Young Man Asks Obama re Legalizing Prostitution

I imagine he doesn't know that women who end up working as prostitutes were usually molested as children, often through incest. I guess he doesn't know how often battering is done by the charming Richard Gere-esque johns (sarcasm). I guess he doesn't know about the damage done to a woman's body, not to mention her spirit and her heart.

The young man included prostitution on his list of "victimless crimes." Well, I think it's time to give R. Mott her say; I don't think her stuff can really be linked to too often - do you?

from the blog of R. Mott

video: Not For Sale

and from me to R., because she came into the world already complete and beautiful (which is what a rose traditionally symbolizes):

V-Day

Well, V-Day in New Orleans starts at 10 Friday morning. There is going to be a special blessing ritual to cleanse the Superdome of the energy of those awful post-Katrina days. There will be lots of speakers and panels. Also, there will be massages and yoga and other such relaxation-related goings-on for the women of New Orleans (fabulous - I just wish some of the visiting counselors would be staying for good, since we now have only about 1/4 of the counselors we had here pre-Katrina - and we have LOTS more need now).

Alix Olsen, whom I LOVE, is going to be there tomorrow afternoon.

I will be attending the actual Monologues Saturday night with my cousin, which is truly in the spirit of sisterhood because I adore her and she's one of those busy, busy superwomen with whom it's difficult to schedule social time. So this will be a rare treat.

On top of that, I was expecting cheap tickets in the upper nose bleed section, but Mr.Me surprised me with more expensive tickets near the stage - for me and my cousin.

He also surprised me yesterday by setting up what had become a junk room into a real office. I have a desk, an adding machine with tape, the printer/copier/fax right there, four file cabinets. He set up files for all of my genealogy stuff, which had been in boxes for three years. I can now find all the tax stuff, all of the bills. Geez, I'm in danger of becoming a grown-up! Somebody save me from myself!

I guess maybe the office thing finally got done because Tuesday night at 7:30, the law school to which I recently applied called. There are one or two more things they need (proof that I paid my speeding ticket!?), but it sounds like I'm in. This school offers a public interest concentration, which could lead to some great non-profit, political, administrative, or other advocacy work. The school also has several different clinics in which third year students can work - and one of them does nothing but domestic violence work. Another does environmental justice work, which is just huge here in Louisiana. Not only do we have these terrible environmental problems caused by the petrochemical industries, but because the companies in those industries bought up land along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that was once all sugar plantations, there are these African-American populations there, descendants of slaves, who are suffering the health effects of the pollution. Most of the white people who want to leave have left. In this area, around the antebellum home called "Oak Alley," has sprung up "Cancer Alley." The locals - primarily African-American people, sometimes living in relic "freedmen's" shacks - suffer shocking rates of miscarriages, leukemias that are rare in the rest of the American population, skin rashes, eye and nose irritations, and birth defects. I would love to do some environmental advocacy work. The law students at Tulane have actually won some cases in this region, have managed to keep some new industries from locating here. Of course, the evil state responded by changing the rules under which law students can handle these cases - requiring that the citizens form a non-profit BEFORE coming to the clinic (no, they need lawyers FIRST to help them form the non-profit!), that they prove the average income level of the plaintiffs is below poverty level, all kinds of hoops, things unheard of in other states - all because some law students won some cases against the petrochemical industry!

Ramble, ramble, ramble. And to bed.

These Are A Few Of My Favorite (Louisiana) Things

First, I just want to say that I've worked out the issue about the other person in my house knowing where my blog is. I talked to him about this, made it clear that my blog has kind of also become my journal (my fault for showing it to him when it was just political rants & blog round-ups). I told him that he has his 12-step program journals in the house, and that I've never cheated by reading any of them. Then I found out how use the blog stats thing so that I can always sign on and be sure the last time anyone here went to my blog, it was ME - and I told him I would be checking from now on too!

Thanks for the supportive comment.

And now, on to some of my favorite (Louisiana) things.

Thanks, Katrina explains how we can be tourists in our own backyard.

This weekend is Super Sunday, which involves the Mardi Gras Indians. The Mardi Gras Indian tradition grew out of the respect and affection African-Americans had for native-Americans, who often harbored escaped slaves. The traditions involved are unique, fascinating, and very complex - and way beyond my ability to explain here, so instead I will provide a link.

This video is offered as a f**k you to the "just let New Orleans die" crowd - and a polite rebuke to the otherwise fabulous Barbara Ehrenreich, who wouldn't include New Orleans in her book on celebrations of joy in the streets because she said Mardi Gras is too commercialized and because she has apparently seen one too many ads for "Girls Gone Wild: Mardi Gras edition." Here you are, Barbara! Come see for yourself!

This video is of two tribes of the Mardi Gras Indians doing "battle." In the old days, actual fights broke out and scores from other times during the year were settled. In modern times, this is how the chiefs do battle. Ultimately, one chief will bow to the one who is "the prettiest."

If you're interested in this, go to the original of the video above at youtube and there is a link to a New Yorker article. Also, try a search for "Mardi Gras Indians" at youtube.

I'm sort of working the event on Sunday. I am volunteering to be a legal observer for the ACLU, observing and then noting what happens between attendees and the police (more at LaACLU).

I did this kind of volunteering once before, when I was a first year law student and member of the National Lawyers Guild (I went to type that last night and it came out "National Lawyers Guilt - how Freudian!). Anyway, that was when friends at the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane held this protest in which they sat down on the highway outside of the Air Force base. At the time, I was so amazed by how professonal and polite the many police and military and riot control units present were. Now that the ACLU has used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain our FBI files (the law students referenced on page 12 would include moi), it is abundantly clear why law enforcement were SOO nice. Anyway, so I am going to do that for Super Sunday.

Next, my favorite author in the world, James Lee Burke, gives an interview to the Sydney Morning Herald. (sigh)

NEW ORLEANS isn't just a place for bestselling crime writer James Lee Burke. Nobody could describe it - the good and the bad - the way he does without a deep well of affection. Love even: "You woke in the morning to the smell of gardenias, the electric smell of the streetcars, chicory coffee and stone that has turned green with lichen. The light was always filtered through trees, so it was never harsh, and flowers bloomed year-round."

That's a blues musician talking, a character from Jesus Out To Sea, one of Burke's most personal stories. He's clinging to a roof in "the Big Sleazy" after Hurricane Katrina has ripped it open. He goes on: "New Orleans was a poem, man, a song in your heart that never died … I only got one regret. Nobody ever bothered to explain why nobody came for us."

I went to a book signing of Burke's at a fabulous indie bookstore called Auntie's. At the time, I had been living up North for about ten years, and Burke's books were the closest thing I could afford to a trip home. When it was my turn to have him sign my book, I told him that I was from New Orleans and that I used his books for mental transport back there, then I said, "Thank you so much for writing to life some quirky, recognizable Louisiana characters who aren't just the same old Scarlett and Rhett stereotypes. It means a lot to me." He stopped in the middle of signing, looked up abruptly, kind of searched my face for a moment, then said, "Why, thank you, ma'm." (another sigh)

I walked into my therapist's office one day carrying one of Burke's books and was amazed to learn that she'd never heard of him. She wanted to know specifically what I like about his novels (especially since, as I'd told her, I rarely read fiction). As I tried to describe the complexity of the Dave Robichaux character and the complexity of the world as Burke - accurately - depicts it, where cops have Vietnam flashbacks, occassional violent tempers, and weekly 12 step meetings, where there is honor among thieves but little among politicians and patriarchs, my therapist pointed out that Burke's novels and characters reflect the complexity of my life's experiences. It's true. I've found the good guys aren't easy to tell from the bad guys. I've found little of the black and white I crave, but lots of the gray I dread.

She's right. Burke's complexity gets me (and, if you read the interview, that complexity of ordinary characters, what he calls "the bottom up story" is what he is trying to tell). It's also, however, the simple fact that his descriptions of my beloved Louisiana are melt in your mouth poetry.

Perhaps I carried too many memories of the way the city used to be. Maybe I should not have returned. Maybe I expected to see the streets clean, the power back on, the crews of carpenters repairing ruined homes. But the sense of loss I felt while driving down St. Charles was worse than I had experienced right after the storm. New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn't belong to a state; it belonged to a people.

When Clete and I [had] walked the beat on Canal, music was everywhere. Sam Butera and Louis Prima played in the Quarter. Old black men knocked out "The Tin Roof Blues" in Preservation Hall. Brass-band funerals on Magazine shook the glass in storefront windows. When the sun rose on Jackson Square, the mist hung like cotton candy in the oak trees behind the St. Louis Cathedral. The dawn smelled of ponded water, lichen-stained stone, flowers that bloomed only at night, coffee and freshly baked beignets in the Cafe du Monde. Every day was a party, and everyone was invited and the admission was free.

The grandest ride in America was the St. Charles streetcar. You could catch the old green-painted, lumbering iron car under the colonnade in front of the Pearl and for pocket change travel on the neutral ground down arguably the most beautiful street in the Western world. The canopy of live oaks over the natural ground created a green-gold tunnel as far as the eye could see. On the corners, black men sold ice cream and sno'balls from carts with parasols on them, and in winter the pink and maroon neon on the Katz and Besthoff drugstores glowed like electrified smoke inside the fog ...

Every writer, every artist who visited New Orleans fell in love with it. The city might have been the Great Whore of Babylon, but few ever forgot or regretted her embrace. (a little more...yum)

Hat tip New Orleans News Ladder for the James Lee Burke interview.

I'll close with this, "Unsuffer Me," by Louisiana GODDESS Lucinda Williams. This isn't really a video, but it plays the song, which is fabulous. Lean back and let Lucinda massage the sore spots in your soul.

Finding Good Stuff

I've been struggling with my depression quite a lot lately. Sometimes, you have to find cool stuff where you can, and today I did just that.

Today, I drove the kidlet to another town for a track meet.

It was a perfect, sunny March day in the South, outdoor thermostat set on "just right."

I got a snowball at one of those little snowball stands, and we got pints of fresh strawberries right off of some guy's truck.

On the way into the track meet, I saw two little girls, one black and one white, both beautiful and wearing pigtails. They were holding hands, skipping, and giggling. Watching them, I was transported to a long since forgotten time, when my best friend was black. This was back in elementary school, before anyone had gotten around to teaching me that such friendships are "supposed" to have limits (sigh...). Her name was Leslie Parsons. She wore glasses and was quiet, except with me. Sometimes we joined the other girls at jump rope, but mostly, we played jacks every chance we got. We were both really good at jacks, better than anyone else in our school; no one else could beat either one of us, so we mostly just played each other. We laughed and held hands like those two I saw at the track meet today, until I asked if she could spend the night at my house. That's when I got "the lesson" - it's okay to be friends at school, but we don't invite "them" to spend the night.

Trying to figure out racism, I have sometimes thought that, okay, maybe people have a natural tendency to seek out those who look most like themselves, that a tribe mentality might have some evolutionary purpose (although surely, we could EVOLVE beyond that by now!). In the end though, I still believe the truth is that "you have to teach a child to hate." If tribalism were so natural, such an evolutionary imperative, why would two innocent little girls be drawn together in friendship to begin with? The truth is that children will make friends with other children, regardless of race - at least until an adult comes along to "correct" them.

Oh, the things I think about just sitting in the sun at a track meet.

Good things about the day:

• ordering jambalaya from the concession stand right there on the track field (where else but South Louisiana!)
• warm, sunny weather in early March (just set my new plants out this weekend)
• locally grown strawberries in March
• spearmint snowballs in March
• kids who say "yes ma'm" and "yes sir" (a Southern sweetness I really missed when I lived up North; my NOLAfugee mom is now teaching in the Northwest and when she recently showed her kids an article about the law requiring schoolchildren to call their teachers ma'm and sir, they really acted like that was child abuse, despite her best efforts to explain the word "manners")
• teenage girl atheletes getting all competitive and fierce, focused on working hard and winning instead of on appearance and getting boys

One mom at the track meet made me think of "Sticks" by Alix Olson. The woman was blonde and bean-pole skinny. Even when I was younger and weighed 102 pounds, I was never stick skinny like that. I always had curves - a 34/24/34 body. But this woman was so tiny, perky, blonde. She had a flashy red handbag, splayed open on the bleachers, filled with everything a well prepared mother might need. She had coloring books and markers for the younger child. She had a stash of big, bright bows so her daughter and her daughter's friends could constantly redo and readorn their little ponytails (geez, my kid was lucky to get a plain stretchy thing for her ponytail; I suck). She had little ziplock baggies full of kid friendly snacks like grapes and Cheez-Its. Sigh:

...We stick baby boys’ lips on our nipples- to relieve them,
stick big boys inside our lips- to relieve them,
suck until we swallow their stickiness.
We tell our sons ‘only sticks and stones
will break their bones,’
then call each other bitch, knowing it sticks
more than hurled knuckles ever could.
We are ignored when our butts stick out,
admired when our chests stick out.
We chant "stick together, stick together", until
size six bitch walks by-
"sick", we whisper, menacingly, to each other,
"Stick", we think, admiringly, to ourselves....

So, yeah, that's how I caught myself thinking about her ("bitch"). I was wondering why I'm not blonde and perky, why my purse contains crumpled ATM receipts with messily scribbled lists on the backs of them (compiled while standing in the bookstore - lists of books I want but can't afford, titles to try to find at the library), pens that don't write, lipsticks I hardly ever use, and two cigarette lighters (even though I haven't smoked since I had the flu in January). I didn't plan ahead, hadn't brought Gatorade and snacks for my teenaged athelete, was lucky I had managed to find matching socks for us to wear.

Then, I thought about the poem, about how expectations pit women against one another and decided that Ms. Perfect Mom was probably an interesting and nice enough woman. Then I got really radical and decided that I'm an interesting and nice enough woman too, just a different kind. Unlike Perfect Mom, I couldn't stay enthusiastically focused on the many track and field events. On the other hand, at least I can say I set a good example for my child by letting her see me read books! Unlike Perfect Mom, I hadn't packed fabulous snacks. On the other hand, I did have one hell of a rocking conversation with my teenager in the car on the way to the meet - about sexism, racism, Clinton, and Obama. As usual, she had absorbed more of my newswatching than I ever dare hope, had strong opinions of her own and wanted to discuss them.

So, yeah, I thought about the poem and decided it was okay that I wasn't Ms. Perfect Mom, that being Me Mom was good enough.

At least today.

After all, it was cool yet sunny and there were fresh strawberries, snowballs, bowls of jambalaya, and giggling little girls.

It was a good day. I managed to find good stuff.

Did You Know Early Flight Attendants Were Nurses?

I didn't know this - that in the early days of commercial aviation, flight attendants were nurses, but the airlines, aware of public concerns about flight safety (and, no doubt, aware as the patriarchy always is of the potential to use women to sell stuff), emphasized instead their availability as skybound sex kittens.

I'm also sitting here reading poetry of African-American women of the nineteenth century. You know, it really pisses me off how there just aren't enough hours in the day to educate myself properly about herstory. I am an educated woman. I even have a degree in Social Justice Issues, with a Women's Studies concentration. And yet, every hour that I am able to spend researching online, I learn just how little I really know. Our herstory has been erased. Erased! Why in the hell were these African-American women's poems not in my English textbooks? Why, dammit?

Three Days to the "Stop Porn Culture" Conference

I SOOO love this woman. Watch it, watch it, watch it - woman flashes men during feminist anti-porn rally wearing signs that say "Make Love Not Porn" and "Porn is Fake, Girls are Real:"

I love this woman too - "Until" by Ayisha Knight, Def Poetry Jam:

"Why Many of us Feel Betrayed by Bill Clinton."

Not to mention that there's that little matter of the 22nd amendment. As a feminist, I had wanted to give Hillary Clinton credit and NOT assume that eight years for her would necessarily mean eight more years for him, but they are making it clear that this is VERY much a matter of eight more years for him.

But, of course, Andrea Dworkin said it best.
"Are you Listening Hillary? President Rape is Who he Is:"

...President Rape is who he is. Proud President Rape. Everyone turned from Juanita Broddrick. Everyone looked away. Every asshole blinked. It's pretty fucking brilliant to use force after the fuck, as he did with most of the others I know about, intimidate them, have them threatened, destroy their reputations, say they're lying or stalkers or a little mentally unhinged, having delusions of grandeur as if being fucked or mauled or harassed by him was something one dreamed of.... Always easier to blame the woman. Are you listening, Hillary? So much easier to be angry with them rather than with him. Have I got your attention, Hillary? You decide these women, every last one of them, are pieces of shit and he's the shinola. More than anyone you know how cold and premeditating the bastard is. When did your heart die? ... I'd be sick to think I had become as corrupt as you. How many women have you helped him hurt by protecting him and knocking out the opposition? Two political parties, one neo-fascist and the other neo-rapist. Or is it proto-rapist? You and I were girls together and now it's this: I'm nouvelle raped and you defend a rapist through which you defend rape through which you think the women, not the rapist, are the problem. Maybe women are just fucking stupid, you and me babe. I'm glad you're not president or on the Supreme Court. You are a running dog collaborator. You take the side of the rapist, not the raped....

I'm really tired of women who don't care. ... Hillary's best friend, the new feminism, no one's a victim here, it's so embarrassing when a woman's raped, it's so declasse, it's annoying, the wrong time of the day, the wrong day of the week, not during office hours, the woman can barely keep herself together, she might collapse emotionally, which would be messy, or make emotional demands, which would be unpleasant, or you might have to think that it could have happened to you if it happened to her but it didn't happen to you so it doesn't have to be your problem, you don't need to get near the mess of it, the disaster of it, the desperation of it. Just cut her loose and let her die.

Feminists pretend we're on top of all this, as if we've done something about it. We roll the ball up the hill and a fucking rapist pushes it back down and we roll it up again and another rapist slams it down. But never admit not being in control, all polished and shiny, just keep smiling in public, the women on top of everything, and when will a woman be president of the United States? Oh, soon, don't worry. And what difference will it make? Oh, don't worry. We'll get it because we have to have it, even if it's a cookie-cutter Hillary married to ex-president Rape....

Four Days to the "Stop Porn Culture" Conference

Late Monday night and it's four days to the "Stop Porn Culture" conference. Check out their website. There are some great videos about pornography and its effects. I like their film "A Drug Called Pornography: Understanding the Harmful Effects" (Includes interviews with Gail Dines, Robert Jensen, Andrea Dworkin, and Jackson Katz).

So, I wanted to switch from NOLA blogging to feminism blogging these last few days before the conference.

Here it is, my nomination for the ultimate, best ever, kickass feminist poetry slam:

I showed this to myNigel last night and he didn't think it was the coolest thing ever.

That's okay. I am ready, ready, as Eve Ensler might say, "I am Leaving my Father's House:"

Finally, a quick "Ten Great Comments of Dr. King:"