Being Amber Rhea

Executive summary of a few posts that have been in draft mode entirely too long. Bold part is the current title of the draft.

• class privilege - it’s not a game of pick-up-stix
  There was a meme going around several months ago where you have this big list of things that supposedly indicate class privilege, and you bold the ones that apply to you, and… I guess everybody gets to compete to see who wins the Oppression Olympics. It was apparently adapted from an exercise for a college class, where everyone stands in a row and you take a step forward for each thing that applies to you. But the whole thing annoys the crap out of me because of all the assumptions it’s based on - and I think THAT speaks volumes. Like, one of them was, “You had a lot of books in your house.” And?? How does that indicate class privilege?? Give me a freaking break! We always had a lot of books, because my parents valued reading very highly, not to mention that my mom worked at a bookstore in the 70s so she got a bunch of free books - so I guess that makes me more “privileged,” except for the part where we never had health insurance. Funny, that. Just goes to show, yet again, that you can’t judge by surface appearances only. Sure, someone may have a lot of books, but that tells you exactly jack shit. And why the assumption that only “upper class” people have books??
• If you can’t stand the heat, and other meaningless clichés
  I hate when people say, “Well, if you can’t stand criticism, you shouldn’t be blogging; huff huff huff!” They’re always so proud of themselves, and they wipe their hands of the issue and that’s that. They’ve got it all figured out. Except, that’s total crap. So basically what you’re saying is that if I’m not okay with being treated like garbage and having things that are not meant to be open for “criticism” being micro-analyzed, then I basically need to just shut up. I don’t deserve to speak my truth; my voice doesn’t deserver to be heard. What if this is the only place I can speak such truths, and now you’ve told me I can’t even do it here? As if it’s up to you anyway.
• SitPS local action idea
  Elizabeth’s comment made me think, there really should be local action committees to mobilize around issues of sexual freedom in specific communities. I wish someone other than me would get it together for Georgia, though. I just can’t right now.
• youth sexuality
  Yes, teenagers are sexual beings. Why can’t anybody admit that without having a conniption fit about it? Look, admitting that simple fact doesn’t mean you’re saying you want to have sex with teenagers. Why are we all so weird about it? Have we forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager? Sexuality doesn’t magically appear at age 18, and teenagers are not children. Maturity levels vary greatly, obviously, but that’s true in people who are over 18, too. Frankly when I was a teenager I was offended at being treated like a child, and being told that my feelings and wants didn’t count, because clearly I just didn’t know myself yet, I was too young.
• Two things
  Men absolutely must call out other men on sexism. <– That’s the only thing that’s in the draft. I don’t know what the second thing was supposed to be.

Elizabeth agrees with me, anyway.

My real anger, though, actually comes from Dominus’s acceptance of the term “high class.” I know that is the term that much of the press has been using to describe the escort service in question. But to accept its use and to apply it to people is appalling.

“High class” is a value judgement and a way of obscuring the real stratification of wealth, power and privilege in the United States. Why not talk about the upper class, the elite, or the working class or the middle class, which are much more meaningfully descriptive?

Read her whole post; her analysis is spot-on, as usual.

Rusty and I have discussed the possibility of hiring someone to professionally clean our apartment once every two weeks or so. Given our busy schedules, it makes practical sense. And I’ve had the contact information of a cleaner for about two weeks now, on recommendation of a friend - but so far I haven’t actually contacted her.

I feel weird about this. I guess the word to describe what I feel is guilt - but I’m not sure that’s the whole picture.

For one thing, at a very deep level I just balk at the thought of me hiring a cleaner. It seems absurd. That’s something rich people do.

Also, I don’t want to be contributing to, well, exploitation. It goes without saying that I would be respectful toward any cleaner we might hire, and tip well. And yet, again on a very deep level, I feel bad about it, kind of like, how dare I pay someone to do this?

But when I think about it, that second reaction isn’t exactly fair, is it? It’s along the same lines as the reaction many people have to sex workers, for example. Obviously they must be downtrodden hard-luck types who would rather be in a different line of work, but as it is they’re poor exploited victims with no choice, and no voice. And we all know how I feel about generalizations like that.

And it’s really arbitrary, when I think about it even further, because I don’t have a similar reaction to, say, yard workers. Maybe that’s because when I was growing up we hired people to do yard work sometimes? (Even though, for the most part, they were my parents’ friends.)

So, upon (over-)analysis, it seems like the first part of my guilt-like reaction is coming from a place of being low(er) class myself, and the second part might be coming from a place of relative privilege. Maybe. Does that make sense?

Thoughts, anyone?

Sassywho’s post about her two ectopic pregnancies - and how she was treated like day-old shit by the ER staff - has me feeling all shaken up. Not because I’m shocked at the cruelty and mistreatment she endured; but because I’m not shocked, since I know that this kind of thing is all too common, and if anything, it’s the rule rather than the exception.

And I’m angry. And I feel powerless. I hate that feeling, anger coupled with powerlessness. It’s one of the worst, and it usually sends me spiraling down one of those “what the fuck do we do and why are we here?” tunnels - and I don’t like when my train of thought heads in that direction. I don’t like the powerlessness, because it ultimately means the anger usually ends up getting turned inward and is damaging to me, so I usually have to find some other way to deal - such as distraction by focusing on good things. Some may call it sticking my head in the sand, but I call it fucking survival. What the fuck else am I going to do? Sit here and be miserable? Like it or not, I - one person - can’t change the sorry state of healthcare in this country. That doesn’t mean I’ll stop voting for the right people, and donating to the right organizations; it just means, simply, that I don’t have the magic wand I wish I had.

But, that last paragraph was a tangent. The other thing about Sassywho’s post is that it’s quite timely. Because today when we were at the hospital, I was feeling very nervous. Obviously, I was nervous simply because I wanted Rusty to be okay, and it’s hard not to be nervous when the love of your life is having surgery. But I was also nervous for another, more insidious reason: I don’t trust hospitals. I don’t trust the medical establishment in this country, in general.

I was pretty surprised at how friendly and helpful everyone we encountered was, for the most part. Then I was irritated because something that should be the expected default came as a surprise. And, when there was that one nurse in the recovery area who behaved as if we were inconveniencing her with our presence, and seemed to be trying to shoo us out of the place as quickly as possible even though Rusty was barely lucid and in quite a bit of pain - well, I thought, “Yeah, the truth comes out.” That’s how I expect it and remember it, and have experienced it. It goes without saying that the fact that I expect rudeness and dismissiveness is fucked up.

Then I started to wonder, too, if all the other staff members we dealt with - nurses, surgeon, anesthesiologist - would have been just as nice if Rusty weren’t insured. I tried to stop myself from having that thought, because I recognized how unfair it was. And I did get the feeling that many of the people we dealt with, especially the nurses, were genuinely nice, caring people. (They might not even know about patients’ insurance status or financial situation. I don’t know how that works.)

But my mind kept going back to how my dad was treated when he was in the hospital after his stroke last year: like a second class citizen, to put it bluntly. Uninsured and without a stable source of income, they treated him as an inconvenience and a liability. They were trying to get him out of there as soon as possible, and they barely made any effort to pretend otherwise. He stayed in the hospital for a way shorter period of time than he should have. Instead of physical therapy, they photocopied some pages of exercises intended for orthopedic patients and told my mom, “Have him do these.”

My mom has never liked to admit that we’re not the middle-class suburban folks I think she thinks we’re supposed to be. She does that extra-vengeful classism thing that I guess comes out of embarrassment, or guilt, or god knows what. When we were staying at the hospital with my dad, she recounted a conversation with the hospital social worker; she had made sure to stress that while he didn’t have insurance, it wasn’t because he was “lazy” or “a bum.” You know, like those people. The other people who don’t have insurance.

Eh, another tangent there. Point being… well, I don’t know what my point is, really. Just that I distrust the medical establishment in general. This is already long enough, so I won’t even get into the time I was hospitalized for depression in 2001 as a broke, just-married college student. I hope to [insert deity here] that I never have to go to the ER for something as serious as what Sassywho went through, where I literally might die because the people working there are “jaded” and “burnt out.” Excuse the fuck out of me for not giving a good goddamn.

I don’t want to end this on such a pissed off, powerless note, because like I said earlier, I don’t like that feeling, and I don’t want to be passing it along to y’all. So I’ll go stick my head in the sand now, and you do the same if you’re so inclined. Keep voting, writing letters, and donating whatever time or money you can; beyond that? Well, life’s too short to feel powerless all the time. So find the good where you can, and enjoy every nanosecond of it.

This photo is not from tonight. It’s from February, when Jenny, Niki, and I got together in DC and were boozing in the hotel restaurant. But it came up in my random Flickr sidebar, and I thought it was appropriate, so I figured I’d include it in my next post.

Anyway. If I don’t start ranting now, then when? But I’m kind of drunk and it’s hard, and I still have this on-again, off-again headache. And Sara is distracting me. But I’ll just jump right in and give it a try.

So over at fucking Will Hinton’s blog a few weeks ago, that guy Expat Teacher wrote some shit about “porn deadens sex.” O, woe is me, I’ve never heard that line before!! First of all, I fucking HATE how people will throw out a fucking platitude like that and just expect everyone to just swallow it, without asking what the fuck they even MEAN by that statement or anything. Everyone is just supposed to nod approvingly. Because we all just KNOW that porn is wrong an dbad, right? Right??

Those fuckers in that thread absolutely REFUSED to hear what I was saying. I lose my patience real fast with some people. I mean, when people just refuse to hear me? Then what the fuck can I do? There’s nothing else that I can do at that point. I have made myself excrutiatingly clear, endured personal attacks and having my words twisted all around,m posted explanation after explanation, and still… they DON’T. FUCKING. GET IT.

The absolute funniest part was when some guy (and most of them were your garden variety straight white middle-class males, of course) ended up saying EXACTLY the same thign I had said, but as if it were COUNTER to my argument!! So then I posted his shit and my shit side by side to call him out… natch, no response. Here’s the link to that specific comment. (It’s good I can still do links, right?)

And not a one of them comprehended ANYTHING I was saying about class. Guess what?? That’s because they are head-up-their-asses, middle class white dudes with THE MOST privilege of any type of people in this society, and guess what, that’s why they can’t see it!! It’s awlasy these kinds of fuckers who like to think we live in a meritocracy. That’s bc they don’t realize all the shit they THINK has happened to them out of a meritocracy, is largely because of them being at the top of the fucking heap. Someone said on a blog somewhere, the best way to think of privilege is, if one person is on a smooth road and another is on a road filled with potholes, let’s not say one is a better driver. Or wait, maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe it was like, let’s not blame the car. Ah shit. I am fucking this up. Anyway, I think I have it bookrmarked in delicious somewhere… it was some brilliant stuff. I’ll find it later. –[Sober update: The analogy I was grasping for came from Alas, A Blog (via The Angry Black Woman). Here's the part I was trying (and failing) to articulate: "Imagine two roads: one smooth, well-paved, well-maintained, the other lumpy and full of cracks and pits. Most people will drive over the smooth road without even noticing it - but that doesn't mean that the smooth road hasn't facilitated their driving. Nor does it mean that the person driving on the smooth road has more merit, as a driver, than someone stuck on pothole avenue."]–

So here’s what I want to talk about with class. This guy was all, “I would like to see sex shops zoned into a particular area.” Well that’s how it Already IS, fucker!! That’s how it’;s BEEN for decades now, and guess what, that’s where the PROBLOEMS come from! Just think for one nanosecond about the term “slumming.” That is fucked up. That implies a direct corrolation between porn/sex/dirty stuff and LOW CLASS. And let’s not forget lower class folks are presumed to be “wilder” and all that bullshit… oh and when it comes to sex shops, strip clubs, etc., eben if they DON’T want it in their neighborhood, guess who has the most effect when it comes to NIMBY (not in my back yard) bullshit? It’s not the poor!

Look I was blind to a lot of this stuff (not all of it tho) for a long time but now that I see it? I fucking see it EVERYWHERE, and it pisses me the fuck off!! Because to me it is now so fucking OBVIOUS, that it pisses me off that some people just.don’t.see it.

Okay and this is one of the main things that annoyed me about Pamela Paul’s book Pornified too. She doesn;t want porn to go away. She just wants it to go back to being something confined to the wrong side of the tracks. And she doesn’t see anything wrong with that! She just puts it out there like there’s nothing worth examining. She even used the phrase “low class stripper” a couple times and just didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. (She also misquoted Andrea Dworkin, and while I am no Dworkin fan, it pisses me off when people misquote so egregiously, especially with feminists who get a bad rep anyway just for being feminists. She NEVER SAID that thing about “all sex is rape.” THat is a MADE UP LINE and somehow Paul’s editor let that shit slide!!) Check out Amy’s review of Pornified… even tho she is a radfem and anti-porn and I disagree w/ her on a lot of stuff, her review pretty much sums up the problem with the book.

I truly believe that until we begin to dismantle this deeply entrenched classism that is directly intertwined with erotophobia in this country, we will never make any real progress.

Well, this did not make any sense. But I’m going to go ahead and post it because it’s LONG. I’ll try to write more on this subject later. I want to talk about why sex workers are so reviled and why it’s total bullshit the way some radfems say “sex workers are the patriarchy’s dream girl”. No they fucking are not, you idiots!!

More to come. Later. Maybe. I hope. Arrrrrgh.

Patrick linked to this essay this morning. It’s kind of long, but well-written, so it’s a quick read.

After I read it, I felt… weird.

I think that, by and large, the working poor are treated like shit in this country. There’s the government shittiness, which is one thing; and then there’s the social shittiness, whereby people of even marginally higher “class” (whatever that means) look down upon janitors, etc. as if they’re not even human. Who the fuck taught them that it’s okay to treat people like that?

An extension of this is my belief/concern/suppressed freak-out that the socioecomonic situation of the U.S. is teetering on very wobbly legs. On the micro scale, think about it this way - most of us are not as far from the janitors of the world as we might like to think. It would take one personal crisis (serious illness, losing a job, wrecking a car, etc. ad naseum) to knock us flat on our asses. This is something I’ve had in my head for years now, starting in college, when I’d see certain students acting so high-and-mighty. It kind of made me want to punch them in the teeth.

So, part of my response to Perrin’s essay is, “Right on! Tell it like it is.” I think he is spot on when he says:

[A] fair number of them treated my cleaners and me as barely human, somehow beneath them. My theory was that if a worker in cube 6798 identifies with George Bush, he must believe that he’s someone he’s not– so it’s easier to dump on the Honduran woman who empties his garbage and dusts his computer. I’ve had insurance company receptionists and bank tellers speak to me as if I were a twelve-year-old. Clearly, they needed to feel superior to someone, and these people laid it on thick.

There’s the whole Fight Club “you are not your job” thing, with which I don’t disagree; additionally, there’s just having the common decency to be civil toward your fellow human beings. Why do so many people think they’re “better,” on some nonexistant scale of human worth, than anyone else?

But let’s not get off on a tangent. That was my first response to the Perrin essay. My second response was something a little deeper inside, something close to guilt. Not for anything I’d personally done. But guilt on a more theoretical level, guilt that I know I shouldn’t have, because it serves no constructive purpose. I’ve always had this “Why should I be happy/successful/whatever if other people aren’t?” complex; here’s just another manifestation.

There are people who have fallen on hard times. There are people who won’t be able to dig themselves out of the lower socioeconomic class no matter how hard they try, due to personal, social, and governmental circumstance. I feel badly for those people, and angry that such a huge divide can exist in a country like the U.S., where “hard work” can supposedly help you accomplish whatever you desire.

But, does this mean that I shouldn’t continue to form goals and actively pursue them? That I shouldn’t “dream big”? Of course not; but knowing the answer intellectually doesn’t get rid of the deep pang of knee-jerk guilt. I guess I should just keep reassuring myself that personally, I have nothing to feel guilty for; and that there’s nothing wrong with trying to climb to the top - just don’t shit on anybody on the way up.