Blog Administrative Stuff real quick:
I’m super behind on blog stuff. I just had one of those, “My GOD I spend my entire life on the internet NOOOOOO” moments, and the moment lasted a month or more, and I haven’t been checking my email and I’ve rarely even been looking at comments. I also had a, “My GOD the feminist blogosphere is full of a bunch of dicks yes I said dicks FUCKING DEAL WITH IT FEMINISM I HATE YOU” freakout that hasn’t quit yet, and the blog posts that explain that in better detail are currently more cuss words than they are regular words, so I’m working on that. I hadn’t been catching up on my rss as a result of my internet freakout, but it looks like QT and flip flopping joy are already covering this, so you can go there for a preview of: “Feminism: Harriet is about to rant at it.”
I’ll be trying to get more on my blog this month, but no promises, ‘cause I don’t want to feel guilty about breaking them. Now for a real post.
Who Are These Girls?
I haven’t said a lot about the part of my job involving parental notifications. It’s not that I don’t have a lot to say, but the intricacies of keeping my online life separate from my professional life get the most volatile here, and I play it extremely safe.
In light of Alaska passing a parental notification law, I thought I’d note a few brief things.
This is based on my personal experience. These are not statistics. My state doesn’t keep statistics, because of the fear that the judges who are following the law and their job descriptions will be outed as following the law and their job descriptions, and they will be forced out of office and/or receive death threats because they are following the law and their job descriptions (THE NAZIS DID TOO!!!1!!).
This is not a silly fear; it has happened and it will happen again.
So, in my personal experience, here is who comes in to get a bypass for parental notification, presented in order of Happens Most Often to Happens Least Often (but still happens):
DMIA: Dad Missing In Action
Anecdotally, this accounts for about 9 out of every 10 girls we see. Usually, dad is alive, and he is out there somewhere, but she either doesn’t know where he is or hasn’t spoken to him since she was three, and doesn’t want to call up the stranger who abandoned her, reveal deeply intimate personal details, and then beg him to sign the piece of paper that says she can get medical attention. The girl finds it deeply humiliating that just by virtue of having fucked her mom once, this dude who doesn’t give a shit about her now has veto power over her life, so she may not even bother trying to call her absent dad and explain to him that she’s still a real live person and she even has sex now, so let’s hear what you awkwardly or crudely think about that, dad, because you’ve apparently earned an opinion by virtue of having a functional dick 16-odd years ago.
This girl comes in with her mother and often her boyfriend.
Subset A: Mom and the girl know where dad is, but he’s been served with a restraining order.
Subset B: Mom and the girl know where dad is, but he’s an active drug addict and they’re afraid of approaching him or having him involved in their lives in any way.
Subset C: Mom and the girl know where dad is, and contact him, and explain the situation, and send him the piece of paper he has to sign. He doesn’t send it back. They call and remind him. He says he’ll get right on it. He doesn’t send it back. They call and remind him. He stops taking their calls. The abortion will now cost twice as much, and if they wait any longer, they may miss the legal deadline. This dad could be attempting to block the abortion, but it’s just as likely that the kind of father who absents himself from his child’s entire life is just utterly self-centered and irresponsible, and doesn’t really give a shit what happens to her.
Bonus: Sometimes, DMIA isn’t even on the birth certificate – he’s been MIA since the get-go. That means he’s not legally a parent. The girl does not legally have a father that she can notify. Because the law is so vague about how to define a parent, the clinic usually won’t accept those circumstances as legal enough, because all it takes is one legal loophole for them to get shut down . So, if she can’t get DMIA to officially agree that he has been notified, they cover their ass and send her to get a bypass.
The judge is also covering hir ass, however, and judges tend to perform the minimum intervention required or allowed by law, because (short answer brushing over A LOT of context and details) judges don’t want to make a ruling that is so out of line with the current law that it gets overturned on appeal. The law says a girl must notify her parents. The girl legally only has one parent. The judge may not grant her a bypass, because legally she doesn’t need one. So now she has to find a clinic that is willing to take a huge legal risk on her, because you never know when DMIA will decide to MRA.
Here is my suggestion on DMIA*: Since we’ve established, via parental notification and consent laws, that the state has a vested and apparently legally legitimate interest in mandatorily enforcing parent-child communication, let’s have this go the other way. Let’s pass a law that says a parent must communicate with their child once a month to maintain the right to parent. This communication must be legally documented, via a written statement that must be notarized. The notarization will require both a legal ID and a birth certificate. If a parent fails to document their monthly communication with their child, their parenting rights are automatically terminated. A parent can attempt to bypass the communication law by seeing a judge and explaining their circumstances, if a judge is available anywhere in the state to hear the plea. If the judge denies their bypass, they can appeal, but there are no lawyers in the state that is trained and/or will involve themselves in such a case, because of the publicity.
If it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander.
Dead Parent
If the girl doesn’t have a death certificate, she has to get a bypass. Her living parent may have lost the death certificate. Or they may have never gotten one, because the deceased parent hadn’t been a part of the family for quite some time and it didn’t seem important to get the death certificate of your divorced partner who hasn’t seen their kid since the kid was three. To acquire a death certificate would take more weeks than the girl can wait and still acquire a legal or affordable abortion.
This girl comes in with her living parent and often her boyfriend. Her living parent is often fucking pissed. Because their partner died, they’re no longer legally allowed to make medical decisions for their child; they must beg a stranger for this privilege. If the death was fresh, or significantly painful (and how many aren’t?) then this turns into a big grief trigger-fest for all who knew the dead parent and must now ruminate on how the death limits their ability to legally live their lives.
Opposed Parents
Legal notification doesn’t mean the same thing it means in daily life. A girl can’t just be like, “Mom, Dad, guess what.” A clinic can’t just call a parent up and say, “You got notified! Booyah!” A clinic needs to show that they have followed the law. Unless a state has specifically laid out what “notification” means, and how a clinic can show that they’ve fulfilled this requirement (mine hasn’t), the clinic has to guess. And they’re going to err on the side of caution, since a vaguely defined law is sort of like a vaguely made threat: perform action X perfectly or you will be severely punished, and no, I will not tell you what action X is, nor what I mean by perfect, but I will be standing over here sinisterly stroking this gun.
So, notification often means a signed piece of paper, perhaps notarized. Which effectively turns “parental notification” into “parental consent,” because parents can and do refuse to sign. Two parents can be standing in a clinic next to a girl, and the clinic can be announcing over the loudspeaker that their daughter is seeking an abortion (or, if they’re deaf, showing them a slideshow with bright red Comic Sans font and ALL CAPS), but legally, they have not been notified of shit.
So, a girl may have notified her parents. The clinic may have notified the parents. The parents know. They have been told. But they refuse to legally admit they know, so even though the parents have been notified, and the ostensible reasoning behind this law has been fulfilled (we must enforce communication between parents and minors), this girl still has to ask a judge to allow her to not tell her parents, who have been told.
The reasons why the parents refuse to legally admit they’ve been notified vary. Often, they’re anti-choice, and they consider admitting they’ve been notified tantamount to endorsing or causing an abortion. But just as often, they’re attempting to punish the girl or punish each other for some unrelated reason. Say mom is willing to sign, but dad is pissed that mom is “always” taking sides against him, so he won’t sign. Say dad is willing to sign, but mom wants a different custody arrangement, and thinks she might use this as a bargaining chip. Say both parents are willing to sign, but only if the girl tells them who impregnated her. Say both parents refuse to sign, because the girl’s grades are failing and she’s smoking and they just can’t control her, so they’re going to prove to her that she needs her parents and had better stop pissing them off.
When this girl comes in, she’s usually not angry at her parents. She’s more resigned. She can’t afford anger. She has to keep living there. This girl comes in with a friend, a pro-choice relative, and/or her boyfriend.
No ID
A parental notification law requires parents, and it requires notification. If neither of those items are defined by the parental notification law (which begs the question of how one could be so concerned about parents and notification if one cannot be arsed to explain what either one is), the clinic has to guess at what will stand up in court as a “parent” and what will stand up in court as “notification.”
So, in (purposeful) absence of any legal direction, what does a clinic decide constitutes a parent? Usually, a driver’s license and a birth certificate. Some parents don’t have those. The processing time to get one is longer than the girl can wait. Some parents do have them, but, perhaps because they are Opposed Parents, they refuse to produce them. Or, perhaps they are simply abusive, irresponsible, lazy, or uninterested in their daughter’s welfare.
Fun story: my father refused to produce my birth certificate or Social Security card when I needed to get my driver’s permit. He swore to me that I had it. I had never seen either. He told me to find it. I asked if I could look in his room, and he said he would kick me out of the house if I did that. When I told him I couldn’t find them anywhere else in the house, he angrily told me, “Then call the Social Security Office and order one! How stupid are you?” Because of this – and because of the immense difficulty of acquiring a driver’s license if you don’t have parents who will teach you to drive or lend you a car to practice on – I didn’t get my license until I was 24.
I still do not know what bug my dad had up his ass here, but it doesn’t matter – the fact is, some parents are bug-asses for their own fucked-up reasons. If the bug-asses have access to all the ID papers that proclaim their daughter legally exists, you can see how this is an issue for their daughter.
This girl comes in with both her parents (if they’re not parents who are deliberately being assholes, but just don’t have the docs), or the one who can afford to miss work, and her boyfriend.
Subset A: The girl whose parents are undocumented immigrants. This girl does not come in with her parents. Her parents are afraid that somebody will report them to ICE. This is not an idle fear. Sometimes we have to sneak the girls around in a Family Circus-like route to avoid certain individuals.
Rape
If a girl has been raped, she doesn’t legally have to fulfill the parental notification requirement, but only if she files a police report. So, we see the girls who don’t file.
Why don’t they file? There are as many reasons for not filing as there are raped girls; all their lives and circumstances are very, very individual, and even the few general reasons I can give don’t cover it. Maybe they don’t want their parents to find out. Maybe they don’t want to be harassed at school, because when their rapist gets taken away in handcuffs, everybody will damn sure know who tattled. Maybe they don’t want to talk to the police (perhaps they also have a record, or have had bad experiences with the police, and don’t necessarily consider them helpful). Maybe processing the trauma of the rape to the point where she can admit what happened and start to deal with it takes a long time, likely longer than the window of time she has available for an affordable abortion, so the abortion comes first and the police report comes after. Maybe she thinks she won’t be believed, and doesn’t know how to assert herself with the police enough that she ensures a police report is filed. Maybe the person who raped them is a close family friend, or a family member, and they suspect that a report will get them put into foster care (they’re correct).
If she is very unlucky, she will get a by-the-book judge who dismisses her case, telling her to go file a report – she’s been raped, ergo, no need for a bypass. So, sometimes the girls won’t say “rape.” They will describe a rape, but they won’t call it that. In these cases (in all rape cases, actually), we notify the clinic if they didn’t already know. The clinic will preserve the fetal tissue in the off chance that the girl decides in the future to file a report; now she has some evidence of what happened to her.
This girl comes in alone, and you have to ask her to repeat herself several times, because she is very quiet.
Rape But Not Really
Sometimes a girl comes in for a bypass, and in her mind, she is just Ruin My Relationship. But once she describes how she came to be pregnant, and why she doesn’t want to tell, it becomes apparent to us that she was raped but doesn’t realize it.
This girl has usually been raped by a much older man. She won’t report it as rape because she thinks they’re dating and he loves her and it’s not a big deal anyway, it’s not like he hit her or anything. She doesn’t want to tell her parents because she thinks they will report him for statutory rape. She may not want him arrested because she loves him and wants to be with him. She may not want him arrested because she’s scared of him. She may not want him arrested because his house is the only house she can go to when she needs to escape her abusive parents, and she suspects that when she’s 18 she’s going to have to live with him to survive.
This girl doesn’t report what happened to her as rape (and thus, doesn’t file and doesn’t get the exemption) because she truly believes what happened to her was appropriate and right, and that this is what she can expect from sex.
This girl comes in alone.
Subset A: Pimped. She gives the barest amount of information possible. She has obviously been thoroughly prepped about what she can and cannot say. She lies about everything. She will not disclose to you. You are a stranger. You will arrest her. She is right – we will take her into protective custody if we can.
Abusive Family
They might beat her. They might throw her out. They might rape her (someone in her family might be the father). They might make her life unlivable. They might take her out of school. This girl wants us to believe she is Ruin My Relationship or DMIA, (if DMIA, she tells us her mom knows but couldn’t make it today). She rarely discloses her abuse. We may pick up hints of it, enough to figure the truth, but not enough to report.
She may know she’s from an abusive family. She may not. She may simply be used to not talking about it, because it’s so shameful. She may not know there’s anything to talk about, assumes that everybody lives this way.
She will not disclose to us, and she has not disclosed to the clinic, because we are complete strangers. The clinic doesn’t have access to her medical records, which could possibly help them discover the history of abuse. The clinic is not her usual doctor, or usual clinic. This girl does not disclose because abortions are performed as something separate and segregated from other routine medical care, and at a time during which this girl may have the guts to tell somebody what is happening to her, she is surrounded by complete strangers, and called a whore and a murderer whenever she tries to access those strangers.
This girl comes in alone, though sometimes with a fiercely protective friend (the friend knows it’s an abusive family, even if the girl doesn’t).
Ruin My Relationship
“I can’t tell my parents because it will ruin my relationship with them.” That’s all they’ll say.
We generally assume there is more explanation than that, but can’t always get at it. Kids haven’t had the time, experience, or sometimes necessary brain development to fully describe certain difficult concepts, including their relationship with their parents. I mean, how many adults can really accurately describe the complex ins and outs of these relationships?
“It would ruin our relationship” may mean “my dad is bipolar and he can’t handle this.” It may mean “my parents think they are hiding the fact that their relationship is falling apart, but I can tell, and I don’t want to put more on them.” It could mean, “They’ll let me live in their house and they’ll let me eat their food but they will stop speaking to me until I am in my 30s, because that’s what they did to my sister.” It might mean, “They’ll take away my college funds if they find out.” It might mean, “My parents have always stated that they think abortion is evil and wrong and the women who get them are selfish and whores and I have no way of knowing that they would change their minds and their tunes once they knew it was me they were talking about.” It’s hard to tease those details out of a sullen teenager having a bad day, especially if these are details she herself hasn’t fully processed.
There is usually a much bigger story to Ruin My Relationship, but nobody gets to hear it, because we are all strangers to her, and she knows that her ability to adequately present herself to us is what stands between getting medical care or having a baby. She’s often afraid that her reasons aren’t good enough, that if she tells us about how hard it is at home, somebody will say, “Well, toughen up, that’s no reason not to talk to your parents,” and she will have to face whatever there is at home for her alone. So she gives a simple line and sticks to it, because she doesn’t know how to argue that she is good enough to have the right to access necessary medical care.
This girl comes in with a boyfriend and/or a friend.
Legal Wasteland
This is some kind of tricky shit and could be any kind of wild formation of unseen circumstances. Two examples:
A girl who has had her legal custody transferred to another person, but her parents’ legal rights have not been terminated. So her parents are still her parents, even if she doesn’t live with them, even if there is a court order that they cannot contact her. She cannot acquire notification from parents she isn’t allowed to contact.
A girl who was adopted privately or internationally and her adoptive parents, in a fit of naïve and ignorant privilege, never finalized her citizenship or custody, so they’re not legally her parents. No, really. Parents do this.
I’m writing these as if they’re discrete categories. They’re not. They mix and match. Try a girl:
- Who has one dead parent and no death certificate
- Who was raped and doesn’t want to report
- Whose living parent has been known to say things like, “Girls with short skirts are asking for it.”
Or, try the girl:
- Who has one dead parent and no death certificate
- Who has one living parent without identification
- Who has a disability that severely limits her cognitive abilities, meaning she is unable to consent to an abortion (did she consent to sex? Nobody is able to ascertain details from her), and the one person who could make that determination for her has no legal evidence that they are her custodian.
Here is a list of the girls who don’t come in to get a bypass for parental notification:
- Girls who can’t afford an abortion
- Girls who attempt to self-abort
- Girls who are just all, “Like, whatever, man, I don’t feel like telling my parents, I do what I want.”
One of these things is not like the other. Do you know? Can you tell?
Girls 1 and 2 – they exist.
Girl 3 – she’s a figment of your imagination.
Girl 3 isn’t real. She may look like Girl 3 when she comes into a clinic, but once a counselor sits down with her, a story comes out. The story is either one of the categories above, or it is, “Okay, I can tell my parents, I was just hoping not to” or “I was hoping to do it later” or “I was hoping to do it after finals because I am just too stressed to deal with that right now.”
The girl who just whimsically doesn’t want her parents to know grows up to be the woman who just whimsically gets an abortion, all nail-biting and hair-twirling and “Gosh! I didn’t realize my baby has fingernails WHAT.” (Fun fact: After these billboards went up, my bear and I incorporated them into our daily language. I’ll have the chicken WHAT. Did you know? I feel fat today WHAT.) That girl haunts the dreams of anti-choicers, much like zombies and naked unprepared math tests haunt mine. These things are fears that have a basis in a very real and persistent anxiety – the newly dead are creepy; being naked unexpectedly is vulnerable; failing math in high school is scary; uncontrolled stupid females are dangerous – but they do not have a basis in a very real nor very persistent actual thing in the world. There are no zombies. There are no unprepared naked math tests. There are no pregnant women who are driving to get ice cream one day and then are like, oh, hey, there’s an abortion clinic, I’ll just pop right in.
The expectation that this woman exists reminds me of the opening of my favorite Chick tract that I can’t be arsed to find. A dude sits down on a park bench next to another dude. Dude 1 says, “What a beautiful day!” Dude 2 agrees. Dude 1 says, “Thank Jesus Christ for such a glorious day!” Dude 2 says, “Jesus Christ? What’s that?” Dude 1 is all, “I’m glad you asked!” So convenient that Dude 2 has been living under a rock for the last 2000 years, never heard of this “Jesus” thing. Otherwise, Dude 1 would have no reasonable transition into Bible study!
It is like, woman accidentally sits on a penis because she thinks that’s where lollipops comes from. Then she finds out she’s pregnant and she heard that makes you gassy. So she goes to an abortion clinic and an anti street harasser tells her, “You will have a beautiful baby!” and she is like, “Baby? What’s a baby?” and they are like, “There’s one in your tummy!” and she is all “WHAT.” and they are all, “I’m glad you asked! Let’s talk about breast cancer.” I mean, it’s a good thing that woman was such an ignorant slut, or Anti 1 would have had no reasonable transition into Slut-Shaming!
So, there you go. Girls who can’t tell their parents about their abortions? After you pass a parental notification law, they still can’t tell their parents. Girls who can tell their parents? After you pass a parental notification law, they still tell their parents, unless they fall into an ill-defined legal loophole – then they tell their parents but still have to come get a bypass. A parental notification law accomplishes two things: 1) it takes the girls who can’t tell their parents and penalizes them for not being able to tell their parents and, 2) it takes a portion of the girls who can tell their parents and makes them go through the process anyway.
*Please note that I do not actually advocate a law like this being passed. I do not accept that the government has a legitimate interest in legally enforcing parent-child communication, which is why I do not support parental notification or consent laws. But, if the government does have that interest, I don’t see why it shouldn’t cut both ways. If there is a distinctly difficult set of obstacles that must be undertaken within a parent-child relationship, those obstacles should be shouldered by the parent, because they are the legal adult. All the circumstances I just listed above would then start happening to parents:
You lose your parental rights because there’s no notary in your town
You lose your parental rights because judges in your county don’t do these cases, and you can’t miss work and get to the next county in time
You lose your parental rights because you don’t have a birth certificate
You lose your parental rights because you don’t have an ID
That would be horrible and shitty, right?
It’s just as horrible and shitty when it happens to kids.
If it’s legitimate to do this to children, then I say it’s legitimate to do this to adults.
And once these consequences start piling on tax-paying, voting men, I’m quite sure the circumstances I laid out above would no longer be seen as too-bad-but-so-what, but egregious attacks on fundamental rights. Once we started forcing adult men to endure the consequences of difficult family relationships – or at least force them to endure these consequences as responsibly as we force children — I bet we’d see an immediate end to laws formed on the basis that the state gets to enforce adult-child relationships.
Discuss this post on the Fugitivus Discussion Board.
I’m on a bit of a blog sabbatical. I’ve got a lot of stuff to say, but none of it is coming out quite right yet, so I’m putting it on hold.
In the meantime, here’s another Flavor Bible recipe for you, cobbled together via random shit left in my pantry:
Salmon with Cardamom, and a Bunch of Stir-Fried Shit on the Side
The salmon part
- You get some salmon. I like a lot of salmon.
- You slather the salmon in something spicy. I like Sambal Oelek.
- Now you slather it with cardamom.
- Put the salmon in a baking dish. Pour over it either a) a can or two of pineapple chunks, with juice, b) a can or two of mandarin oranges, with juice, or c) some orange juice or pineapple juice.
- Put the salmon dish in the fridge to baste while you prepare the other stuff
- Eventually, put the salmon in the oven somewhere between 350-450. I don’t know what temperature you’re supposed to cook salmon at. Don’t ask me about this part. It’ll cook eventually.
- During the last ten minutes of cooking, sprinkle some coconut on top of the salmon and let it get crispy.
The stir-fry part
- Slice a yam into thin bits. Two yams if you have company
- Get some baby carrots if you like a really carrot-y taste and have extra time to stir-fry, or shredded carrots if you like a little less carrot flavor or have less time. The shredded carrots have a really nice consistency at the end.
- Mix the yam and carrots together in a bowl with honey, brown sugar, ginger, maybe a little lemon juice, maybe some cinnamon, and a splash of sesame oil (can substitute olive oil if you don’t want to go get special-ass oils).
- Stir-fry the yam and carrots mixture. Possibly add: a) some rice vinegar for tanginess or b) some soy sauce for saltiness, so you can get a whole sweet-sour-salty thing going on.
- When the yams are getting there, throw in some snow peas.
- When the snow peas are getting there, throw in some chopped up scallions and (optional) sesame seeds. They’re good for your cholesterol, is the thing, so put some in your face.
- I found that while cooking this, it smelled unappetizing. So don’t be surprised. It tastes good, though.
- Serve over rice.
For dessert: rice pudding, coconut cookie, and a slice of ginger candy.
Bonus: While cooking, send your partner/roommate/friend/stranger to your local Asian market. Have them pick out several refreshments that they do not know the names of and do not recognize at all. Drink with meal.
I’ve got a friend I don’t see often. To preserve anonymity, I’m going to use gender-neutral pronouns and call zhim Robin.
Robin is, I don’t know how else to say this, the awesomest person I know. Sorry everybody else I know who thinks they’re awesome – you’re not as cool as Robin. Not by ten thousand longshots. I think zhe would probably be embarrassed to know I think this about zhim, or maybe I’m projecting my embarrassment at talking very openly and personally about feelings with other people. But, back to the point, I admire Robin in a way that is usually reserved for, say, Bob Moses. Robin is feet-first, hands-on, neck-deep in real and meaningful activism, and always has been. Zhe’s got a first-rate mind, a heart with room for everybody, and a presence and a personality that is just steady and fulfilling to be around. If I ever have a kid that makes me want to vicariously live the dreams I never had the courage to live, I would probably be trying to make them like Robin. Zhe is just good and smart and important down to the bone.
Just recently, Robin disclosed to me that zhe is a sex worker. I assume that Robin only decided to tell me this because zhe had made a determination that I wouldn’t be a total shithead about it. I hope I’m not being a shithead. But, as I told Robin (albeit not very eloquently at the time), I have some conflicting feelings about this.
Theoretically, I don’t have a problem with sex work. I don’t think there’s anything inherently, fundamentally wrongdirtybad with sex as a job, or sex for pay. But that’s based on a concept of sex work in a vacuum, and we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a patriarchy. And sex work situated within a patriarchal world is inevitably swimming in a pool of wrongdirtybad, and anything tagged with the wrongdirtybad brush becomes fair game for serious violations of humanity.
On the one hand, since my ideal vision of the world doesn’t differentiate sex work from any other kind of work, it seems like that should be the thing I’m working toward. I “should” be the kind of feminist that is all on board for decriminalization or legalization, or normalizing the sex trades so they’re not a dirty stigmatized mess — and often I feel bad that I’m not more so. On the other hand, I work in a profession where I frequently see young girls who have been trafficked and exploited, and/or mothers who have had to prostitute themselves in order to feed their children, and their desperation has usually caused them to be exploited as well. Some of the abuses I see surrounding exploited sex work are so heinous that it’s very difficult not to come away with a “SHUT IT ALL DOWN” view of sex work. And yet, I know it’s not something that can be shut down, not now, not ever. I often just don’t feel like my brain is large enough to find a way to integrate some of the worst horrors I’ve ever seen with a utopic vision of positive, healthy sexuality. I don’t know how to overcome my revulsion of abuse long enough to separate the tools (which are not inherently abusive) from the abusive people who are handling them. At some point, they just seem practically, realistically fused together, even if conceptually I know they aren’t.
Normally this would’ve just been something to chew over slowly and at my leisure. But Robin chose to tell me about zhis work the day before I was to attend a conference on young girls and human trafficking. So my conflicts were immediately brought to a huge, bubbling surface of confusion. Talking with Robin, I could so completely understand zhis point of view and I felt like climbing on the radical sex work advocacy boat. Knowing that I was later going to be hanging out with a bunch of people who consider Robin – awesome, incredible Robin – to be an exploited, miserable being who needs saving at the least and is ignorantly perpetuating a system of evil at the most made me feel very guilty. The next day, hanging out with bunches of social workers relating story after story of the beaten, raped, kidnapped, abused, purposefully addicted girls that they have worked with, I felt guilty for having ever entertained some ideas of “sex work – maybe it’s not pure evil?”
The social work side of me and the feminist side of me often come into this conflict, but it’s usually smaller and less personal. As a feminist, I believe very strongly in offering people options; people – and especially women – get picked up and moved around so much by their oppressors, the last thing you want to do is emulate them. And yet, as a social worker, I’m working with people who, if I do not pick them up and move them around, are going to rape or kill somebody.
I know our system is a broken one. It delivers law, and not justice. The long view is that government can change, slowly, or die, slowly, and new solutions can be brought to bear. The short view – which is the view that allows me to work for government – is that in the meantime, government is the largest resource out there. People can’t avoid interacting with it, and when they do, they deserve a friendly voice on the end of the phone, they deserve a worker who’s doing their best. When somebody comes into my office, they are likely having the worst day of their life. I don’t believe that I personally have the internal resources or intelligence or just plain strength to be the person who moves and shakes the big things, keeps that worst day from ever happening. But I do have the resilience to deal with people on the worst day of their life, and be polite, and help them with their paperwork, and be kind, and be efficient and hard-working for them. I can help them feel that, on this terrible day, they are not utterly alone or considered totally worthless or a lost cause. They have somebody who will hold their hand until this terrible day is over.
When there are no other options for a person – as is often the case with abused children – the biggest resource out there is likely the only one that can forcibly extract them from their abusers. In the long view, the government is fucked to hell and needs to change, and cannot manage this responsibility in a way that doesn’t perpetuate more horror. In the short view, there is a kid being horribly abused and they need to be taken to a safe place right now more than they need to hear about political change or theory. I don’t want a damaged child to grow into a damaged adult and say, “When I needed help, nobody was there.” I’m willing to accept the restrictions of giving imperfect help within an imperfect system, because a kid that doesn’t get helped as much as they should have still has more chance of growing up to change the system than a kid who gets no help and is abused until they’re just a shell. I consider my job to be life support. It’s worth more to stop the things that put people on life support, but until that happens, they need good, smart, genuine people manning the life support. That’s a position I’ve found I’m capable of emotionally dealing with, so that’s where I locate myself.
This doesn’t play out too well with sex work, I’m finding. There are people who come into our office who have been crippled by the sexual exploitation inflicted upon them. In the long view, we need to destroy the goddamned patriarchy so the word “sex” no longer gets paired with “abuse” as a viable weapon. In the short view, we need to get these people out. Like, now. And the solutions we have for getting people out are so imperfect that they actually inhibit us from ever achieving the long view. The legal system is a chainsaw where we need a screwdriver.
And yet.
There is a girl who has been in our office lately. She’s actually a woman now, I suppose, but she is so young I have trouble thinking of her that way. She used to be one of our kids, the kids we work with. She’s grown enough that she’s not our kid anymore, has graduated from “victim” to “criminal” due to her age – but she’s still so very young that I cannot help but call her a girl. She’s got her own kid. Her kid is now a kid we work with. That’s always painful to us. She’s a really fun, friendly, wonderful person. Her kid, though very young, has obviously inherited her traits and then some. Everybody loves this kid on sight. The kid is like a shining beacon of light, zhe’s just so damned adorable – strangers are drawn to zher. The girl, she’s had a bad time. I probably can’t count how many evils of the world she’s fallen or been forced into. It’s pretty apparent to us that she’s also being prostituted. We’re not sure if she knows this. She might, and might think she’s hiding it from us. She might not know. She talks about her boyfriend and how much he loves her. But we hear the ways he loves her and we are pretty sure he is her pimp, not her boyfriend.
The only legal option for her right now — the only help the government is able to offer at this point — is to put her in jail and take her kid away from her. It’s a very strong possibility. Her pimp will probably go free. Her johns will probably go free.
That’s not life support. That’s the cutting away of healthy flesh.
And yet, that healthy flesh may not have a chance if zhe keeps living with zher mother.
And yet, the only reason we can help the child and not the mother is because the child is a victim, and the mother is a criminal, and the only difference between them is age. We can help this child, and 20 years from now, we will perhaps be cutting healthy flesh from them as well.
The only other thing I can do to help her that I know of is continue to work toward a world where sex is not abuse. Where, should she choose to be a sex worker, that would not be a black mark against her legally, and it would not be one further inhuman torture she must endure as opposed to a profession she has chosen. I can work toward a world where the ability to repeatedly rape, abuse, beat, and terrorize multiple human beings at once wasn’t a valid job description called “pimp,” because all those things would be actually and always illegal, instead of lip-service illegal and actually tolerated and normalized behavior between most men and most women.
But when I see her in the office, I can’t think that’s worth a damn. Right now, she needs something more. But the only something more I have to offer her is, I believe, only going to hurt her.
I’ve seen the sex worker vs. exploited woman conflict pop up frequently on feminist blogs. In the past, I’ve tended to skip over those blog posts. It’s just too much for me to navigate, and I haven’t really had to, either. The official right and wrong answer is pretty clear in my job, provided the kid is a kid/victim and not an adult/criminal. Girl comes in, she’s getting pimped, we move the fucking earth and stars to get her out. The end. We don’t bother ourselves with any concerns about whether this is good for her in the long term – we see an evil thing menacing a child, and we remove the child from the menacing evil. On my feminist side, it’s been equally simple: sex worker rights are women’s rights. Sex workers have the right to not be raped, to negotiate freely, to live happily, to make their own choices. Anything deeper than that didn’t need to be addressed. Any conflicts between those two beliefs and actions – any conflict between my personal beliefs and my professional position – didn’t have to be investigated. Until I had a friend who was a sex worker.
I’m chagrined now that I’ve declined to care about this particular topic. I’m embarrassed at all the times it came up, and I pushed it aside, because why bother investigating this further? Everything I’ve got for me works right now, and it’s not like this affects me, so, whatever. It’s a privilege I’ve had that I don’t think I get to have any longer, because Robin is the best and I want to be the best I can in return. I don’t want to be a shithead. If I disagree with aspects of zhis life, I want to be able to express those disagreements clearly and respectfully, instead of giving off a bad vibe of ambivalence that makes zhis wonder if zhe should have told me. If zhe is willing to answer my questions (if I have them), I want those questions to be informed and inoffensive, and as non-101 as possible, because it’s my responsibility to educate myself first, before I start asking zhim to help me out.
At the conference I attended, one of the speakers was describing several women she had worked with. She described their fear, their humiliation, the sorrow that had been their lives. I’ve met those women, too. I know they exist. But the image of those women, at that conference (and usually in that entire field), are synonymous with sex worker. Whenever anybody in that conference said “prostitute” or “sex worker,” that’s who they meant. And that’s not Robin. There’s no room for Robin in the phrase “sex worker” or “prostitute,” and everything my coworkers mean by it. The solutions discussed and debated had no bearing on Robin, and some, I imagined, might cause zhim more problems than it solved, such as a discussion about shutting down certain websites where sex workers can find clients. I don’t know how Robin finds zhis clients. Since zhe seems happy in zhis work, I assume zhe has found a way that is safe for zhim. I know websites can provide a significant vetting opportunity for any business, including sex work. And while I understand my colleagues’ point of view (new ways to find clients = new ways to pimp girls, or, new ways for clients to remain undetected = new ways for girls to continue to get pimped) I’m also invested in anything that keeps Robin safe and happy, and honors the fact that zhe’s a human being who can make zhis own damn choices. So, suddenly I find myself surrounded by intelligent, good-hearted adults saying, “Obviously, we need to go after Craigslist,” and I’m not sure how to phrase everything that goes through my head. That won’t work. That will hurt others. The Internet is not the patriarchy. The Internet is not the abuser. The handful of girls that will save doesn’t add up to the handful of girls who go underground.
Social work and feminism are very similar in a lot of ways. People get into these fields because they want to save lives, make the world a better place, create good where good previously wasn’t allowed to live. And because you’re taking on the responsibility to make things better, you also have to share the responsibility of making things worse if you fuck up. If your action can make the world a better place, your inaction can make it far more horrible. So, those two fields get populated by people who believe (rightly or wrongly, but often through experience) that the wrong decision will truly and literally destroy another person’s life. Which can lead to a certain degree of well-intentioned fanaticism. I have seen both social workers and feminists cling to “best practices” or “current theory” as if their lives – as if ALL the lives – depended upon it, and all those who aren’t zealously convinced be damned. They are the BAD people, their skepticism and flexibility and unbelief is corrosive and sinful. I don’t mean to make fun of this view, as if the people who buy into it are stupid. I’ve done it. If you tell me you haven’t, I don’t think your perception is worth a damn.
I know all that fanaticism comes from a very personal place. At the conference the other day, I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up and saying that I didn’t think getting rid of a website was worth anything, because for chrissakes, there are always more websites. I knew that there would have been people in the audience who had seen their clients, friends, or daughters get sucked in by a website, seen what happened to them after. I know they end up inhabiting the ugly place that some of us go to sometimes, the abandoned hell of: “Why didn’t somebody do something? It was there and it was so obvious and everybody saw it and NOBODY DID ANYTHING.” Their daughters end up on a website that is easily accessed, the whole world can see what the website is being used for, and yet, nobody does anything. Why shouldn’t we shut the website down? Why shouldn’t we do something, ANYTHING?
I don’t mean to paint that as an irrational way to think. There are some situations that can only be solved by the tiniest of steps possible. There are times where you have to put out the fire but have no control over the asshole running around with a box of matches. And if that’s the only option you have to make things better, and you don’t take it, then you feel responsible in some way for the blaze, and all who get caught in it. It is of no use to tell a girl getting pimped that her pimp wouldn’t abuse her if we ended patriarchy. It looks suspiciously like you care about the big picture – and being somebody who paints that big picture – more than you care about the actual, living human being in front of you. At the same time, when what you have is a rampant, systemic problem, I don’t think you can really say, “As long as we save that one girl, it’s all worthwhile.” That’s all worthwhile only if your solution for saving the one girl doesn’t make it harder to save the other girls. If shutting down the website saves one girl but drives the rest underground, you’re really saying that that one girl was worth more than all the other girls who go on being exploited harder. But try explaining that to the one girl you’re not saving.
I’m definitely guilty of both. On my feminist side, I have engaged in the big picture with sex work. I’ve read the theories. I know the lingo. And I can sort of generally say that by attacking patriarchy from any angle, I am doing something about the badness involved in sex work. On my social worker side, I engage in the little picture, putting out the fire. A kid comes into the system, they’re being exploited, and I really don’t care about questions of agency and careers and self-determination and feminism. I care about getting that kid out, right this very second. And, of course, these two areas in my life could use a little more connection. For example, at this conference about the sexual exploitation of girls, the word “patriarchy” wasn’t mentioned once. A speaker noted that, of course, sexual exploitation happens to little boys, and, of course, women exploit girls, too, but considering the overwhelming statistics in this field, they were just going to go ahead and talk about little girls and grown men. And yet, patriarchy and feminism were verboten words. When I mentioned feminism or patriarchy — not even by name but just by idea — I got crinkled up faces of distaste. I don’t know how you can come up with a solution to a problem that primarily affects an underclass without addressing what makes them an underclass, and how to destroy that particular noose. Otherwise you’re just shuffling them from one noose to another. Maybe the next noose is looser. Maybe that really is an achievement, in the absence of any other possible achievement. I don’t know.
On my feminism side, I do too much theoretical engagement, and too little involvement with real people. Talking with Robin, hearing about zhis life, makes me see this much more clearly. I’m not a very social person. I’m very analytical. In some ways, it’s worth noting my strengths and working with them – I’m the person to organize the SHIT out of your movement, but I’m not the one who gets feet moving. But in other ways, I’m cutting myself off from the most direct, immediate, and powerful method of education there is. Just having Robin disclose zhis work to me has already forced me to confront more things in a few days than I’ve managed in the last several years. Knowing zhim, loving zhim, admiring zhim, is making these issues important to me in a way they weren’t before.
I’m trying to figure out what I can do – right now – that will have an effect. As always, I have to start in my own backyard. Before I can engage more in education or action, I need to understand where I live in relation to these systems. There is a deeply personal side to this that I need to investigate. There has to be, or there is no meaning, no context. Social workers who don’t care about people are little more than abusive prison wardens. And feminists who don’t care about people are little more than a new breed of supremacists. And I have to include myself, first and foremost, in the definition of “people,” or I’m already starting out with a worthless foundation: some people count, and others don’t.
Starting in my own backyard, I realize that I have to address something I usually prefer to avoid. I need to talk about sex. I have talked about a lot of personal things on this blog, some of them very difficult. I have talked about rape until I am blue in the face (or fingers). I have rarely, if ever, talked about sex. When Robin told me zhe was a sex worker, I expected to be filled with deeply curious questions. And I had none (okay, I am a little curious how zhe does zhis taxes). I realized I had none because I could not even begin to conceive of what zhe does. To have sex be that large a piece of your life, you’d have to know so much about your boundaries, your wants, your needs, your desires. You’d have to be able to connect with others, routinely, in a very intimate way. That’s alien to me.
Robin has known me for a long time, but we haven’t seen each other in quite a while. Lots has changed in my life since I last spoke to zhim. In many ways, I feel stronger. But talking with zhim, I realized how much of that strength is an illusion, a shield. I found myself feeling very vulnerable with zhim, because zhe knew me during a time when I hadn’t been so broken, or, more accurately, when I had been more honest and forthcoming and confident about my brokenness. When I hadn’t been so ashamed and afraid of the years I’ve lost and the strength I discovered was fake. I could see my shame and my fear so clearly in comparison to zhis strength and genuineness, zhis comfort with zhimself. I have built up a life full of things that make me proud and different from those around me, but much of that has served to distract me from what are still my most vulnerable places. I do not connect with others. Sometimes, I feel that I cannot. The part of me that needs still operates in full force, but the part of me that fulfills feels broken into and destroyed, so destroyed that I often wish I could take a pill or a therapy that would inhibit forever my desire for sex or desire for friends. I run away from challenges. I run toward my areas of competence, and I bury myself in them. I am competent when others are vulnerable. I am challenged and incompetent when I am. Spending time with a person so together as Robin made me realize how useless I feel interacting with somebody who doesn’t need me, doesn’t want my help, doesn’t look up to me. No wonder I have looked for the work that I have, where I can help those in need, but I am never in need myself. No wonder I have avoided the many, many opportunities there are to make friends, because I only feel worthwhile and useful if I am the strongest, strangest one in the room. And no wonder I have so many inhibiting problems with sex, because I do not even know how to fake sexual strength or competence. In my belief, successful sex requires vulnerability, and I am never willing to give that.
I realized that was the only question I had to ask Robin, and I had no way to vocalize it. And, I suspect, zhe would have no way to answer it. It’s a question to ask myself. How can you give of yourself to so many people? How does it feel to be a part of their lives? How does it feel to know you are making them happy? How does it feel to enjoy doing that, not for the self-sacrifice, but because you are vulnerable enough to take? To like? I mean, sex work requires such a blatant, grounded trade: you need sex, I need money. Even something so bare and basic as that, I can’t manage to imagine. Even if I translate it into something relevant in my life – you need sex, I need sex – I cannot do that. Instead, it’s you need sex, I will give you sex. I will take only from what I give, attempt to fulfill myself only with the satisfaction of giving; I will not take from the satisfaction somebody else offers me. My tongue goes dead if I have to ask, if I have to reveal that I want or need and only another person can fulfill that want or need. I also know that Robin enjoys zhis work, so I assume there’s something more than the cash that does that, because lord knows I’ve had well-paying jobs that I hate, and crap paying jobs that I love. Zhe is getting something out of this, and I cannot even fathom what, because I cannot fathom having an itch and asking somebody else to scratch it. I cannot fathom taking as well as giving.
Before I can address sex work as a larger concept, address its problems and work towards solutions, I have to investigate the fact that I cannot understand on a basic level how Robin can like sex SO MUCH that zhe makes a job of it. That has to do with me, and my serious fucking problems with sex. So, because I want to be as good a friend as I can to Robin, and because I want to help the people who need help in the best way I can, and because I want to live a happy and fulfilling life, I need to address this very private, very vulnerable part of my life.
Which I will do in another post because, as per usual, this one has gone on for a decade.
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Here is one way you can fight rape culture. If you have just watched a movie with a rape scene:
- Go to the Wikipedia page
- Note the scene’s description
- Note that it likely does not use the word “rape,” but probably instead says “have sex,” “seduces,” or “love scene.”
- Revise the description of the scene and use the word “rape”
- Go back in 6 months and return it to “rape,” as a rape apologist or rapist has by now has revised it back to “love scene”
- Repeat
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