This is just something I’ve started fleshing out. I think it would be really good for us all to contribute so PLEASE add.

An Apology:

I can’t tell you enough how sorry I am that you are so confined to your awful gender norm that require you to ASSUME positions of power and that require that you have pretty much full control and autonomy over your own life. It sucks that no ruling power is above you besides a government that is made up of ….men. For that, I am truly sorry. I, as a woman, would love to be the first to apologize for boxing you in as my oppressor and making you writhe in discomfort when you talk about how much it hurts you to hurt me. I am SO sorry that by ‘working on your shit’ you mean ‘not’ and trust me, I know, from just how much you’ve told me, that that sucks. A lot. I know what you’re going through; I understand your struggle. I may never be able to understand it fully, but I will try my hardest, throwing aside my own problems to help you figure out yours. After all, it’s hard to be a feminist! Too many ambitions to save the world, too little time.

I’m also sorry that I haven’t told you what I need, when I need it, and how to do it. Explicit instructions are important! I guess there’s never really been a good time to explain them though, but that’s okay, I can wait! I know that it takes time and my patience for you to learn them- both of which you have an infinite amount of from me. I’ll understand your oppression before you begin to tackle mine. I’ll even help you through yours and heal your tattered and torn soul, tired and broken from years of taking all the space you could possibly need and more and therefore stepping all over people who are in your way. It’s exhausting to watch over the globe and I’ll give you a haven where you are able to rest and vent all your frustrations having to do with such responsibility and restrictions.

Anything at all that I can help you with, please, let me know. PLEASE.

Sorry if this is too inarticulate, inaccurate, unsophisticated or whatnot.

I just needed space to vent, I figured this blog would be the best place to do it in the hopes that someone feels the same way.

Love always.

Posted by Carly, Providence SDS

For a year now, I’ve been struggling with the question of how to share my experiences, and my chapter’s experiences, of a member’s abusive behavior in a productive, conscionable way.

From the day it happened, I didn’t know who to tell, what to say, or how to deliver any of it. I had a hard time articulating to myself what had happened. It took me two weeks to tell him what he did made me feel uncomfortable, two months for me to stop blaming myself, six months for me to name it as sexual assault.

I had many conversations with people as I went through this process. I told my partner first, searching unsuccessfully for the words to name my experience. All I could really do is describe what happened. “He gave me three glasses of wine. He put his legs over me on the couch. He started stroking my hand…”

I became angrier and angrier as time went on, consistently walking out of meetings and snapping at the perpetrator. I felt I needed to share my story in order to justify my behavior to the other members of the group. When I approached someone as an individual to tell them, I relied on emotion and my old set of crude descriptions. For months, the only way I could share my experience was in furtively and bitterly describe the events of that night to individual friends. Maybe we would be the last ones left at a party, maybe my friend would be lending me a book. My only release from my anger and frustration came through these small fits of sharing.

In telling others, it became clear to me a vocabulary was missing. I didn’t have the words at the time to name what was going on, and those who listened didn’t have any either. The people I told were confused and hurt, which they expressed through silence. Our community lacked any sort of framework for understanding and confronting abusive behavior. There was no room in our group’s language for my experiences, no room for any of the other women and men who were affected by this one person’s behavior in other violent ways. As individuals and as an organization, we were paralyzed, effectively silenced by this person and the missing vocabulary and framework for understanding our experiences.

Finally, one incredibly strong woman called an emergency meeting of the women’s caucus. For the first time, we shared our experiences with each other not in whispers behind backs, but as part of a group. Sharing was awful, listening was gut-wrenching. Together, we created the missing vocabulary to name our experiences for what they were: abuse, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. We decided that as a group of twelve women, we would demand that the perpetrator leave or we would leave the organization to make the space safer for both women and men in our chapter.

From this moment on, the question in my mind was not “how do I share my experience with others,” but rather, “how do we share these stories with the whole group.” I didn’t know how my male friends would react to our stories or our decision. As I had said before, my experiences sharing had been pretty negative. My friends’ silence had eroded a lot of my trust in the group, and I was particularly scared to see how they would react to our decision to remove this person, who had been an integral part of the organization for years and a good friend to many members. I was afraid they might minimize our stories or doubt our decision. Our group had already been ripped apart by the abuser’s behavior in a lot of ways, and part of me feared that people would view it as a divisive, not healing, decision.

Telling my story to a group of twenty-two people was a nerve-wracking experience and very different than telling it to a group of women or a friend late at night. It was hard, but I felt bolstered by the group of eleven women sitting next to me. The organization’s response was incredibly positive, and people were supportive, responsive, and reflective. I left the meeting with renewed faith in my community. I have never felt more inspired by collective action, acting as a woman, in a group of women, to actually do something about patriarchy.

Among the barriers to sharing was this particularly slippery one, one that I struggle with to do this day. I didn’t want to ruin this person, and still don’t want to ruin this person. I knew that in a lot of ways, I was helping to make a decision that could potentially isolate and really socially damage someone who had used to be my friend, someone who I resented but didn’t hate. I believe in restorative justice, but what if the restorative justice process inadvertently becomes punitive? This person did legitimately shitty things. Sharing that and making it known would most likely be an unpleasant experience for him. People could react by pulling away from him, and he was no longer going to be in the organization. These things would be negative and could possibly be interpreted as punitive for him, but were consequences of a decision made with the safety of women and the organization in mind. I don’t know how to reconcile this.

As I’ve become more involved in national work, I’ve run into this same issue again and again. Do I share information that could possibly do further harm to this person? I don’t want to further damage this person’s relationships, but I definitely do not want to be silenced. The other day, I was triggered by someone who made a comment about sexual assault happening within chapters. I didn’t know whether I should share with her why I was triggered, and thought maybe if I had previously shared my story, she wouldn’t have made the comment in the first place. Again, I felt unsure as to how to speak about my experiences in a useful, fair way.

I think SDS needs to do a better job creating a community in which stories of sexual assault and interpersonal violence can be constructively shared. To echo something I heard a lot at the national convention, I think we need to build a community of trust so we can actually have a safe space to talk. I think we need a vocabulary to talk about these experiences. Finally, I would love conversations to take place about the act of sharing these experiences. Hopefully this piece will open up some space for us to talk about the processes of being silenced and speaking out, how to more effectively go about making sure our voices are heard, and how to create a safe and constructive environment for sharing our experiences.

Throughout my life-and yes I think every woman’s life but I’ll stick to talking about mine since I know it best-I have struggled with body image, continually wavering from acceptance and love of my body and disappointment and even disgust for it. Looking back at my childhood and adolescence, there are many painful memories that I can dredge up, experiences in which people who were supposed to be loved ones, caretakers (including teachers, family members, neighbors, friends) knowingly or unknowingly reinforced what the dominant culture told me about women’s bodies, my body, through movies, books, tv, textbooks, etc. There was an ideal woman out there. She was/is pretty, docile, thin, demur, and I learned, was taught early on that I was not HER.

Whether the time when I was a young girl, probably 5 or 6, that my grandmother told me not to eat so much, something that would never and still will never be told to any of my male cousins (in fact, they should eat more!), or the time a gym teacher told me she was surprised at my athleticism because a girl of 11 with a short stocky build is not usually such a good runner!, or my mother expressing her concern over my upper lip hair upon accompanying me to my first visit to a gynecologist- all of these experiences continue to hamper my love for myself and my body as well as my ability to truly love and trust all women despite my discovery of radical politics and feminism and my continued work to develop and promote critical consciousness-my own and others.

On a recent visit home, my mother commented that she thought people might think my un-shaved legs “looked ugly.” At first I was hurt, but this hurt was quickly replaced by sadness and rage at the fact that my 50 year old mother is so insecure about body image that she is concerned (anxious and worried, stressed even!) about my leg hair and how others might think about me, and about her, because of my not so out of the ordinary choice to not shave it.

I responded to her that “You might think that but I don’t and a lot of  other people don’t either.” My confidence and disregard for caring whether I “looked ugly” caused her to rethink her statement and she realized how hurtful it was, not apologizing but quickly adding that “of course I think you’re beautiful”- not indicating any body hair in that phrase.

This most recent experience was an eye opener for me. Like I said, I continually struggle with body image-wavering between shaving and not shaving body hair and continually worrying about my weight. (Yes, that’s right, I am not afraid to admit that these negative thoughts still plague my mind and I would venture to say they plague the minds of many alternative women I know and love as well. We have to acknowledge them before we can eradicate them!) This last exchange with my mother however, caused me to critically examine many of the hurtful memories and experiences linked to my body and affecting my body and self image, confidence, and love. I concluded that these things were often keeping me from fully expressing myself, embracing all of my varied selves that are suppressed by attempts to feel comfortable, to not stick out or gain unwanted attention.

I also realized that having confidence in my own decisions and perception of my self was crucial to helping other women, like my mother, battle their own hang-ups and self hate which has been ingrained in every woman living in a patriarchal capitalist society that values them only as commodities and sexual objects. And more than ever, reflecting on my own struggle to love my body and myself and all women despite difference left me with an overwhelming drive to infuse this struggle into my everyday life, my social organizing, and to find new creative ways to bring radical feminism not only into radical circles but into the mainstream!

I strongly believe that along with the dominant patriarchal capitalist vision of women that continues to thrive in the mass media and to a large extent in academia and even in radical organizing, personal experiences in which loved ones or caretakers betray our trust and assert the power of these same oppressive structures over us represent a huge hindrance not just to developing and maintaining critical consciousness and love for ones body, self, and of others, but to a powerful, radical feminist movement among the many voices currently working for social change. I think it is vital that we confront the hurtful, damaging experiences that occur living in a patriarchal society and that we be vocal and supportive of each other in these efforts so that we can transform our hurt into action, our pain into change!

LOVE JO PHILLYSDS

-Joanna-Philly SDS

Dissidents-despite the age in which they have lived and struggled-have been put to death-murdered-by institutions and individuals fighting for woman’s right to control her body. From the Inquisition throughout Europe in the “dark ages” to the outlawing of midwifery and the establishment of the medical industry in early 20th century America, with its professional, male doctors, woman’s health advocates, especially those fighting for control of reproductive care, have been labeled as witches, moral hazards, illegal, heretical, justifiably punished with death.

In short, woman’s fight to control health care, her own as well as her right to provide it without “official” sanction, is a historical battle that can not be isolated from the past. In a pamphlet by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, “Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, A History or Women Healers,” the authors outline how women have been pushed from controlling health care and their bodies by institutions that benefited (and benefit) from their oppression. By marginalizing women as unfit to care, except in the intentionally innocuous role of nurses, these institutions ( for example the church, state, and university) created the current dependency on an inadequate health care system inherently tied to profit and patriarchy. During the Inquisition it was stated that, “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil” (“Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, A History or Women Healers,”10) and apparently the dominating spirit expressed in this hateful speech is still at work among Christian extremists in the U.S.

To truly understand the threat that abortion, midwifery, and birth control pose to the American Christian right, the historic oppression of women by a patriarchal elite must be acknowledged. It is in this framework that Dr. Tiller’s assassination should be placed. For, according to precedent, Tiller represented another menacing witch to be burned.

Tiller’s true crime was not killing babies and angering Jesus, even if the killer and his supporters preach this on high. Tiller threatened the dominant mythology of church, state, and the heath care industry that women can not and should not think for themselves when it comes to their bodies- for everyone’s safety seems to be linked to maintaining patriarichal control.

Interviewed on Democracy Now! on June 1, 2009, Dr. Shelley Sella, who worked with Dr. Tiller since 2005, remembered him saying that, “The woman’s body is smarter than the doctor…” This statement sums up the danger that he and other abortion and reproductive health care providers pose to those fighting to maintain control over womens minds and bodies. Woman- to these individuals and institutions- is unfit to make decisions and certainly a sexual and moral danger to society if let loose. What the killing of Dr. Tiller, as well as that of other Dr.’s and health care workers that have been recently targeted by religious extremists, signifies is the continued threat to patriarchal control posed by women and men who struggle for autonomy.

A witch is a witch to killers who disguise murder as mercy- the inquistion appears alive and well.

This list is based on my own experiences with men in SDS. If you’re a man that I know, and you’re reading this and wondering if any of it is about you… then it could be.

Please don’t send me a(nother) long e-mail about how you’re angry about the way I “called you out” (notice that there are no names) or how you think this list is “counter-productive” or “self-righteous.” Instead, I encourage you to take that anger or defensiveness or whatever emotion you have after reading this, and think about why these behaviors might be upsetting and how you could change these behaviors to make SDS a more welcoming place to women/queer/transfolk.

Fellow women/queer/transfolk: feel free to add your own lessons in the comments! (I’m sure I’ve left out a lot – after all, men have so much to teach us!)

Lessons That Men in SDS Have Taught Me:

1. It is wrong to call women “bitches.” It is, however, perfectly acceptable to call them “aggressive,” “intimidating,” and “hostile.”
2. It is “self-righteous” and counter-productive to call people out, to ask people to respect you, or to tell people why/that their words and actions are hurtful and oppressive.
3. The appropriate way to deal with a conflict is to send out long e-mails about it, preferably to every listserv you’re on.
4. When problems arise, long e-mails may also be combined or substituted with passive-aggressive statuses on Facebook and/or gchat.
5. The most effective and liberatory way to share your knowledge with people is in monologue form.
6. Questions on feminist politics should be taken to the token woman.
7. The best way(s) to deal with your emotions are (a.) refuse to acknowledge that they exist, and/or (b.) dump them on your (least?) favorite female/queer/trans friend.
8. Women are only worth your time if they’ll “hook up” with you. (Or if there’s a chance that they will sometime in the future.)
9. “Feminism” and “sexual liberation” mean “fucking lots of women.”
10. Men in SDS never commit sexual assault. Only “normal” men (such as liberal environmentalists) do that!
11. It is wrong for women and queer/transfolks to use violence to defend themselves against rape and queer bashings.
12. If you’ve read The Will to Change, it means that you’re no longer a patriarch. It also means that you can be self-righteous about how you’re in touch with your emotions, and how you’re no longer a part of patriarchy.
13. Having a penis and being male are the only qualifications you need to do a job. Take charge — no one will mind!
14. The fact that someone “has come a long way” means you should be totally understanding of, and patient with, their current fucked up behaviors.
15. Abuse, patriarchy, and sexism are totally compatible with radical/anarchist and feminist politics.

<3 sarah b. (dc-sds)