Understanding the Uncomfortable

I’m a white cisgender able-bodied straight woman in New England. I am unlikely to get shot by cops, harassed for my religion, deported, drafted for a nuclear war, or, really, have much worse happen to me under Trump’s administration than have more job prospects disappear, the planet melt, and my access to birth control further limited. My chances of being sexually assaulted are still about one in five, although that may increase if Trump’s ascendancy makes sexual predators feel more entitled. So, largely, I can write safely and compassionately about understanding the white working class frustration that fueled Trump. As I find myself saying frequently, understanding is not the same as condoning.

It’s not, exactly, that I am surprised that Trump won—just stunned and saddened because the rhetoric of his campaign was so vitriolic, and I hate that so many people found resonance with that anger. I suspect that the anger of many of Trump’s almost entirely White voters has more to do with a fear of losing identity, of wanting to make sure that, in a growing and changing and browning and gender-changing America, there is still a place for them, for the life and the values they know.

That fear of being left behind, of losing your place, losing a place, in the world, I understand. My father once stood up in a crowded bookstore, in an almost entirely female audience, to ask Terry Tempest Williams a question. Williams was on a book tour for When Women Were Birds, about her relationship to her mother and the women in her family, and my father’s question was, “where is your father in all of this, does he have a place in this story?”

Williams answered warmly that her father did, and my dad sat down, and I deeply regret that I can’t remember now if I ever told him how proud I was of that moment, what I learned in it. To me, that exchange, crystallized my understanding that as movements for social change go forward, that as Progressives work for equal rights, representation, and opportunities for women, Black, Brown, LGBTQ, immigrants newer to America than ourselves, and non-Christian people, we cannot overlook that to change the country—as I believe we must—this is going to intrinsically make, particularly, straight White men feel like they don’t have a place anymore. That lack of inclusion is a disservice, and as it turns out, a disservice that is dangerous to everyone.

I don’t believe that White America is under an assault, that we need to let straight WASP dudes be in charge again forever because they get sad (or dangerous to everyone else) when they don’t get all the seats at the table, but I do think that, as Progressives, we have been narrow-minded and unkind when it comes to this issue. We have not embraced diversity that did not agree with our ideals. We have not been open-hearted, we have not understood that shifting the balance of power is as out and out shitty for some as it is bold and beautiful for others.

That said, it is an unacceptable response to our liberal idealistic ignorance to have misogynistic, climate change denying, White Supremacist billionaires running the country.

I don’t know what to do about it, exactly, but I do know that I am open to almost all suggestions. I think that Progressives like myself will have to change our tactics, because all of the pot-luck rallies, listening sessions, membership drives, candlelit vigils, direct actions, writing letters to Congress, laboring for policy changes in a corrupt system, Black Lives Matter marches, bike lanes, and all the rest that we—that I—have put such idealistic faith in, believing that by doing so we were curving the arc of history so sharply to justice, these activities have not been enough, this time.

Which isn’t to say we should cease to do whatever both feels good for our souls and is socially effective. My faith in that arc of history is shaken and I am appalled at my own ignorance at how long the arc is, how hard progress is to come by and sustain, but I’m not giving up on justice.

How we go forward has been the grief soaked question of Progressives this week. Real things—a registry for Muslims in America, a climate denier at the head of the EPA, a tacit affirmation of White Supremacy at the highest level of national government, Trump selecting Supreme Court justices—are happening. The fox is in the henhouse, and no amount of good intentioned hand wringing will take it out again. For a hopeful people—Idealists, Liberals, Progressives—we need to grieve, and accept reality. Not submit to it, but accept it.

As an environmentalist, I have long been reconciling myself to the reality that we cannot go back in time, that the damage of climate change is irreversible, that all the best energies and efforts cannot hold back the tides already risen and still rising. We can mitigate the damage, we can build for a more sustainable and resilient future, but we cannot erase what we have done. And, we have done this, but failing to understand the perspectives of those who see the world differently. Everyone can embrace the alternate realities of Harry Potter and Westeros, but we cannot understand our own families, our own fellow citizens, and how they world and their eroding or aspirational place in it differently than our own values and experience?

We cannot change the past, we do not get a do over. Instead, we go forward with the best that we can, we do all the things—protesting, rallying, running for office, stepping down from privilege to let others step up, listening and understanding. And this includes understanding why Trump won—because many people were scared of losing what they have, losing who they are, and finding their beliefs unrepresented in government.

I believe that same fear of loss of identity and power is at the root a lot of the Progressive angst and sorrow this week—we thought the world was leaning one way, our way, and it tilted over “against us.” This may be the most uniting force in our country at present—if we can remember that most of us aren’t evil, we just want to be seen and heard, to have a place and a purpose, and the pride of our families. 

International Women's Day: On Prom-Posals and A Time for Outrage

For my recent birthday, some dear friends gave me a t-shirt celebrating Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. As you can see, it is fire-engine red and amazing.

I wore it the morning after my birthday to clean up the minor wreckage of a good dinner party. This sartorial choice wasn’t a statement open to some post-umpteenth-wave of Feminism ironic interpretation along the lines of, "we’re now so evolved as society in terms of gender equality and identity, a lady such as myself can freely choose to do the duties of a repressed housewife, even while wearing the garb of revolutionary propaganda." That is silly bullshit that I hope you read in a funny snooty parody voice. 

I was thus garbed because I wanted to wear my new shirt, the kitchen was littered with dirty dishes and I don’t much like living in filth, and it was my mess to clean up.

I find even the ghost of an idea that we’re in a post-Feminist society absurd.

We aren’t.

As an example of how I fear we’re backsliding as Feminists in important and emotional ways, working at the high school, I keep overhearing clusters of boys worrying about how to pull off a good “prom-posal,” which is apparently now a thing. I hear girls giggling about how they hope they’ll be asked. One boy is making a daily series of riddles and clues for his date—presumably him actually asking her to prom is the treasure. Another is planning to buy red roses for everyone in his math class, have them one by one present the roses to his girlfriend—also in math class—and then he would come in last and give her a white rose and ask her to prom.

Prom is not my issue here—if teenagers want to get gussied up and dance and canoodle and have healthy consensual sex lives, more power to them. Similarly, I am 100% on board with Romance—although I’m guessing that these kids haven’t learned yet that Romance is not really rose petals and pink hearts and proms, but someone bringing you Gatorade in the middle of the night when you have a violent stomach flu, or waiting up for your bus until dawn, or putting tennis balls on your walker and salt on the icy steps, or any of the other millions of ways that people demonstrate their actual, practical, messy love for each other.

In fairness, I didn’t go to my high school prom and so have no frame of reference on this allegedly all-important aspect of high school life in America. Aside from being painfully—almost snobbishly—shy, I had a track meet the next day and, while I was a lackadaisical athlete, that was a simple excuse to avoid what I at seventeen suspected would be a lot of fuss over nothing. The school dances that I had attended always ended up with me in the bathroom with one upset friend or another, dealing with some mismatch of expectations and reality. No matter how many teen-age rom-coms I watched, I suspected that real prom wouldn’t be much different than past dances, and having my mum make me a beautiful dress just to hang out in a fancier bathroom somehow didn’t appeal.

So, really, I’m not one to talk about proms per se. But, my issue with the prom-posal situation is that is seems both horribly stressful and indicative of trends that cauterize teenage girls as passive Princesses in need of asking, with the expectation that they will be asked and in a certain way, or they are not correct. Flipping that, this script for life requires that teenage boys are the actors, the one who gets to make the choice of what lady to ask, who pick the cast and create the lines. Ladies should just sit around and wait with absurd culturally engrained expectations to be asked to the dance, to life. Dudes should steel up against any fears of rejection, but remain emotionally open and Romantic, and pick a lady by doing something traditional but unique, memorable but not super weird. To culturally pressurize these traditional gender roles at young and emotionally fragile ages seems cruel and, therefore, against the Feminist agenda I believe in.

At the same time, I am mentoring a trio of high school students in a Feminism seminar this spring. We are compiling a list of readings and videos and music to study and explore. We’ve got Emmaline Pankhurst and Ida B. Wells and bell hooks and Betty Friedan and Wonder Woman and videos of 100 years of beauty in Black-American, White-American, and Iranian culture and more all set up and ready to go.

These students already know so much more than I did at their age about Feminist history and literature. On the other hand, I grew up with red and yellow and blue Legos and no Disney princesses. They are at once reading Angela Davis, and expecting rose petaled prom-posals.

Their emotional dichotomy seems different and somewhat more dire, to me, than cleaning the kitchen while wearing my Betty Friedan t-shirt. Or the common challenge of hating the Patriarchy and loving men.

If we read and know these things, but do not articulate them through our lives, does it matter?

Stéphane Hessel was part of the French Resistance in WWII and spent his long life working to resist various threats to human life and dignity. In his small and effective book, Indignez-Vous!: A Time for Outrage, he wrote about how, when he was young and resisting Nazis, it was almost easy because the enemy was so clear cut. Now, with globalization, instant communications, climate change, mass-marketing, and all the rest, the outrage is still easy, but knowing where to direct one’s indignation and action is more nebulous.

Last summer, someone asked me if I could give some examples of sexism and gender inequality still happening in this world. Similar to and as a part of Hessel’s nebulous enemies to be resisted, I feel that sexism is so subliminally and systemically omnipresent that it took me a minute to catch my breath and form words.

Sexism is everywhere and Feminism needs everyone—women, men, and those who have yet to make up their minds, as Lola says in Kinky Boots.

How we respond to this need depends on how we each get up every morning, what we put on and how we are in the world, what we ask for and what we expect from each other every day. Never mind International Women’s Day, it’s always Human Day.