Progress: As Seen In My Morning Routine

I wake up.

My room is a little bit messy.

I have learned that there is no need to berate myself for not folding my socks before they go into the drawer. Skipping laundry day does not make me a bad person.

I stumble into the bathroom wearing boxers and a star wars t-shirt.

I am not obligated to wear sexy lingerie and nightgowns to bed. I am not obligated to wear underwear designed for women. I am only obligated to wear what makes me feel comfortable.

I brush my teeth and wash my face and I DON’T weigh myself.

There is no scale in my bathroom. I have learned that my health is measured by how I feel, and my worth isn’t measured at all.

I rub styling paste into my short, boyish hair and stand it straight up.

My hair is not my crown of glory. My hair is not a symbol of my relationship with a deity. My hair does not hide the roundness of my face or accentuate my femininity. My hair is just hair. And it makes me feel free and powerful and I think its sexy as hell. And that’s all that matters.

I slap on a swatch of winged eyeliner.

I don’t care what it “says” about me. I just like how it makes my eyes look greener. It’s not for you. It’s for me.

I get dressed.

Dress pants from the men’s section of Banana republic. A flattening sports bra. A button up, tucked in. A grey cardigan. Wide, flat stud earrings. My clothes make me feel confident, and they reflect me very accurately. I am masculine and feminine rolled into one. I am me. I am different. And that’s okay.

I eat breakfast.

Fruit and toast with almond spread. I am a vegan. Respecting nature is important to me. This is a personal moral decision, and it doesn’t mean that I am foolish, or arrogant like I was taught. Living vegan makes me feel honest and compassionate, and that’s a good enough reason.

I kiss my Hunnie goodbye on my way out the door.

I’m off to work an 8 hour day. I bring home the bacon, and that doesn’t make me less of a woman any more than it makes him less of a man.

On the way to work, I call to make an appointment with my Doctor.

I’m getting a  hormonal birth control implant in my arm, because I don’t want to get pregnant. Not now, maybe never, and that’s okay. My value is not defined by my willingness or ability to give birth. My family is not defined by how many children we have.

Feminist, queer person, agnostic, vegan, student, nerd, employee, blogger, singer, activist; these labels fit me, but they don’t define me. I am Sarah, and I am more than the sum of my parts. I am free, and I am finally learning what it means to be happy.

I Do Not Belong To You

I am a teenager. He is a stranger waiting next to me for the train. When he calls me “sexy” and tells me to smile, I blush as red as his baseball cap. “aww are you blushing, baby?” My stomach churns. I do not want his attention, but I cannot say no. I smile for him, hoping I look more bashful than scared. On the train I seek out a seat next to very large older woman and bite my lip to hold back the tears brought on by adrenaline and embarrassment.

My smile does not belong to me.

 You taught me this when you ordered me to smile for your friend who was over for dinner. I was 5. I didn’t like him, but you took me aside and told me to “smile and be nice” or I would have to sit alone in the other room.

I am 14 years old. He is my sparring partner in Martial Arts class. “I’m gonna punch you in the boob!” He laughs like it’s the funniest joke he ever heard. I am uncomfortable, but I don’t know what to say. He jabs at my right breast, like it’s a target, and pain blossoms across my chest. He laughs, his buddies laugh, and I laugh with them. I don’t want to be rude. “Do you need me to kiss it and make it better?” More laughter. I tell myself we’re all just kidding around, it’s just fine… everything is fine.

My body does not belong to me and I do not have the right to decide what I think is funny.

You taught me this when you let my cousin tickle me without my consent. I was 7 and he was 19. I screamed through the involuntary laughter and everybody just smiled and laughed along. When I finally got away I was angry. Hot tears sprung up in my eyes and shouted at him, at all of you, “I told you to stop!” You gripped my arm and pulled me aside. “Your cousin was just joking with you and you were very rude to him. Go apologize and give him a hug!”

I am 19. He is my sexually aggressive co-worker. He traps me against the wall and whispers explicit things to me, hot breath against my neck. Sometimes he sneaks up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist, purposely pressing his body against mine. He grows bolder each day, and he never listens when I insist that he leave me alone. I never tell anyone, just befriend an older man who works with us, and hide near him when I’m feeling afraid.

My sexuality belongs to the most powerful male-bodied person available.

You taught me this when you bought me a purity ring at age 16 and made me promise that I would never let anyone touch me until you gave me away to a man on my wedding day. And all the times you ordered my brother to protect me, instead of teaching me to defend myself.

You just wanted me to behave. You wanted me to obey the rules as children should. You didn’t known that children are just tiny adults. You couldn’t have foreseen that your words would shape the woman I would become. You never thought that I would carry the lessons meant for a five year old with me for the rest of my life.

But I know now. And if I ever have a child I will remember that she does not belong to me. I will never force her to talk to my dinner guest, because I do not own her voice, or her smile, or her body, or her heart.

Rape Culture

This just popped up on my Facebook news feed. It's just so ironic when someone proves the existence of rape culture while trying to claim that it doesn't exist...

Through The Eyes of the Privileged

Like most Americans, I spent Sunday night watching the NFL Super Bowl. I was not surprised by the blatant and gratuitous sexism (and occasional racism) in the infamous Super Bowl commercials. I was expecting to see some breasts selling Budweiser and some pole dancing to advertise a show. Women were exploited, marginalized, and objectified in almost every commercial, just as I expected. Sexism is alive and well. I joined many others on twitter by calling out the sexism with the Miss Representation tag of #NotBuyingIt. We used social media to call on companies to end their sexist campaigns and stop perpetuating the obvious issue.

I honestly don’t know why I was so surprised by what happened next.

I was attacked. My inboxes and my cell phone lit up with snarky, sarcastic, and downright hateful messages. All of them were from middle class, white, cisgendered, heterosexual males. “You’re a hypocrite for not calling out the commercials that make men look dumb!”
“Women have more privileges than men, feminism is just reverse sexism!”
“Why are you always complaining about women having it rough? You can do whatever you want in America if you just work hard enough!”
“What, no comment about the taco bell commercial making old people look bad?” “Everybody’s life is rough, you people need get over it!”

I could go on.

I have gone from disbelief, to fury, to bewilderment. Maybe I’ve been out of the Fundie bubble for too long, but are there really still this many people who don’t believe that sexism and racism exist? I mean there are FACTS out there, people. 37% of African American children and 34% of Hispanic children live below the poverty limit, compared to 12% of white children. Women are still making only 75% of what a man makes in the same job. Despite major growth in minority college enrollment, Hispanic and African American highschool seniors are still significantly less likely to be able to attend college than their white peers. The list goes on and on. You do not have to look far to see the glaringly obvious inequalities in our society. And yet so many people choose willful ignorance.

As a cisgendered, white woman married to a man, I am well aware of my privilege. Because I happened to fall in love with a man, I was able to get married without any problem. This allowed me to get enough financial aid to attend college.  Unemployment statistics, evidence of workplace racism, and stories like this one would suggest that my skin color made me more likely to be hired. I am also less likely to be the target of hate crimes than say, a trans woman or an African American teenager. I know this. I do everything I can to educate myself on the difficulties faced by my fellow human beings, and I stand up against inequalities wherever I see them with passion and empathy.

This is why I don’t understand the garbage in my inbox. Are all of these guys just completely uneducated on the issues of racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc? Do I need to lend them a few biographies written by someone in a minority demographic? Did they fall asleep in history class and miss the parts where we wouldn’t let women vote? Where we trafficked in human flesh for over 50 years after the civil war? Where we displaced, raped, and murdered thousands of Native Americans? 

 Are they sincerely ignorant like I and my fellow former-fundies used to be? Or are these guys so high on their cloud of privilege that they can’t see destructive inequalities and discrimination that define the reality of so many millions of people?

Anti-Birth Control or Anti-Women?

During my engagement, my fiancé and I received a call from another young couple we knew. They had been married for about 5 years and already had 4 small children. I had mentioned in a previous conversation that I was considering some kind of IUD to prevent pregnancy for our first year of marriage, so I was not surprised when they revealed that they wanted to talk to us about birth control. “Any birth control besides a barrier method is basically an abortion” they told us. “We will come visit you tonight (it was a 15 hour drive) if you’re really serious about using BC, we feel that strongly about it.”

I took their passionate response as a sign from God: birth control is murder. They gave me the same argument I grew up hearing, but in more detail. If you haven’t heard the argument, it goes something like this: Birth control pills work by thinning the lining of the uterus. If your birth control fails to prevent ovulation (this happens in 2-10% of cases) and an egg becomes fertilized, the uterus will reject the egg, thus causing the “baby” to die and be expelled from the body. The argument continues by saying that millions of babies are murdered by birth control every year.

Some of you may have seen this video circulating on the Internet. It’s the one that claims birth control is responsible for adultery, homosexuality, divorce, murder, and a slew of other “evils.” I won’t even begin to address the dozens of lies and misleading statistics in the video. I just want to address the issue at the core of the anti-birth control. Namely, that birth control is murder.

  

Now, this whole position is ridiculous if you don’t believe that a zygote is a baby. Most people hear the anti-birth control argument and shrug it off. There are some, however, that believe life begins at conception. For those people, hormonal birth control seems to be completely out of the question. However, the anti-birth control crowd leaves out one very important fact: a woman’s body naturally rejects at least 18% of fertilized eggs. This means that if you have unprotected sex that leads to the fertilization of an egg (30% chance or successful fertilization), the resulting zygote has an 18% chance of being rejected by the uterus. The human body naturally performs “abortions” almost 20% of the time. So does taking birth control actually increase the chances of zygote abortion, or does birth control actually reduce the chances of this occurring? Let’s do the math.

Without Birth Control:

Out of 100 fertile women on birth control, 100 of them will ovulate in any given month.

Out of those 100 released eggs, 33 will become fertilized.

Out of those 33, 18% will be rejected by the uterus.

In a group of 100 women not on birth control: 6 zygotes will “die”

With Birth Control:

Out of 100 fertile women on birth control, around 6 of them will ovulate in any given month.

Out of those 6 released eggs, only 2 will become fertilized.

Out of those 2, 100% will be rejected by the uterus.

In a group of 100 women on birth control: 2 zygotes will “die”

So let’s get this straight, taking birth control makes a woman’s body LESS likely to dispel fertilized eggs. If you believe that life begins at conception, shouldn’t it be your moral duty to reduce the number of zygote “abortions?” If you believe that a zygote is a human, you actually kill more babies by refusing to take birth control.

How has such a massive flaw gone unnoticed all this time? Did anti-birth control advocates really just “miss” these obvious facts, or could it be that they like the result of this misconception? Denying women rights to their own reproduction is the oldest weapon in the war on women. Even if you believe that a zygote deserves the same rights as a full grown human, there is still no reason to oppose birth control other than to control women.

 I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of the “personhood” smokescreen. Let’s call the anti-birth control message by its real name: anti-woman.

Conservative Christian Speaks out Against Misogyny

A few months ago, Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson posted a video on youtube in which he blamed women for all of societies problems. "It's unfortunate that men are so weak that they allow these women to just run wild, and screw up everything, including their souls, and their children." He said. "And if you speak up about it, Satan got it set up, through the women, that you're going to be punished in some way." From behind the pulpit, he insisted women are incapable of leadership, and that they should not be allowed to vote. Think I'm kidding? Watch it for yourself here. When I first saw the video, it was all I could talk about for days.

About a week ago, Peterson was on the Hannity show on Fox News. I didn't see it because I don't watch Fox News. But my husband, who is a staunch conservative, watches regularly. Kirsten Powers was on Hannity at the same time, and she interrupted Hannity in the middle of a segment and asked Peterson to explain his misogynistic youtube rant. Neither Hannity nor Fox news saw fit to address the subject and the whole event was swept neatly under the rug.

My husband, who generally shrugs off my feminist tirades, surprised me today by writing a letter to Hannity, calling him out on his choice of guests and friends. He sent the letter to Fox News, Hannity himself, and the station that broadcasts the Hannity Radio program. 

Dear Mr. Hannity,

I am a 21 year old married college student and a lifelong  advocate of conservatism.  I appreciate what you have done and continue to do to advance the cause of freedom in our Country. Recently an exchange on your show between Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson and Kirsten Powers piqued my interest.  I soon found myself watching a video in which Mr. Peterson delivers a sermon filled with indefensible comments about women, including that they should have never been granted the right to vote and that women are responsible for the introduction of all the evils we face in the modern age. I do not toe the line that there is an organized war on women, and for that reason I believe a statement like this must not go unrecognized. As a Christian, I understand that every man, woman, and child is born with original sin. To suggest that women are disproportionately guilty of bringing evil into our world is not only cowardly and self serving, but poor theology. Frankly, Mr. Peterson is not fit to be on local TV network, let alone a show with your reach and influence and preaching the Word of God.  I implore you to at the very least make a statement condemning a painfully obvious example of sexism (fuel for the "war on women" argument) that originated from a conservative contributor to your very show. If you choose not to address this issue then I understand that either this man's friendship means more to you than the credibility of your show and the conservative movement, or that you yourself agree with the egregious statements made by Rev. Peterson.

Sincerely,

--------------------

 [Enigma's Husband]

 Let's see if it goes anywhere, after all, I'm sure Fox and Friends will listen more closely to a Conservative Christian man...

"The Girls"

If you have ever worked in an office, you know how indispensable Administrative Staff is.

 I get up early every morning, put on professional business clothes, comb my short hair, and drive to the office just like everyone else. I unlock the doors and turn on the lights, make the coffee and turn on the phones. I spend 8 to 10 hours at the office every day. I keep the office supplied, I do all the vital paperwork, I pay the office bills, and interact with all our clients.

A job like mine usually requires a minimum 2 year degree and experience. My profession is not easy. It is not fun. It is not a joke. But every day I go into the office to do my job, I am dismissed, talked down to, and marginalized.

My boss consistently refers to the admin staff as “The Girls.” The other two women on our team of three are middle aged mothers. When do they earn the title of “Woman?” What do we have to do to be taken seriously as business people?

Am I the only one who cares about this?

I met a male Administrator once. He was a 20-year-old student who worked part time as a Receptionist. He did nothing but answer phones and browse Facebook. All. Day. Long. His boss (an older man) called him “Sir” and often praised his accomplishment of being a student and employee at the same time. He used words like “young” and “ambitious” and “smart” when he talked about his Receptionist.

But I’m just a girl. Married, going to school 10 hours a week, working full time, indispensable team member, but just one of “The Girls.” It disgusts me.

I mentioned my frustration to a fellow administrator once, and she called me “a crazy feminist.” I asked her to define “feminist” and her only response was that she “doesn’t have a fit when a man holds the door open.” Are American women so ignorant that they don’t see the oppression and discrimination going on before their very eyes? How can I demand the respect I deserve when the women around me don’t mind being marginalized?

I have news for you America: sexism is alive and well. I see it every single day. I just wish there was something I could do about it.