If you are an insomniac, watching movies right before bed about political prisoners, torture and desparadicios will not help you get to sleep.

Quite the opposite, actually.

I’ve been thinking about street harassment and why it is that some boys just can’t wrap their head around the fact that is is harassment and not a compliment. So here’s a little thought experiment for the bepenised among us.

Imagine you have the coolest t-shirt in the entire world. Maybe it’s a concert tee from a favorite band or it has the most pithy statement ever written across the chest. Maybe it was hand crafted by exiled Tibetan monks. Whatever. Every time you wear it, people stop you and comment on it. You think to yourself “Hell yeah, I am awesome and my t-shirt rocks.”

Now imagine you can never ever take the shirt off. Ever. After awhile, you just want to be able to do your grocery shopping without getting asked about the shirt 15 times. You just want to be able to go to the post office or grab a beer with friends without strangers thinking that you are at the mercy of their praise and questions about your shirt. So you start wearing a big, ugly, baggy sweatshirt to cover up the t-shirt. But not even that works. People still bug you. “Hey, aren’t you the awesome guy with the rockin’ t shirt” they ask, and they refuse to leave you alone till you pull up your sweatshirt and show it to them.

At some point, you realize that no one sees you as a person anymore. They see you as “t-shirt dude”. You are reduced to being just a body that wears the shirt. Nobody really cares what you think about the t-shirt or anything else for that matter. You could be a scientist who discovers a cure for cancer. But all these people see you as is a shirt. They don’t care that you may be too busy to answer questions about where you got the t-shirt, how old the t-shirt is, does the t-shirt have a phone number. They don’t care that you are just trying to go about your day without being bothered by strangers. You’ve tried everything by now. You ignore the questions or you walk fast with the scariest look you can come up with on your face. This just makes strangers say things like “dude, with a t-shirt like you should be smiling” or “if you didn’t want the attention you shouldn’t be wearing that shirt” as if you could just take the damn thing off and be done with it.

Sometimes, the t-shirt fans are just too much, and you snap. You yell back or flip them off. But this makes them mad. You’ve been followed, chased, threatened with violence all because you didn’t give some stranger the attention they wanted. Sometimes fighting back feels good, but then you are reminded that you will always have to fight back. When you complain to friends without such a t-shirt, they tell you to lighten up. It’s a compliment after all. Some friends even deny that it happens at all. They think you are just being melodramatic and are always looking for something to get pissed about.

Now substitute vagina or tits for t-shirt, and that is what it is like for girls. All the time. We can’t take off our femaleness. We can’t hide it under baggy clothes. Regardless of how we feel about our bodies, we become public property when we step outside. Whoever we are no longer matters. We are just there for the amusement of others. It’s not a compliment. It’s harassment. And it is meant to remind us that no matter what we do, we are never more than the sum of our sex organs. We are just bodies, not people.

Me: I am the destroyer of men. Well not men so much as republicans.

Kid: And Obamabots

Me: And Obamabots

Kid: but not all Obambots. Ms. Z (kid’s fav teacher) is an Obamabot.

Me: There is a difference between Obamabots and Obama supporters.

Kid: I think ms. Z is an Obama supporter. And so are most of the kids in my class.

Me: Remind me to explain to you about liberal white guilt someday dude. But feeling guilty never actually solved a problem.

(At this point the conversation was interrupted by yet another fuckwad who thinks it’s completely appropriate to make catcalls at me while I am walking with my son.)

A lovely little thing left in the comment mod by someone called “child of god”

god made man..satin made women…women are all evil by nature….hell is over flowing with the bitches…women turn mans heads away from gods will..and lead them into sin..by the use of seduction…and controll….women all love to be worshipede…that it self is evil..and agenst gods will…you are to love one and other…men are not to worship women….you worship GOD!

You heard it here first kids. Satin made women. Shiny, silky, soft flowy satin made women. Does this mean I need to start calling my satin lingerie “Mommy”?

Around this time of year, my neighborhood is usually awash in illegal fireworks. At any time of day or night, series of loud pops will stop us from whatever we are doing to play the time honored game of Firecrackers or Bullets.

It’s annoying, and it terrifies the kid. We spend the week before and the week after July 4th all tense and cranky. Shoulders get stiff from tensing repeatedly throughout the day and I usually spend a good chunk of time hiding under a hot water bottle because of stress induced migraines.

But this year, it’s quieter. There have only been a few games of Firecrackers or Bullets. People can’t afford their annual explosives splurge when the price of gas to go out and buy them is painful. And there isn’t any spending money anyways. Food prices are climbing while package sizes are shrinking. It may be the beginning of the month when even welfare recipients have some cash, but we’ve all been suffering through those last weeks of the month where we find a thousand and one creative ways to eat ramen noodles. Spending 20 bucks on fireworks means 2 days of hungry for a family (if that family can eat cheap).

They say it is going to get much worse here before it gets better. We already have Hoovervilles (some groups has started call them Nicklesville after our mayor) and the food banks have had to cut back because they can’t afford the gas to go pick up supplies. More people are hungry and there are fewer programs to help that. So few that our governor just raised the income limits on the state food stamp program so more people will be fed. But they will end up in the same boat with the rest of us. A couple of flush weeks per month where you eat like normal people, and a couple where you spend your days dreaming of meals with all the food groups. And we haven’t even hit the subprime bubble here yet. Oh it’s coming, but not just yet. And when all those people lose their homes to foreclosure, those of us who could never afford to buy are going to see the all ready high rents skyrocket.

This year, I don’t even want to waste the $3.00 in bus fare it would cost to drag the kid out to see fireworks. I don’t want to sit on a muddy blanket and oh and ahh over the pretty colors while internally wondering how the fuck I am going to pay rent this month. I’m skipping it. It’s hard to feel love for a country when you aren’t sure how you’re gonna feed and house your kid.

This year, Firecrackers or Bullets is more likely to be bullets. And this year, 4th of July tense and cranky isn’t from over excited kids trying to blow off their own hands. It’s from fear and struggle and worry.

So I am spending the night in. I am curling up with a trashy British spy show and hiding from the reckless drunk and revelry. I don’t see a lot to celebrate in this country right now.

When people do horrible things to other people, like say flying airplanes into buildings or becoming serial killers, we like to say that they are evil. We use words and phrases like that to disassociate ourselves from the act. It’s the same for rape apology and victim blaming. It’s a way to disassociate ourselves from the victim. The more different from us that we make them, the less likely we think we are to be them.
But we don’t just disassociate for the big, grizzly things. We do it all the time for relatively less difficult stuff. Disassociation is one way of othering people.

Back when I was still reading stalkerbot’s comments, he was pissed cause I just don’t get where prejudice and misogyny really come from. According to him, it all comes from parents teaching children to hate. If that were true, with 30 some odd years of fluffy tolerance lessons in schools and Peacock messages on TV, we should all love each other now.

Funny, it didn’t really work out that way.

Privilege is pragmatic. I’ve said that over and over again, I know. And for many of you reading this, it’s a no brainer of a statement. But many many people still think that it is simply the result of irrational hate. They think that if they can just make everyone play nice, then all the problems of a unequal society will be solved. And when that doesn’t work, we disassociate ourselves from the problem. They’re evil, or stupid, or violent, or whatever, but they aren’t us. Disassociation makes us feel better because it means we get to keep our privilege while pretending it doesn’t exist or that if it does, we aren’t the ones keeping it around. We don’t have to do the hard work of dismantling privilege brick by brick this way.

We disassociate whenever we talk about how lazy the poor are or how violent blacks are or how women are bad drivers. As if there has never been a rich white man who was a lazy, violent and a bad driver. Nah, never happens. We do it when we complain about domestic violence victims who just won’t leave their abusers. We assume that we would never allow ourselves to be in that kind of situation, and if we were we would act differently.

But people are rational creatures, even badly beaten wives and racists. By othering both of them, we refuse to find the real solutions to problems. We refuse to even look at the problems because we have disassociated, and the problems are no longer ours.

I was thinking about those statistics from the women in academia slides. Why is it that both men and women in the Swedish study judged men and women differently? Why was men’s work overvalued and women’s work undervalued in the same process. What benefit does it give to the evaluators to undervalue women and overvalue men? Are these just evil misogynist who hate women and want them to fail? Nope.

For the male evaluators, there is a definite benefit to them in keeping lower standards for men than for women, even if they don’t realize they are doing it. By keeping standards lower for men, they are keeping themselves competitive. Without doing anything other than being male, they have just made their own chances better. They associate with the male candidates, identify with them. So they judge them as they would like to be judged. But when it comes to female candidates, they disassociate. They judge them more harshly, require higher standards, and keep women at a competitive disadvantage.

Think of it this way. (The following analogy is entirely the fault of AG and this post). For your entire life you have only ever eaten McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with cheese. You’ve never eaten at Wendy’s or Burger King, and you’ve never had a real gourmet burger either. Whenever you eat a burger, you judge it based on the other burgers you’ve had. Is it hot, fresh (comparatively) or did it sit so long the cheese started to get gummy? The basic parts are all the same every time, so you are very familiar with Quarter Pounders and you have a kind of shorthand in your head for judging good one from bad ones. Then one day, someone puts two burgers in front of you. One is the trusty quarter pounder, the other is something else. In order for you to choose the other burger over the quarter pounder, that burger needs to have all the components of the original, plus something that will make you choose it instead. It has to be much better than you are used to get you to pick it. .

As for female evaluators, in order for them to get to the position they are in, they probably had to do a lot of disassociation with their own sex.