I am, as most of you know, not the kind of girl generally struck mute the stupid actions of misogynist boys. There’s enough pissed off righteousness in me to call out egregious actions for the benefit of any other girl in a 1000 yard radius, But lately I have found myself unable to call out a certain behavior that pisses me off to no end- the Look Up.

The Look Up is when a boy takes that 30 second long look at you starting with your legs and ending at your tits. They never, ever look you in the eyes until they’ve finished their examination and decided that you are a fuckable object. Maybe you guys think this is flattering, but it’s creepy.

This always happens when I am minding my own business, like standing in line at the grocery store. It happened the other day when I was walking to the end of my driveway (shared with all the other apartments) to meet a friend who was having a hard time finding my building. The guy literally blocked my path so he could get his full mental porn image before I could go on with my business.

You boys may think that this is basically harmless, I should feel flattered to get the attention, maybe just write it off as a socially awkward moment with a guy who has no idea how to get a girl. But that is not how it feels on the receiving end.

The Look Up makes me (me of all fucking people) feel like a powerless hunk of meat. Calling out a boy who is yelling stupid things on the side of the street is easy, but telling someone to stop looking at you is different. Without saying a single word these boys put you in your place and keep you there until they are finished. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t looking for attention, or that you are trying to do other things, or that never in a million years would the boy who is doing the looking get to see you naked. It doesn’t matter that you are just trying to buy groceries for dinner with your kid standing right next to you. You have no choice but to let the guy take a full mental image of you. It feels like you’ve been turned into wank-fodder against your choice.

And what the hell can you do against someone who is “just” looking at you. Someone who is willing to block your path or corner you in a spot that you can’t leave while they take their visual fill has already demonstrated that you don’t matter and calling them on their behavior feels more dangerous than telling the stupid cat caller that he’s an ass.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t notice attractive people. I do that all the time. But I have never interrupted someone else’s day so that I could get my visual kicks. I have never impeded someone’s movement. A Look Up involves making sure the person you are looking at knows that they are being looked at and can’t escape it. That is not flattering, it’s just one of the thousand ways woman are treated as objects instead of people.

First- I know I have become a ghost of a writer, but people keep dying and life has been so hard this past year that I feel like a walking bruise. Imagine if you used a peach for batting practice, that’s me. Putting words down in this state can be dangerous, I loose the snark and let out a little bit of stuff that is more personal than I should.

But like I said, people keep dying. In the last few days it’s been both my grandmother and Jerry Falwell. The first left me sobbing like a baby at my work for an entire afternoon on Monday. The second, I am almost ashamed to say, made me smile. For anyone keeping track, that means 5 people in my life have died in the last year- not including Falwell of course. While that is not on the scale of the Virginia Tech shootings or the Iraq War, it’s a bit much for a girl to deal with. And since it has always been the rule of threes when it comes to deaths in my life, I am wondering who not so lucky number six is going to be and how the hell I am going to deal with it.

I don’t believe in idealizing the dead. I hope that when I die my friends and family will say that I could be a serious bitch sometimes who had no tolerance for those who choose ignorance as a lifestyle, that sometimes I was flaky and that I never seem to finish projects, that I was horrible at making money and fabulous at throwing tantrums. Hopefully they will also say that I was always more loyal to people I love than to cute shoes or vodka and that no one else can drown a turkey in a bottle of wine like I could.

So when it comes to Grandma, I will say she was an angry woman. She was a poor single mom from the South raising 3 kids in Detroit by herself in the 1950s. She did a number on her kids, including my mom. I have limited first hand knowledge of that, having seen my Grandma only a few times as an adult. But I know the stories, and I have seen myself what she created. My mother is her bitter, angry, emotional doppelganger and her parenting style is a carbon copy- viscous manipulation might be the phrase one would use. Without having to get too detailed but to give you an example, I once was in a session with my therapist and I was just explaining the what I thought were innocuous details of a childhood event. The therapist made an audible gasp and started stuttering and apologizing to me for what I had been through. She was almost teary eyed and she said that she had never heard anything so awful, and she did child protective services work for years before being in private practice.

While I have all sorts of damage from my mother, I can see my Grandma’s life from a farther distance and I have no direct pain from her. I know it’s all a horrible spiral, but each parent is responsible for how they raise their child and I am working damn hard to break the pattern. Mom could recognize the hurt the Grandma caused her, but not the hurt she caused her own kids. I don’t pretend to be a perfect mom, far from it. I only hope that my greatest skill is in the ability to recognize screw ups and admit them.

I do have some fond memories though from when I was little. My mother, who was an odd, flannel wearing, no make-up, sexist in 70’s braless feminist clothing, couldn’t understand me. I was a frilly pink girl who wanted to wear dresses and patent leather shoes in four foot snow drifts. But Grandma got it. She was the one who introduced me to Sunday afternoons of girly lunches and shopping for pretty shoes, even if it was a trade off for going to church with her in the morning. I also have my genetic ability to fry chicken (or fish for that matter) from Grandma. There may be some dispute as to which Grandma gets to claim my cooking skills. I have been told my cooking skills are Hungarian, which would come from my other Grandma, but neither of them taught me how to cook and my mother thinks all food is made with some form of canned soup, so she didn’t teach me either. I learned to cook early as a form of self-defense. There are only so many nights a week you can eat something made with Lipton golden mushroom soup. Maybe both grandmas can share the genetic claim to cooking skills.

So what the hell does this have to do with Jerry Falwell anyways?

Jerry Falwell was the product of the same kind southern, bootlegging, violent sort of upbringing that my Grandmother was. For those of you who haven’t read it- I would suggest Fox Butterfield’s All God’s Children as a fantastic book on understanding the southern states’ relationship to violence and honor and booze. I think it nails down a lot of the psychology pretty well. My Grandmother didn’t break those patterns, but she didn’t glorify or intensify them either. Jerry Falwell took brutality and wrapped in the book jacket of a bible that I am not sure he read or understood.

Falwell and my Grandmother were both angry people who were sure that someday all their paranoid fantasies would be proven true, but my Grandmother never wished entire populations to suffer horrible deaths. Grandma never inspired people like Eric Rudolf to go out and kill people, but Jerry Falwell did. Grandma never bilked millions of poor people out of money better spent on medicines or mortgages, but Falwell did. Grandma never blamed me, or people like me for the worst act of terrorism to hit American soil or inspire the kind of terrorism we don’t talk about, the home grown Oklahoma City Angry White Guy kind, but Falwell did. My Grandmother may have inspired anger and caused hurt to her family, but she never intentionally set out to be a hatemonger. Grandma may have been an angry woman who could have done much better by her children, but Falwell was an angry man who left this world worse for his being in it. The kindest thing that can be said of his demise is that I hope he receives as much compassion in his death as he has dished out in his life.

Shamelessly copied from http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

My darling friend, The Naughty Professor (AKA D Train) landed himself a new DJ gig.

Check him out here.

He promised to play me some Le Tigre, cause I need some kick ass girl tunes today.

Some of you may have noticed that I almost exclusively use the terms girl and boy instead of woman and man. There is a reason for it.

When I call grown ups boys, many of said boys will say things like “oh baby, I’m all man”. This gives the the opportunity to point out to them how if they dislike being diminutized so much that they need to assert their manhood when I call them a boy, then they need to stop using the word girl to describe a woman. More thoughtful boys will just ask why I only use the word boys. Then a simple explanation of why works.

But this kind of tactic only works with people I am around long enough to have this conversation with. Lately, before I even know someone well enough to know their name, I am confronted with girl/man problem. The cartoon about a “girl who knows how to treat her man” is something that I can say happens about once a week.

So, since I know that being rational with idiots never works (try debating with a conservative redneck sometime) I am no longer going to point out to the girl/man users that they are being sexist. Nope, I got me a better plan.

Instead, I am going to ask them if it’s hard to be a child molester in this day and age since they are being so open about wanting an underage female as a companion. 10 bucks says that the next time they want to call a woman a girl they think twice about it.

Last summer, on a warm August morning, I walked my son over to his day camp at the community center down the street. I did this every weekday morning that I was in the country and we usually took a shortcut through the playing field.

On my way back I was listening to music on my headphones and I walked past a guy who was just hanging out. He was old, at least 65, on crutches and had a cast on his leg. As I walked past he started shouting the “hey baby” crap at me. I could hear him over my headphones but I ignored him. He started to chase after me ON CRUTCHES when I didn’t respond. He started yelling shit like “bitch you shouldn’t be shaking your ass if you don’t want attention” etc.

I turned around, pulled my headphones off and told him that if he didn’t shut up I was going to kick his ass, and I absolutely meant it. He said something about how I couldn’t kick his ass and how he could kill me. I laughed, pointed out that he was old and broken and walked off. I was a bit shaken up but proud that I had told him off. Today though I am really glad he didn’t have a car or a weapon after reading this.

A woman was in serious condition Wednesday morning after Orange County
deputies said a man deliberately ran her over.

The woman and her friend were apparently walking down the side of the road near Orange Blossom trail and Jordan Avenue late Tuesday night when the accident happened. Deputies said the man responsible wanted their attention and wasn’t taking no for an answer.

Just to make it simple- here’s an easy breakdown so you can understand the problem from a male privilege point of view

1) Women are created to be attractive so that men will pay attention to them

2) All women are attention whores so they all should appreciate any type of attention they receive from men

3) Women who don’t show the appropriate amount of respect when receiving attention from men (i/e dropping to their knees and offering a blow job or at least flashing their tits) are teases even if they weren’t trying to get any attention at all. If they didn’t want attention then they shouldn’t have left the house.

4) Teases and whores deserve what’s coming to them. They were asking for it.

Most guys don’t get how unnerving it is to be yelled at by some stranger. They think that like in publicity- all attention is good. But being yelled at by some stranger or even just having some random guy on the street tell you to smile are not the same thing as having a friend or acquaintance compliment you on your dress or hair or shoes. One action is part of enhancing or creating a social bond between equals, the other is one person turning another into an object for their own gratification and not for the benefit of the person being commented on.

Add the ever present threat of violence that women are warned about everyday from the time we are old enough to know we are different from boys, and this kind of harassment is enough to make me want to get a concealed weapons permit.

Today is my birthday. It is also the anniversary of this little adventure called The White Papers.

It is also the 4th year of the Iraq war. The paranoid conspiracy theorist in my head still thinks that part of the reason for starting the war on my birthday was so that the neocons could get one more giant dig into a progressive. But I’m not really that important.

So it’s four years into this pointless and badly planned war and no one seems to have any idea what to do about it. Surging is pointless, we don’t have and can’t commit enough troops to turn Iraq into the lock down, high security prison state that Bush dreams of. If we stay the course then the horrible bloodshed will either maintain its current intolerable level or, much more likely, get worse. And if we pull out, completely leave Iraq to its own devices, then there really will have been nothing gained and much lost after four years of horror and blood.

But pulling out is the only way for Iraq to find its footing and eventually some peace.

The current powers that be, namely Bush and Cheney and their foaming mouthed sycophants, still think we are a country capable of creating puppet “democracies” like we did in Latin America for most of the last century. But not this time. There was no real “Big Man” in Iraq like there was in Chile with Pinochet. Well, there was and we helped put him there, but recently the Iraqi people had their former leader executed.

The Iraqi people need the Americans out so that they can create their own government, be it a democracy or theocracy or flat out anarchy. It is not our place to force a government of any kind on Iraq. One of my favorite quotes is that “Democracy through tyranny is still tyranny”. By imposing ourselves and our politics on Iraq we are the worst kind of tyrants- ineffective. If we could justify our presence in the country by showing that the Iraqis are now safe from violence or ethnic divisions, that they are free from the starvation and shortages that they suffered under Saddam because of the embargo, that they could even walk out of their houses everyday to go to work or school, then maybe we could justify staying in the country to promote peace. But everyday life for Iraqis becomes harder and we are the cause.

So we must pull out. It will cause a power vacuum, it will increase violence in the short-term, and every death that follows our leaving will be just as much our fault as the deaths that are caused by our being there. But the Iraqis will then have to deal with each other without the excuse of the Americans as occupiers to continue the violence. Without us there, then the influence of Al Qaida (that only exists since we have invaded Iraq, not before as the foaming mouths will have you believe) will diminish.

Iraq needs a chance to organically develop a leader to take charge of their country and as long as we are there that WILL NOT HAPPEN. Anyone who works with the Americans will be suspect as being a puppet, anyone who works against the Americans will be fodder for our troops. The Iraqis must have a chance for a strong leader to develop the support and organization needed to drag a country out of civil war. It will be bloody, it will most likely be another dictator, and the Sunni minority will probably be the biggest losers. But it is up to the Iraqis to fight or accept that. All we can do at this point is throw money at the infrastructure of the country that we destroyed (and not put that money through government contracts where palettes of money disappear like political Latin Americans in the 70s).

We have failed the soldiers of our country by putting them in harms way for reasons based on lies. We have failed the people of Iraq by taking them from a dictatorship that they knew to a bloody civil war where no one is safe. Saddam was certainly not a saint, but I am pretty sure most Iraqis would prefer a false sense of security over perpetual war. We must admit our hubris and withdraw.