find any. I do not know if the sexualization of gay men is an issue.)

Men On Mondays && The LGBT community

Mondays are the days that I recognized Males that help further the feminist causes. I just wanted to take time to thank the male-identified individuals of the LGBT community.

Before I went to college, I knew of a few homosexual males. I never actually got to know any. From the moment I stepped out of the bus after graduation, I have come across more and more male-identifying individuals from the LGBT community. They have helped me grow as a person and I appreciate all of what these individuals have done for me over the past-almost-two years. (Wink Wink- you know who you are.)

It is really important to help all causes, whether it is in your group or not. I feel that people with different sexualities than myself, different genders than myself should have equal access to healthcare, job opportunities, education, life choices, whatever. This is the same for different races than myself, different ethnicities than myself.

There are people being discriminated against for their sexuality. Whether or not they are a woman, I do not care. I believe in the golden rule and reciprocity. Maybe if I help them, they will help fight for women's issues. At least, in the perfect world, they would support the causes I fight for if I support the causes they fight for.

So here's for the men in the LGBT community who support feminist causes!! Inclusiveness and collaboration is what is going to get our issues heard!

(And a small shout out for the women-identified individuals in the LGBT community, you are heard! You are not forgotten and you are loved! )