I’ve been watching the social media fallout surrounding the trial of Brock Turner, the swimming champion from Stanford who received a six-month sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman in January of 2015. As with any other case that deals with violence against women, the reactions have been equal parts depressing and encouraging. Depressing because even now, the narrative persists that young white men convicted of rape are being unfairly denied their potential bright futures. Encouraging because every time this happens, it feels like we get a little closer to exposing the framework of rape minimization and acceptance that supports incidents like these. This case has made it clearer than ever that we as a society condone rape by privileging men’s feelings over victims’ trauma — and more people than ever have objected.

Most of the discussion has centered around two letters. The first is the impact statement written by the victim herself, which she read out loud in court on June 2 and which was subsequently published by Buzzfeed on June 3. The other is letter written by Turner’s father asking for leniency in his sentencing; Stanford law professor Michele Dauber brought this one to public notice when she tweeted a portion of it. The former letter is as gutting as the latter is tone-deaf. The woman that Turner attacked speaks of what it felt like to wake up in the hospital with pine needles and debris inside her vagina. Meanwhile, Turner’s father laments that his son no longer enjoys pretzels, and argues he has been forced to pay too high a price for “20 minutes of action.”

To read Turner’s father’s letter is to feel an immediate rush of pure fury. It’s tempting to just go full snark on it, because there is lot here to snark here: from Turner Senior’s lyrical description of Brock’s lost love for steak to his obstinate refusal to actually name his son’s crime, the letter reads like a bad parody of how someone might talk about a rapist. It’s much harder to read the letter earnestly; it feels almost impossible to comprehend that this man truly believes his son is the one deserving of pity. It’s more comfortable to mock — but we can’t just mock. We have to look at — really look at, unsparingly and in detail — all the ways in which Turner’s father’s letter exemplifies how rape culture works.

This case has made it clearer than ever that we as a society condone rape by privileging men’s feelings over victims’ trauma.
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Rape culture is the idea that sexual assault does not happen in a vacuum, but rather occurs because we are socialized in a way that normalizes and even celebrates sexual victimization of women. In my experience, most men have a twofold reaction to that definition: first they’ll ask how it can be true that rape is normalized if rape is also understood to be one of the worst crimes a person can commit, and second they’ll swear that they, personally, would never. When they say these things they will absolutely believe that they’re speaking the truth. And then a case like Brock Turner’s will come along and present some very uncomfortable challenges to those ideas.

Everyone can agree that rape is objectively wrong, but problems crop up when we try to parse exactly what rape is and under what circumstances it occurs. I’m willing to bet that more than a few men read the victim’s letter and had a pang of recognition — not of her experiences, but his. Because most men have done at least some of what Turner did. They’ve gone to parties with the intention of hooking up with someone; they’ve zeroed in on the vulnerable girls, the drunk girls, the girls who seem like they’d be easy to take home; they’ve assumed that silence or a lack of clear refusal is the same as consent. And when these men read the account of what Brock Turner did, even if they recognize it as awful, there’s a louder voice in their heads saying something like this could have been written about me.

And the brutal truth is, they’re right. A lot of men, a lot of self-professed good men, have done something like what Brock Turner did: maybe not after a frat party, maybe not on the ground behind a dumpster, maybe not with a girl so intoxicated that she was losing consciousness, but maybe not so far off. Perhaps in their case the girl was drunk, yes, but not so very much more drunk than they were, and she seemed to like it and the next morning they went out for breakfast. Perhaps the girl said yes to kissing and touching and even though she froze up when he tried to penetrate her she never actually said no. Perhaps he thought that every yes starts out as a no because someone told him so, or because every movie or TV show he’d seen showed a women having to be cajoled and worn down befor she agreed to sex. Whatever the circumstances, Brock Turner’s story forced them to look at their actions in a new light and what they saw didn’t jive with how they felt about themselves.

And it’s so much easier to say neither of us are rapists than it is to say both of us are rapists.

Rape culture is the idea that sexual assault does not happen in a vacuum.
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Most rapists aren’t monsters who lurk behind bushes and in dark alleyways waiting for unsuspecting women to walk by. In fact, statistics show that a woman is far more likely to be assaulted by someone she knows than by a stranger. Most rapists are men we know and like: our neighbors and our colleagues and sometimes even our friends. Men who might admit that things got a little bit out of hand, or that they didn’t mean to go that far but they got caught up in the heat of the moment. Men like my friend’s boyfriend, who once referred to beer as liquid panty remover only to declare minutes later that rapists deserve to be castrated. Men who think that consent is a one-time binary, yes or no, and not an ongoing process of checking in with their partners.

Men we think of as nice guys.

Men who look just like everybody else.

And the worst part is, this feels like a best case scenario. In fact, there’s a small part of me that is still somewhat shocked that a white man from a well-connected family was convicted at all.

But please, tell me again about how our society takes rape very seriously.

Brock Turner’s father might be right that he does not have a violent past. It might, in fact, be accurate to say that up until the events of January 17th, 2015, Brock Turner had led an exemplary life. It’s possible that at the time Turner did not consider what he was doing to be sexual assault. But it was. The fact that he’s not a violent monster doesn’t mean he isn’t a rapist. He’s a rapist because he committed a rape. If these nice men who kind of sort of identify with what he did committed rapes, they’re rapists too.

And this is what we need to talk about over and over: the fact that nice boys from nice families commit rape. The fact that assault can happen even when the rapist does not “feel like” he is committing rape, because someone told him that attacks like the one Brock Turner committed are just normal romance. The fact that Brock Turner’s feelings seem to have greatly trumped those of the woman he assaulted.

We need to talk about how so many reactions to stories like these center the mens’ feelings.

And then we need to talk about how we can drown out those voices with the voices of survivors.

I used to go on long walks when I was pregnant. I’d lace up my snow boots and zip my barely-fitting winter coat over my belly and just walk for hours around the neighborhood. I loved it. I loved how I waddled, my hips expanding to accommodate the baby’s drop. I loved how my stomach strained the zipper, pocket seams bursting, as if even my clothes were excited with anticipation about my daughter’s arrival. I loved how strangers smiled and asked when I was due and told me, “Congratulations!”

I loved being a pregnant person.

It felt easy to be a “good” pregnant person. Yes, the details were hard – a screenshot of safe fish to eat lived on my phone, consulted before every sushi order that always ended in California rolls anyway; I sat on an inflatable birthing ball at work to try to encourage the baby to go into proper head-down position; I didn’t sleep on my back; I learned infant CPR; we squirreled away money for future childcare.

But overall, I was lucky. For me, moving through the world as a pregnant woman was simple. I felt so sure of my choices, so sure I was doing it right. It was the first time in my whole life I felt truly at home with my identity, that I wholly embodied within what was being projected outwardly. It was the first time I felt confident in myself.

Motherhood is not like that. Motherhood has shaken my confidence to the core, chiseled away my decision-making skills, left me puddled and wobbly. Things that had once seemed stupidly obvious stop me in my tracks. I spend a ridiculous amount of time standing in the grocery store, paralyzed at the thought of choosing the wrong baby water. I agonize over what is the proper type of onesie to put her in (Fleece? Cotton? Flannel?). Old episodes of ER play in the background as she cluster feeds and my mind hums with screen time recommendations.

Everything, every choice, every decision, every moment, is heavy with consequence.

My daughter sleeps in her bassinet next to me. I lay in bed, having checked to make sure she’s breathing. Once. Twice. Three times already. I close my eyes, satisfied.

She shifts.

Don’t do it, I reprimand myself in my head. She’s fine. Don’t do it. She just moved a little. Don’t do it. Embarrassingly, she has not one but two life-detecting monitors (a motion sensor pad under her mattress that came with the video monitor, and a Snuza clipped on her diaper that is supposed to beep should she stop breathing.) Don’t do it. Neither is going off. Don’t do it. She’s fine, she’s fine, she’s fine…

I lift my head, scootch to the side of the bed, peer over. I check on her. I watch her diaphragm move up and down. I make sure her nose and mouth are clear of anything that has the minuscule chance of blocking her airway (the sleeve of her onesie positioned in a one in a million chance in the throes of her sleep, the fitted sheet somehow coming up from the secure hugging of the mattress corner and tangled over her face in her tossing…) She is fine. I pull the covers up, I close my eyes, I wait for sleep.

She shifts again.

Motherhood has shaken my confidence to the core, chiseled away my decision-making skills, left me puddled and wobbly.
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I don’t want to be this mother. Double-checking, triple-checking that the car seat is clicked in properly (did I hear two clicks? I don’t know. Do it again). Nerves frayed after a bad night of sleep (why did I rock her to sleep, she will never learn to sleep on her own, I’ve ruined her sleep habits forever and committed my husband and me to a lifetime of interrupted nights, 2 a.m. wake ups). Thoughts from long ago, news stories of dangers lurking in every corner fill my head (infants accidentally left in hot cars, dead after their first day at daycare, stabbed by the nanny…).

I’m sorry, I didn’t get it, I want to say to the mothers of eons past. I used to think, “Why is it so hard? Why are you so worried? If your baby is hungry, she will eat. Tired, she will sleep. What are you fretting, obsessing, agonizing about?” I’m sorry I didn’t understand until now.

The love for my daughter took time to come in. We don’t talk about that much, but maybe we should, the assurance offered to new moms that their breast milk may take time to come alongside a “don’t worry, that love everyone talks about, it will come too.” It snuck up on me, weeks after she arrived, but when it came it was enough to stop the world. I would lay in bed after a middle of the night feeding and listen to her shallow breaths, listen to my husband’s deep slumber beside me, everyone at peace, and I would think if the world had to end, please God let it be now because there would never be anything more perfect than this moment.

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand how your child is everything and nothing all at once. Like Sandra Cisneros describes in her short story Eleven, how when you’re eleven you’re not just eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. My daughter is everything right now in the moment, but she is also nothing but potential, events yet experienced, lessons yet learned, a life yet lived.

It’s here where the anxiety nestles itself, feeds off itself, this crux of past and future.

The heat rattles to life and fills my New York City apartment with an oppressive warmth. Is she too hot in her swaddle? “Cold babies cry, hot babies die.” Pinterest notifications illuminate my phone during nighttime feedings, alerting me to pins I might like: “5 Hidden SIDS Risks” and “Newborn Safety Checklist.” Clickbait promising to make me a better mother lures me in.

“It’s because you click on them,” my husband says as I show him the ad for the weighted sleep sack that promises three more hours of sleep in just three nights, the gripe water that cures colic and stops crying, the teas and bars and cookies that will boost my dwindling supply of milk. “It’s targeting you because it wants you to buy things.”

But it doesn’t feel that way. I don’t feel targeted; I feel like I’m being sent clues to a puzzle. That writhing, wailing newborn you can’t figure out? We know how to fix it–here’s why your baby isn’t sleeping; here’s why your baby isn’t eating; here’s why your baby won’t stop crying, here’s what you’re doing wrong. You’re doing it wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

I feel like a good mom only when I’m not responsible for her. When she is with Grandma or Dad I wash and change her crib sheets. I scrub her clothes free of spit-up stains. I sanitize her bottles and pacifiers. I organize her toys. I buy more formula. I tick off all the things she needs, stay on top of the concrete, hard details of keeping her alive and happy. But she always comes back, and with her the unknowns.

But are they unknowns, or are they just things I haven’t learned? How could I live with myself knowing the information was out there that could’ve saved us both and I was too lazy to click it? That the research existed but I was too tired to read and evaluate it thoroughly? That I was too overwhelmed, it was four in the morning, I’d been up half the night, I knew the recommendations of flat on her back in her own space but I just needed to sleep so I put her in the swing, in the bed, in my arms, as I rocked her, rocked her, rocked her, my eyes snapping open in panic after dozing off, dawn light teasing the corners of the window.

The model of motherhood is there, it’s right there, I shout in my own head. In millions of mothers doing it right, doing it better.

My daughter raised the stakes too high in a game I don’t have the constitution to play. Thoughts of being younger, begging and begging to watch a scary movie and then huddling by a nightlight, every night for weeks, both terrified and ashamed, in equal measure, of the fear I’d brought on myself.

You wanted this, prayed and pleaded and cried each month when one line appeared instead of two.

Now she’s here. You protect her. You keep her safe.

She would never exist again. This soul made of stardust. It would never form again.

It’s maddening, it’s exhausting, it feels viscerally unfair, being forced to exist like this: repeating the same mundane steps of caring for a newborn over and over, the numbing repetitiveness sliced sharp with the knowledge that if you don’t do the steps right, if you let your guard down for a moment, if you lose focus on the task at hand, if you take your eye off the ball…like the bright yellow posters in factories warning workers of the dangers on the assembly line that do nothing to break through the haze of monotony until an accident shocks everyone awake again.

We know how to fix it–here’s why your baby isn’t sleeping; here’s why your baby isn’t eating; here’s why your baby won’t stop crying, here’s what you’re doing wrong.
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My daughter grows. She reaches developmental milestones. At five months she scoots forward on her knees and elbows in a combat crawl and I lay out circus-colored safety mats to cushion the hardwood. At seven months, I turn around to see she’s pulled herself up on the side of her crib — that night we drop her mattress to the lowest setting. Now, at nine months, the mats have been replaced with carpet because she cruises along any furniture she can reach, legs shaking when she lets go to test her limits. She gobbles down the food we put on her highchair tray, bits of cheese and mashed banana and bread balled as small as my fingers can make it.

The old fears lessen their grip around my heart but instead settle like a cold in my bones, and are replaced with new fears that cause the blood to rush in my ears each time she stumbles while she learns to walk or chokes as she learns to eat. I doubt they’ll ever go away completely. This is parenting, I think, your breath always one moment away from being knocked out of you.  

A grape not cut small enough. A dresser not properly secured.

My mind remembers, listening to a news brief when I was so young I was standing on a chair to reach something in the kitchen cabinets. The grandmother had wanted to surprise her infant grandchild with a stuffed bunny for Easter. She put it in the crib next to the girl while she slept. The tape holding the wrapping paper somehow came unstuck, the paper somehow covered her mouth and nose in the night.

Everything would be nothing.

I raise my head, peak over the side of the crib. Check to make sure my daughter is still breathing.

The Untold Story Of Memorial Day: Former Slaves Honoring And Mourning The Dead

By Sarah Lazare

The African-American history of the federal holiday has been nearly wiped from public memory.

Union General John Logan is often credited with founding Memorial Day. The commander-in-chief of a Union veterans’ organization called the Grand Army of the Republic, Logan issued a decree establishing what was then named “Decoration Day” on May 5, 1868, declaring it “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

Today, cities across the North and South claim credit for establishing the first Decoration Day — from Macon, Georgia to Richmond, Virginia to Carbondale, Illinois. Yet, a key story of the holiday has been nearly erased from public memory and most official accounts, including that offered by the the Department of Veterans Affairs.

During the spring of 1865, African-Americans in Charleston, South Carolina — most of them former slaves — held a series of memorials and rituals to honor unnamed fallen Union soldiers and boldly celebrate the struggle against slavery. One of the largest such events took place on May first of that year but had been largely forgotten until David Blight, a history professor at Yale University, found records at a Harvard archive. In a New York Times article published in 2011, Blight described the scene. While it is difficult to pinpoint the precise birthplace of the holiday, it is fair to say that ceremonies like the following are largely erased from the American narrative of Memorial Day.

During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

A key story of the holiday has been nearly erased from public memory and most official accounts.

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

This story of Memorial Day, also reported by Victoria M. Massie of Vox, was not merely excluded from the history books but appears to have been actively suppressed. The park where the race course prison camp once stood was eventually named Hampton Park after the Confederate General Wade Hampton who became South Carolina’s governor following the civil war.

In 1966, former President Lyndon B. Johnson declared Waterloo, New York to be the official birthplace of Memorial Day. Then, in 1971, Congress established “Memorial Day” as an official federal holiday to honor all Americans who have fallen in U.S. Wars. In an article published in 2013 on Snopes.com, writer David Mikkelson used these official declarations, as well as the decree issued by Logan, to bolster his argument that African-Americans in Charleston probably should not be credited for establishing the holiday. He further noted that numerous other towns and cities claim to have created the first ceremonies. Yet, Mikkelson’s reasoning fails to account for the systematic and proven appropriation, erasure and distortion of African-American history by presidents, lawmakers, generals and scholars alike. The fact that the role of African-Americans is missing from the official record is precisely the problem. At the very least, the contribution of Black people in Charleston has been erased from the public narrative of Memorial Day and deserves to be recognized.

World War II veteran Howard Zinn argued in 1976 that the holiday has since become an uncritical celebration of war-making. “Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees,” he wrote. “Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.”

Yet Memorial Day has other troubling modern-day manifestations. Today, while confederate symbols across the United States are increasingly rejected as racist, civil war reenactors still gather in Charleston for a public ceremony, held shortly after Memorial Day, to honor the confederacy on the anniversary of General Stonewall Jackson’s death in 1863. The ceremony is slated to take place even after last summer’s white supremacist massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in which nine African-Americans were slaughtered.

Mikkelson’s reasoning fails to account for the systematic and proven appropriation, erasure and distortion of African-American history.

Charleston officials have taken some small steps towards recognizing the city’s African-American history. Following a community campaign, the city of Charleston finally held its first formal commemoration of the African-American roots of Memorial Day in 2010, and the following year it established a plaque. Yet, the history of former slaves’ efforts to give the union dead a proper burial is missing from the park’s official history, made available online by the Parks Conservancy.

Dot Scott, president of the Charleston branch of the NAACP, told AlterNet, “Many of the issues we have around race are based on the fact that these stories have not been told. It sends the message that the contributions of African-Americans are not valued and respected.”

*This article was updated to include a response to a Snopes.com article.

This story first appeared at AlterNet, and is republished here with permission.

“I am water
soft enough
to offer life
tough enough
to drown it away”

– from ‘Milk and Honey’ by Rupi Kaur

I started my week off by interviewing Ijeoma Oluo about systemic racism and the representation of women of color in the media.

Ijeoma talked about how, at its core, when people with privilege “do nothing,” even with all the good faith and intention in the world, it constitutes oppression.

The conversation was incredibly important and inspiring and ground-breaking.

I also walked out of the room very broken. For a variety of reasons; discussing these issues in a public forum where the room was primarily white was challenging, the examples of casual racism were so painful and familiar.

We barely scratched the surface.

Because, how do you cover centuries of oppression in an hour-long conversation?

How many examples do we need of how people of color aren’t considered worth defending, worth listening to, worth being considered human, before people in power take notice?

Will it be after a book by a white woman continues to receive fanfare despite being journalistically indefensible and morally repugnant?

Will it be after a newspaper publishes a full-page recruitment ad for the KKK?

Will it be after Bill Cosby gets locked away — rightly so — but the definition of justice continues to be very different for white monsters like Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein?

How much longer after “far too late,” will those in power — those with privilege who could actually do something — start caring?

With love + solidarity,
Ruchika Tulshyan
Founding Editor

What Happened That Made Us Numb To These Deaths?

By Asma Gaba

The police say that this man was stalking her after she had turned him down multiple times. If that story was correct, I knew nothing about it.

She never told me about a guy persistently asking her out on dates, or that he was following her. I wondered why.

Every time I walked outside and saw a man holding an object, or walking a little too fast, or with his hands in his pockets, panic began to brew in my chest.

Theoretically, I knew that every man wasn’t a potential school shooter, but there was a small part of my mind that totally believed that every man was.

Bernie Sanders And My Mom And The Attack On Sex Workers

By Lorelei Lee

People care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago to a “porn star’s mom” — as a Newsweek story about my tweet put it — than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

Even after many years of living in the world as a sex worker, after the deaths of so many friends and coworkers — some of them uninvestigated and unreported, others followed by online comments like “good thing she’s dead” — the passion with which people will apply themselves to protecting (or destroying) the reputation of a politician, while ignoring the impact of legislation he supports, still surprises me.

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‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Costume Designer Wants To Fuel The Fire With Visuals

By Peg Aloi

There’s a lot of bad stuff happening in America now. Do you think regimented clothing or dress codes for women or other groups may soon become a reality?

Ane Crabtree: I think those in power are trying to take things in that direction, and I don’t think they’re going to get very far. I don’t know why I’m saying that, because we have already seen so many changes; but in my mind, I am completely optimistic.

We’ve been through so many things in my lifetime. I know someone from a country that experienced severe repression of women in the late 1970s, I’ll just leave it at that without identifying the country by name. She wrote to thank me for the design of the Handmaid costumes, and she thought that I took the idea for that design from her country as a metaphor for those times of regime change.

But in terms of that kind of thing happening here, I think it would take years and years, and I don’t think we’ll get there. Because I think women will just become stronger and stronger and will fight against it.

Heroic Men Share Stories Of Times They Didn’t Sexually Harass Women

By Ginny Hogan

Here, I ask brave, upstanding men to share stories of encounters with women that did not involve sexual harassment.

“I was waiting in line at the grocery store, and I noticed the girl in front of me has a nice ass. Well, I say ‘girl’ because she was extremely sexually attractive to me — she was probably in her late twenties with a successful career, eh, if I had to guess, I’d say she ran a team of software engineers, based on the fact that I took a photo and Google-imaged her and found her Linkedin. Anyway, I stared at her ass for a long time, but whaddya know — I didn’t grab it.”
 — The Hero John Monroe

“Do I have a story about not sexually harassing a woman? Ha, yeah, funny you should ask. It happened today, actually. I was walking my dog, and another woman was walking her dog, and we just walked on past each other.”
 — The Venerable Mark Wallace

Unpslash/ Li Yang

Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having.

flickr/StephenRMelling

A s a woman who makes a living putting pen to paper, my second worst fear is that I will communicate so poorly that I’m misunderstood (I’ll leave you to guess what the worst fear is). So I have a certain amount of empathy for Ross Douthat fretting about that very thing after a severe backlash to his latest New York Times column, entitled “The Redistribution of Sex.” My empathy went out like a tide when I recalled that, in typical fashion, he refuses to be honest about the implications of his crypto-misogynistic thought experiments.

In the piece, he argues that while leftists and feminists are opposed to the idea that anyone is entitled to sex, this is a natural and logical outcome of societies that “look for fixes that seem to build on previous revolutions, rather than reverse them.” As he sees it, our vaunted sexual revolution means that we are inevitably sliding towards the society yearned for by mass-murdering misogynists like Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian, because we have imbued sex with so much value — both personal and political — in the wake of the 1960s.

This has been mischaracterized as Douthat arguing in favor of the “incels’” ideal world. He doesn’t, but this is hardly exculpatory. While the caricature of Douthat’s argument misses the particulars, it nevertheless captures the spirit of a piece that is resolutely androcentric and utterly ignorant of sexual culture.

This Is The Story Of The Story I Can’t Write

Although Douthat is not in favor of this proposed redistribution, by entertaining the idea at all and going so far as to propose it as an inevitable dystopia (which, really, is the fault of us damn feminists for wanting too much sexual choice) he nevertheless embraces fundamental aspects of a worldview shared by reactionary malefactors like incels and men’s rights activists. It all starts with the “sexual hierarchy” that he and other writers have cited as a social problem that gives rise to incel terrorism. In short, they can’t get dates or get laid, so they blame women and society at large; inevitably, some act out violently. But accepting this argument is to take the embittered propaganda of these communities at face value. There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.

Thus, without endorsing their ends, Douthat endorses an MRA view of sexuality. He simply proposes a more conservative solution, arguing “that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence.”

“The sexual revolution,” he argues, “created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.” This is strikingly similar to an equally credulous analysis advanced by the nominally leftist thinker Angela Nagle, who writes:

“Sexual patterns that have emerged as a result of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order.”

Pun unintended, I’m certain. Nagle’s words, which even more explicitly regurgitate MRA-ish talking points about sexual elites and celibacy, were passed around after the Toronto massacre by other leftists as “a perceptive point” about these men who keep killing women en masse. What Nagle and Douthat share, aside from being all too willing to take the promoters of these extreme views at face value, is an argument that fails to account for the existence of women and queer people.

There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.

In short, we have a good A/B test available to us that suggests the problem isn’t sex and who’s getting it, but how different groups conceive of their entitlement to it, and what they do about it.

So let’s break this down.

There’s a sexual hierarchy, but nerdy young white guys aren’t the only ones on the wrong side of it.

It is striking to me that these conversations proceed almost entirely without discussing women who are perceived of as sexually undesirable. Fat women, disabled women, nerdy women, non-white women, trans women, all fall short of beauty standards that are structured by prejudices as much as the advent of the “sexual revolution.”

Douthat does mention this when he tries to use a recent essay by Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan to buttress his argument, where he notes that Srinivasan makes the exact point I just made, but then breezes over its implications entirely except to suggest — bizarrely — that she implies sexually undesirable minorities must someday be redressed by the very “redistribution” feminists find so appalling. Neither Srinivasan, nor myself, nor indeed anyone in that milieu has ever made that argument nor sought to imply it. Douthat was undaunted: “This wouldn’t instantiate a formal right to sex,” he says of Srinivasan’s argument, “…but if the new order worked as its revolutionary architects intended, sex would be more justly distributed than it is today.”

This is speculation in its purest form and it mistakes analysis of ideology (recognizing that norms of attractiveness and desirability are highly politically charged) for a proposal of a “redistributive” solution. But beyond this, it also ignores the elephant in the room. If all of these groups experience a certain dislocation and loneliness from being on the wrong side of sexual hierarchies, why aren’t we awash in mass murderers from those groups? Where are the lonely, nerdy women who kill because they can’t get a date on Tinder? Where are all the black women mowing down pedestrians in a rental van because society’s beauty standards aggressively privilege whiteness? In failing to grapple with this, every writer who entertains incel/MRA ideology, even as a mere thought experiment, makes a catastrophic analytical error.

Being at the bottom of a sexual hierarchy does not mean you don’t have sex.

This is another point that should be obvious but has, apparently, been lost in the vacuous prattle that followed the Toronto killings. Society has hegemonic norms, but people violate them constantly and form microcultures. As an autistic transgender woman with non-white features, I’m certainly on the “wrong” side of a few beauty hierarchies in this society and I pay a price for that; I still have sex and two very committed partners with whom I share very deep connections.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright. This doesn’t even begin to grapple with how your individual notions of attractiveness, honed over the years by uniquely personal experiences, may affect things. Hierarchies of desirability do have an impact, but not necessarily on the practical outcome of whether or not you have sex. It may affect your ability to feel sexy, and hurt your self-esteem of course; goddess knows I’ve been there. But that’s less about your ability to have sex, than it is how you feel about yourself and what struggles emerge from that. Through it all, people from every position on the “hierarchy” still manage to frequently find meaningful and exciting relationships.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright.

Even a casual glance in your own social circles will reveal many happily bonded people who, in one way or another, are considered socially undesirable or “unattractive” by the ruthless metrics of conventional beauty standards. Meanwhile, our media is saturated with the image of “unattractive” men who are loved deeply by conventionally attractive women; it’s the conceit of a dozen and one sitcoms and it does reflect a partial reality where men who look like, say, Kevin James are quite capable of finding loving relationships. (I say “partial” because, naturally, it fails to reflect what life is like for women of all shapes and sizes.)

In short…

Sexual hierarchies aren’t really about sex.

They’re wired in to all manner of socio-economic and political mores, certainly, but bear only a passing relationship to your actual ability to find dates and slap your genitals against someone else’s. Rather, they are norms about social value which determine other aspects of your reality that are untethered to your sex life. For women, those who are seen as conventionally attractive will have to endure constant imprecations about their careers — “is she sleeping her way to the top?” will haunt her every step, and her beauty will be taken as blanket consent for everything from drawing porn of her against her will to dismissing her point of view to undervaluing her accomplishments.

The Case For BDSM As A Feminist Manifesto In Art

Conventionally “unattractive” women, meanwhile, will be ruthlessly mocked and derided by men (including incels — just look at what they say about women they deem undesirable, impervious to irony as reactionary bigots often must be). Such women may be ignored outright or deemed unworthy of making even professional connections with, seen as uncharismatic, unhealthy, or shamed for what they look like.

This is all, indeed, a function of the sexual hierarchy; but it’s markedly unrelated to one’s sex life as such. Which brings me to the final point…

Sex will not cure these extremists.

Implicit in arguments like Nagle’s and Douthat’s is the idea that if only these lonely nerd boys got laid more often, maybe the victims in Isla Vista or Toronto would be alive today.

There’s no evidence to suggest this is the case.

Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having. Domestically abusive men are often having sex with the partners they assault, after all. Meanwhile men like Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes were, indeed, raping countless women. These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power. In fact, as heterosexual men who were married they were, to a large extent, living Douthat’s ideal. But, if anything, their abuses begat more of the same; nothing was ever enough, and each new assault seemed only to feed a void that grew into the prodigious litany of crimes that each man is now justly infamous for.

These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power.

The cancer must be cut out from the root. Implying, as so many often do, that the solution is to “give” sex to men like Minassian is merely to feed the lust of insatiable loathing. The problem is not that they aren’t having enough sex; the problem is that they despise women, and will do so no matter how much sex they’re having.

The proposition that sex is “unequally distributed,” which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim. Being outside of hegemonic beauty norms does not inherently deny you love or sex; your place in that hierarchy instead shapes other things untethered to your actual sex life.

Yet this dubious claim has legs because, as ever, we must privilege the perspective of the loudest and angriest men as worth consideration. The scope of their entitlement determines the seriousness with which we must take their worldview, however horribly skewed it may be. Thus, lightly laundered mainstream interpretations of this worldview linger, despite the obviously dehumanizing implication of likening women to a currency or resource that must be paternalistically apportioned by the powers that be.

Douthat laments that progressives seem to be demanding that “the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states.” But by disingenuously linking these two things, he poisons the discussion he claims to want to have. Asexual people, after all, don’t figure into Douthat’s argument. Yet, as a political force, they’ve argued very forcefully against the idea of compulsory sexuality — and done so in a way that neither shades into anti-feminism, nor into arguing that the sexual revolution was some kind of mistake. Theirs is a call for greater pluralism, a far cry from Douthat’s lustful homogenization.

The proposition that sex is ‘unequally distributed,’ which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim.

It’s old hat by now to claim that crimes like Rodger’s or Minassian’s are the fault of growing liberalization, that somehow women’s choice has left some men so forlorn that they can only resort to murder. There is no way to take this argument seriously without courting a misogynistic worldview that stands ignorant of even obvious facts. Even if Douthat is worried about the coming of a “redistributive” sexual culture, such concerns are founded on the hot air of hyper-ideological drivel that he had no business entertaining in one of the nation’s largest newspapers. But I can see why he did: His preferred prescription for us would see — as always — women and queer people stripped of our rights and, presumably, forced into straight and monogamous relationships. In the end, Douthat does seem to believe in “redistribution,” just of an altogether different sort to produce a society akin to his fantasy of the 1950s.

In the end, all that needs to be said is this: Incels and their ilk do indeed believe they’re entitled to sex, and that such contact would cure them of all that ails them, sparing society from their wrath and vengeance.

We do not have to take them at their word.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-handmaids-tale-costume-designer-wants-to-fuel-the-fire-with-visuals-62d08305bc16/ Tue, 01 May 2018 21:23:02 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2605 Read more]]>

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Costume Designer Wants To Fuel The Fire With Visuals

The Establishment speaks with award-winning designer Ane Crabtree about symbolism, feminism, witches, and Handmaids.

Handmaids attend the premiere of Hulu’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 2 at TCL Chinese Theatre on April 19, 2018 in Hollywood, California (Credit: Facebook)

Warning: mild spoilers ahead

E ven if you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel, or seen its Hulu adaptation, you’ve probably seen images of the women’s uniforms in Gilead — red robes, white bonnets, hiding women’s faces and bodies, marking these women as men’s property, not people. These costumes have been donned by activists in many public protests in the last year and are now a widely recognized symbol of resistance.

At least some of the credit for this powerful sartorial movement can go to Ane Crabtree, the costume designer for the Emmy-winning series adaptation. Ane’s been a costume designer for film and television for decades. Some of her work includes the pilot for The Sopranos on HBO; episodes of Rectify on the Sundance Channel (a great series loosely based on the true-life story of Damien Echols); and episodes of Without a Trace, LAX, Vanished, Justified, and Westworld (about to debut its second season).

Ane and I talked about the ways in which her upbringing informs her work, and the importance of color in the symbolism of The Handmaid’s Tale. Also, witches…

Peg Aloi: You were born in South Dakota, raised in Kentucky. I’m very interested to know if your upbringing in what many people would call “flyover country” informs your work in general, and maybe your work on this show in particular. In The Handmaid’s Tale we see many references to the proud liberal city Boston once was, and what it has turned into.

Ane Crabtree: I definitely think that is something that informs everything and everybody, where you grow up. I moved to Kentucky from South Dakota when I was 3, and I’ve done all my adult growing-up away from Kentucky; I haven’t lived there since I was 18. Since then I’ve lived in other places usually for about 15 years, with the exception of England, where I lived for two years. I left because I was a young kid wanting different things at a young age. But I do reach back sometimes, to use things in a creative way as an adult now. I love South Dakota. Oddly, with Kentucky, work is what brought me back and I was just there recently. In my fifties now, I want to spend time with my family and get to know it again. There was some bad stuff that happened there, personally and politically. But the landscape inspires my work in a very personal way. And a very prolific way, and also in violent ways.

PA: I think one of the most interesting costume moments in the first season is in the episode “Jezebels” [in which characters visit a brothel in Gilead]. Did you have fun with that?

AC: I did. It was funny, though; we never had a lot of time, because when you’re doing television everything is on fast-forward. “Jezebels” was something that was very well-known in the book. I had to speed through it much faster than I would have liked. It was really awesome, though; a departure in so many ways. The whole vibe was so different, where the women were dressing provocatively.

It felt as though all of a sudden you’re seeing women as sexy, which is so normal, but it felt not normal. I designed everything in those scenes, from the leads down to the 40 women working at the brothel. I really wanted to make each one a distinct character, but as I said, it was all very fast. Funnily enough, I think my fashion show experience helped me, because I had to move quickly through all 40 designs, and so it was a bit stressful.

I Grew Up In A Fundamentalist Cult — ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Was My Reality

PA: Whitney Friedlander’s interview with you for Variety discussed the color palettes and the blue dresses of the wives, which are referred to as “peacock” colors. In Margaret Atwood’s novel, the wives’ dresses are referred to as sky blue (sort of a Virgin Mary image), and in the first film adaptation the dresses are a very primary blue, sort of cobalt or royal blue, which, paired with the very bright red of the Handmaids, had this American patriotism thing going on, flag colors.

I find it so intriguing that your designs for the Commander’s wives contain a variety of colors within this palette: emerald green gowns for formal occasions, dark blue dresses for everyday, and sometimes other shades. Why is there this subtle gradation of color for them, and what kind of symbolism is contained in the color choices for these costumes?

AC: It’s a very subtle thing. I am a huge rabid fan of Margaret Atwood, and of course followed the novel for much of what we did. When we first got started with Season One, the design went into a very dark emotional version of the red and the blue in the book, which is one reason we didn’t do sky blue. Our red became blood red, and the idea for the teal blue followed thereafter. We play with color in the camera work and the use of filters in our show, and we wanted something that was hauntingly beautiful, and hauntingly disrupted. I’m a fan of the original film, and Margaret Atwood is a producer on our show so I could write to her and ask questions at any time. I followed Margaret’s story for many of the costume ideas, but I did change out the striped dresses for the Econo-wives; instead I did grey.

The original movie had that bright blue and red, as you said, and those were really perfect colors for the 1990s. But for our show, which premiered in 2016, it felt like the colors we were using were really the perfect colors for right now. There’s so much black in these colors. Being a painter that’s one way that I look at it: These are like blackened colors.

PA: The color palettes of the show’s production design often seem to arise from the costume colors, as if those points of color are the inspiration. I noticed in this season, where we see the “Unwomen” working in the Colonies, cleaning up toxic radioactive waste, there is a lot of grey in the costumes and interiors, but a lot of golden light when we see the women working outdoors. That feels almost nostalgic to me. That’s such an interesting contrast, the sunshine and all that greyness, a bit of beauty and romance amid all the horror of that place. How did you go about envisioning the costumes for these segments?

AC: When we were pitching the season, me and (production designer) Mark White came up with the visuals, and for the Colonies we looked at so many different places for inspiration. Mark and I have a very symbiotic way of creating, because we’re best friends, basically. We both adore Andrew Wyeth, and that kind of dry brushed gold you see in his paintings, that golden light that comes in winter; you know it because it’s all over upstate New York. It also occurs in Kentucky, and also in Toronto where I was living for a while. It doesn’t necessarily fill you with a feeling of warmth, there’s a coldness to it. So that straw colored shade of gold was in our original ideas for that place and affected how we chose the location.

It’s a tricky thing to ask, though: What color is radiation? Most of us are lucky enough to never even have to consider this question. I grew up with several Japanese families in my neighborhood, they were mixed families, women who had married American servicemen during the war. One of them was this amazing woman who introduced me to collecting rocks and gems, which I still do to this day. Also, in a very macabre way, she was trying to help me with understanding her story: She showed me her wounds from Hiroshima. It happened when she was a little kid and it stayed with her through her entire life. She had horrible health problems, but she was a very formidable, strong and vibrant woman. As a child, she was outside when the bombs fell and so she was exposed. So this woman’s experience found its way into the costume designs and what happens to the women over time. Fukushima, which is a much more recent historical example of this, that was also an influence, so this research all went into the costume and production design for the segments taking place in the Colonies.

This place isn’t shown in Season One, but the color blue was seen in so many places, not just costumes: a color that is tinged with sadness. So what we did was just added some grey to that for the outer layers of the costumes in those scenes. Those costumes have a lot of under layers too, and you can almost imagine it like layers of skin peeling off, which is of course what happens. You have all good intentions for things to be a certain way, but as is often the case in Toronto, there are weather changes, so I had to redesign so many things between Seasons One and Two.

‘The color blue was seen in so many places, not just costumes: a color that is tinged with sadness.’

We ended up adding more layers to the costumes of the Handmaids when they’re outdoors, and also for the women in the Colonies. The underlayers of those costumes is a sort of onion skin look, made from sheer organza that was transparent, and these went underneath these 1920s-style slip dresses, and all of this would cling to the skin, if they were bathing, for example. In one or two scenes, you can see this fabric hanging out from beneath the outer layers, you see it on Emily and Janine. One cool thing was that Lizzy [Elisabeth Moss, who plays June/Offred] saw it, and while she doesn’t wear any of those costumes, she’s just so beautifully inspired and supportive, and she said it looks like a membrane around a newborn baby. So that definitely became kind of a very meaningful icon, even though it was such a tiny part of the total design. And that idea of the onion skin, the different layers of a person and what’s left of them as they’re being literally worn away.

PA: I noticed the Commander’s wife, who winds up in the Colonies, gets to keep her blue dress.

AC: We could spent a lot of time discussing what happens to the women of Gilead; the process they go through when they’ve done something wrong, like if they’re a “gender traitor” or an educator. So for example when we see Alexis [Emily/Ofglen, who plays a professor and a lesbian, aka a “gender traitor”] and her lover go on trial, we have to think about what would they wear when we see them. Same idea for Marisa Tomei’s character: Because she was a Commander’s wife, they allowed her to keep her clothes until the very end. In our script, she was the first of the Commanders wives to go there, and in a way having that color as a reminder of who she is allows the other Unwomen to be very angry with her and it causes a chasm. It’s the way to fuel the fire, visually.

PA: I have noticed in the new season that there is a great deal of imagery that is reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. Or maybe that’s just me. Did this inform your designs at all, the idea that the Handmaids are witchy figures? Also thinking of Emily who is a sort of witchy healer figure in her time at the Colonies. And the Marthas, whose outfits feel very Puritan and Colonial-era to me.

AC: Wow. It’s mind blowing to hear this. Listen, what’s really cuckoo about it is, I have never researched any of that. I am sitting here with my mouth agape, because while I am very curious about all of that, in fact, oddly enough my grandfather on my mom’s side from Okinawa was a healer, so that’s in my family. But also, Margaret Atwood talks about one of her relatives being a sort of witch, in that she went against the grain in different ways. I had read about that in relation to The Handmaid’s Tale. Also, one of my favorite films is that one with Daniel Day-Lewis, oh what’s the name of it?

PA: The Crucible! Such a great film adaptation.

AC: I found out that my neighbor played Goody Nurse in that movie, and I never knew she was an actress. This is just so interesting and inspiring. And I have to say, sometimes when you’re dealing with creativity, there are things that are just inherent, so who knows how or why people bring their own thing to a book or piece of music or a painting. One thing I did refer to was that Old Dutch cleanser label, this beautiful image of a girl with a pair of wings, it looks very Dutch. Margaret Atwood had said this image just horrified her as a child, and so she really wanted to use that as inspiration for what the Handmaids wore.

PA: In addition to the costumes having a sort of puritanical look — well, apart from the color red, but then that’s reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter, which takes place during those times as well — you have all the imagery of the gallows, the public stoning and then the way that women in the household are treated like servants. But also, like you see in The Crucible, there’s this sexual tension with the man of the house, so basically that was all just screaming at me during the first few episodes of the second season.

AC: Again, this is just blowing my mind! I mean, maybe that symbolism was in the minds of Bruce Miller or some of the directors. TV goes so fast in production, you design and research all of it as much as you can, then you just have to run with what you’ve got. I’m sometimes embarrassed when people ask me about specific things, and I realize it’s something that was unintentional or came out accidentally, but I guess that’s how people often respond to film and TV. It’s fascinating.

‘Sometimes when you’re dealing with creativity, there are things that are just inherent.’

PA: I love that! As a film and TV critic I sometimes ask directors about things like this, and sometimes am amazed to find that some piece of symbolism or some aesthetic that I think is completely intentional was not even something they had considered. It’s really mysterious and magical to me sometimes.

Okay, one last question. There’s a lot of bad stuff happening in America now. Do you think regimented clothing or dress codes for women or other groups may soon become a reality?

CA: I think those in power are trying to take things in that direction, and I don’t think they’re going to get very far. I don’t know why I’m saying that, because we have already seen so many changes; but in my mind, I am completely optimistic. We’ve been through so many things in my lifetime. I know someone from a country that experienced severe repression of women in the late 1970s, I’ll just leave it at that without identifying the country by name. She wrote to thank me for the design of the Handmaid costumes, and she thought that I took the idea for that design from her country as a metaphor for those times of regime change. But in terms of that kind of thing happening here, I think it would take years and years, and I don’t think we’ll get there. Because I think women will just become stronger and stronger and will fight against it.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/bernie-sanders-and-my-mom-and-the-attack-on-sex-workers-5b3edea5745a/ Mon, 30 Apr 2018 20:57:51 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2611 Read more]]>

People care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

flickr/Phil Roeder

For years, I have been writing on Twitter about the impact of legislation on sex workers, which is to say, on my community. Sometimes people pay attention, sometimes strangers write to me about it, sometimes I get threats and name-calling.

But never have I faced on the internet the kind of vitriol or the kind of frighteningly zealous support as I have since I told a family story online last week about Bernie Sanders behaving less-than-perfectly-progressive toward my mother some time in the early ’80s:

My whole life, my mother has told this story: she went to a democratic socialists’ convention when I was about a year and a half old where they had promised there would be childcare. She showed up, with me. They said,

???@MissLoreleiLee

Sorry, we didn't get the money we thought we'd get, so we cut the childcare." So she was like, okay, taking my kid to these talks then. She went to hear the keynote speaker. We were in the back of the room. I was playing with a toy and making some toddler noises.

???@MissLoreleiLee

The keynote speaker stopped what he was saying and said, "could someone tell that child to be quiet.

???@MissLoreleiLee

My mother has never been a patient woman. She lost it. She stood up and started to shout. "How dare you," she said. "How dare you pretend to support families and working women when the first thing you cut during a budgeting failure is childcare.

???@MissLoreleiLee

She definitely said it with more swearing.

???@MissLoreleiLee

Folks, that keynote speaker she stood up and swore at was Bernie Sanders.

???@MissLoreleiLee

The response to the tweet was overwhelming. As it turns out, people care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago to a “porn star’s mom” — as a Newsweek story about my tweet put it — than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

Even after many years of living in the world as a sex worker, after the deaths of so many friends and coworkers — some of them uninvestigated and unreported, others followed by online comments like “good thing she’s dead” — the passion with which people will apply themselves to protecting (or destroying) the reputation of a politician, while ignoring the impact of legislation he supports, still surprises me.

Sanders, along with 96 other Senators, passed H.R. 1865, also known as FOSTA-SESTA (or just SESTA) on March 21. On April 11, Trump signed the bill into law. SESTA removes protections in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to create new civil and criminal liability for “anyone who owns, manages, or operates” a website “with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.” The law does not clarify what this means. Is warning other sex workers about dangerous clients (as workers have done online for many years) facilitating prostitution? What about sharing safety and health information with sex working people? How many harm-reduction tactics are now against federal law? How will the owners, managers, and operators of social media and other communications websites respond to this, and what impact will that have on already-marginalized people?

The Legislation That Would Harm Sex Workers—In The Name Of Their Own Protection

For months before this law passed, my friends and I wrote to reporters, we tweeted and posted to Instagram and called our representatives and made as much noise as we could. It seemed obvious that this legislation would be devastating to the safety of our loved ones, and had the potential to cut all of us off from each other by making us a liability to websites that facilitate the everyday online forms of communication everyone has come to rely on. When the bill passed the Senate, our predictions came immediately true.

Websites that sex workers relied on to screen clients shut down. Google Play and Microsoft changed their terms of service. Skype and Microsoft Office have banned “offensive language” and “inappropriate content,” to go into effect on May 1. Google Drive began to delete sex workers’ content and lock out users. Sex workers started an alternative social media site called “Switter,” to ensure we would have a place to communicate with each other if we were summarily kicked off of social media. This week, Switter was kicked off of its content delivery network.

There has been other impact as well: reports of an increase in sex workers working outdoors, and stories about friends who have gone missing or harmed themselves. A friend had her bank account frozen. Another friend said that though she’d had plans to leave the adult industry, the hostility of the current climate had convinced her she would not be able to do any other kind of work. This impact is widespread and has hit folks whose work was criminalized as well as those doing legal forms of sex work such as stripping and working in adult film.

Since the law passed, my friends and I have been holding meetings, gathering donations for sex worker emergency funds, sharing information with each other as quickly and as widely as we can. All of us are frightened. All of us are angry. I’ve posted continuously about this impact on social media. I’ve criticized celebrities and politicians who supported these policies. Yes, to all of you writing to me, I’m angry at Kamala Harris too.

But my mom never yelled at Kamala Harris, as far as I know.

The story I wrote on Twitter has never been, in my family, a story about Bernie Sanders. It has always been a story about my mother. It’s a story about her standing up to authority, as she frequently has done, when she believed that what they were doing was wrong. Prior to his presidential bid, Sanders was incidental to the story’s telling. It is a family story. When he began to campaign in 2016, the funny part of the story became the fact that the politician mom once yelled at was now famous. Incidentally, most of us supported Sanders in the primaries. I even gave an interview in 2016 in which I said that I believed his policies would be better for sex workers than the policies of the other candidates. In my house, we had no trouble reconciling someone’s once less-than-perfect behavior with a larger question of who might implement the best overall policies.

I did not fact-check the story before I posted it. I’ve criticized many politicians on my social media, and I’ve shared many personal stories. I have never before had something I posted retweeted thousands of times and then reported as news. Perhaps I should have been more savvy. It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that I should have known how the internet can take hold of something and make it symbolic of one hundred other things. That I should have foreseen, with the recent attention paid to Stormy Daniels, the temptation for online publications to write anything with a headline referencing a “porn star” and a political figure. I did not foresee these things.

Among the hundreds of messages I received were:

“Better disrespect your mom than grab her pussy”

“she raised a porn star so she probably deserved it”

“Porn actresses are just whores with contracts”

“Couldn’t they use that whore who took down Al Franken again?”

“I think you’re a Russian bot middle aged white women trump supporter go home to Moscow traitor”

“Why do white women have to lie?”

“HAHA that’s right, you better fucking hide you liar.”

“You scared?”

Strip Club Raids And Closures Are Weapons Of Gentrification

There were some people who seemed to have spent hours researching the details of my tweets — in order to “debunk” them. They wanted “the truth.” I did some googling with the scant additional information I have about the incident. My family members disagree about the exact details of time and place, and I couldn’t determine with certainty whether the story was true or not. My family believes that it is. I did not, initially, question its truth. In part because I grew up with it, but also because the details about Sanders himself seem utterly banal. That a man might have told a woman to keep her child quiet while he talks seemed to me utterly unsurprising. The only part of the story that I find remarkable is that the woman stood up and shouted rather than leave the room. But my mother has always been that kind of remarkable.

The internet commenters who were the most vicious seemed to believe that I had been paid to write these tweets, that they were part of a calculated political “smear.” They seemed to believe (perhaps accurately) that this kind of anecdote holds more political power than any kind of substantive analysis ever could. I will tell you, I did not post this story with the intention of doing even minimal harm to Sanders, or with the hubris that I might be capable of doing such harm. Despite my rage at the impact of H.R. 1865 on my community, I do not wish harm on anyone who voted for it. What I wish for them is only knowledge.

The story I wrote on Twitter has never been, in my family, a story about Bernie Sanders.

I wrote that story down because I am inspired by my mother. Because I know her to be a woman who has never once kept her mouth shut. Whether or not this story is true about Bernie Sanders, I know it is a true story about my mother. Whether she shouted at Bernie Sanders at a democratic socialists convention (“I think it was actually a democratic socialists conference,” she texted me) or at (as another family member remembers it) a rally about a housing bill, or at some other less-famous, equally-imperfect politician at some other kind of early ‘80s leftist political event, the most important part of the story is not where she was or even who she said it to. The most important part is that she refused to cower. That she has always refused to live quietly.

Of course, I want it to be a story about Sanders. I want to know that my fierce and rageful and impolite mother stood up in a crowded room and shouted at one of the 97 people who would, 35 years later, vote to harm her daughter. I want this even though it is petty to want it, even though it does nothing to change the circumstances in which we now live.

On April 18, Sanders wrote:

Cardi B is right. If we are really going to make America great we need to strengthen Social Security so that seniors are able to retire with the dignity they deserve. https://t.co/B8cOkoOdLc

???@SenSanders

I do not disagree with this statement. Former stripper and current genius Cardi B has said many true things. However, what Sanders is doing with this tweet is a move that is as old as sex work. Anyone who has been a sex worker has seen this behavior a million times before. Powerful people are happy to associate with sex workers when they think we are just “edgy” enough to gain them something by association, and quick to distance themselves when confronted by the systemic stigma in our actual lives.

Bernie Sanders praising Cardi B after voting for SESTA is every ex I’ve had who brought me to a few parties, but wouldn’t let me even be seen in the vicinity of their parents or their boss. Every sex worker I know has exes like this.

Once You Have Made Pornography

At marches and demonstrations, my friends and I have spent so much time shouting. We’ve spent so much time writing letters, calling legislative staff, talking to journalists, showing up at administrative and legislative hearings. We’ve spent so much time being unheard by anyone, from any political party. Equally vehement in the messages I’ve received in the last 48 hours are ones from folks who think my story demonstrates some allegiance to Hillary Clinton or the DNC. Apparently there is a thing called donut twitter and something else called rose twitter, and the 2016 democratic primary is still alive on the internet as though all of this were about gaining and losing points in some ongoing adversarial sport.

Sex work, however, is not a partisan issue. Sex workers are equally hated by the right and the left. Conservatives and liberals and socialists alike have supported policies that have led to the deaths of sex workers. Nonetheless, sex workers hold beliefs across the political spectrum. We continue to vote for people who are demonstrably flawed. We vote for people who we know do not like us. We vote for people who are imperfect, and then we call them on the phone, we show up at their rallies and at their offices and demand that they become the representatives that we need them to be.

We know that they are flawed and we believe, still, that one day they will hear us.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-heroic-actions-of-some-in-toronto-cant-erase-canada-s-shameful-truths-4d498eaba7/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 06:30:04 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2768 Read more]]>

The Heroic Actions Of Some In Toronto Can’t Erase Canada’s Shameful Truths

‘We are comparatively free of racial, sectarian or ideological strife’? Absolutely not.

Unsplash/Pam Menegakis

“The Truth Canada Needs To Remember,” by John Ibbitson, was published in the Globe and Mail on April 24 — the day after one of the deadliest acts of terror in recent Canadian history, when a 25-year-old white man in Toronto weaponized a large van he had rented to plow into unsuspecting pedestrians, killing 10 people and critically injuring 15 others. The public is still reeling from the atrocity.

Yet despite the tragedy of the situation, much has also been made of one positive fact: The assailant was taken down without the use of force.

Focusing on the heroism of benevolent bystanders is right. But the officer simply did his job by actually adhering to his training. Moreover, most framings of this incident have failed to address a crucial fact: Lack of force by law enforcement is something rarely afforded Black and Brown people in this country.

In the Globe article, Ibbiston takes this erasure one step further, stating that in Canada, “we are comparatively free of racial, sectarian or ideological strife.” The basic premise of his article is an ode to the so-called tolerance, diversity, and benevolence of Canadian society, and how we are better for it (while touting that we are far better than our American neighbors and to a greater extent, the entire world).

Let me repeat the part which immediately pained me to read: “We are comparatively free of racial, sectarian or ideological strife.”

Ibbitson calls this a “truth.” But the truth is, I have never read such a one-dimensional white-privileged view in my life.

Yes, innocent bystanders heroically showed up to help in trying times. Yes, the officer involved did what he was supposed to by not using excessive use of force against a white man. But this does not make Canada some beacon of freedom.

How do you say that to the countless Black and Indigenous lives that have been ruined by this state?

I have never read such a one-dimensional white-privileged view in my life.

How do you say that to the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people who have been victimized by the residential school system — the last of which didn’t close until the ‘90s?

How do you say that to the families of Indigenous youth like Colten Boushie, Indigenous girls like Tina Fontaine, and Black men like Jermaine Carby, whose lives were taken by white men who were never held accountable for their actions by a broken justice-less system? How do you say that to the countless Black and Brown people — some children even — whose lives have been taken because they were clearly never really free under this white supremacist system?

The lives of these and other victims have been deemed disposable by not only those responsible for their deaths, but a broken system that has declared their deaths somehow their own fault. Even after such tragedies, the Canadian media, investigating officers, and general public took to victim-blaming, evidence-tampering, and spewing racist anti-indigenous and anti-black hatred about these victims, instead of giving their families the dignity of fair and just trials that honored the lives of their loved ones.

Moreover, how do you say Canada is free of racial strife when there is such an alarming rate of Black and Indigenous kids in the crumbling racist foster care system? When there are so many children who have been (and continue to be) victimized as wards of the state when they are supposed to be protected? When there are cases like that of Abdoul Abdi, yet another refugee child failed by a broken racist foster care system?

How do you say that when the so-called “heroic” actions of the police officer don’t extend to people like Abdirahman Abdi, who was mentally ill and shot down like a rabid dog, instead of supported during a mental health episode in which he had harmed no one?

How do you justify such a low bar set that a police officer actually adhering to his training is somehow a heroic revelation? How do you not see that this also proves what racialized people have been protesting since Ferguson: that police are indeed capable of apprehending suspects without shooting and killing them?

You Can’t Avoid Racism By Moving To Canada

How do you explain such a fact to the countless Black, Brown, and Indigenous civilians, like Sammy Yatim, Dale Anthony Chatrie, Duane Christian, or Joey Knapaysweet, whose interactions with police have far too often turned fatal before police properly assessed the situation in which these individuals were deemed suspects?

How do you account for a litany of such staggering facts?

Like this: Black people account for 36.5% of all police-involved civilian fatalities despite representing only 8.3% of Toronto’s overall population. In the 52 instances of police-involved fatalities since 2000, nearly two-thirds (35 of the 52) were killed by being shot, while the remaining died from excessive physical force or medical complications while being restrained during their interactions with Toronto police. And yet, only seven officers have ever faced charges and only one has been convicted for their involvement in the death of a civilian.

In Saskatchewan, of the 16 people who have died in police encounters since 2000, 10 were Indigenous — accounting for 62.5% of all victims, despite Indigenous people representing only 11.7% of Saskatchewan’s population.

Black people account for 36.5% of all police-involved civilian fatalities despite representing only 8.3% of Toronto’s overall population.

I surmise these numbers are actually much higher, considering police departments have often failed to adequately collect race-based statistics about their encounters with racialized civilians.

And still, I am not done with my questions yet.

How can you say Canada is free from racial strife when it has one of the highest child poverty rates among developed countries, and when the majority of the hundreds of thousands of starving children are Black, Brown, or Indigenous?

How do you say that to the countless Indigenous families that have been devastated by the alarming rate of suicide among Indigenous youth, which our government has failed to adequately address? How do you say that to the dozens of Indigenous communities that have been under boil water advisories for decades without end, without access to basic necessities like clean water on their own land, while their resources are plummeted for white supremacist capitalist gain?

How can you say Canada is free from racial strife when it has one of the highest child poverty rates among developed countries?

How do you say that to the tens of thousands of Black and Brown people locked up in immigration detention centers across the country without basic necessities that are afforded even to incarcerated Canadian criminals — like access to basic medical care, sanitary products, internet, or access to lawyers to help them get out? As a result of Canada’s broken immigration system, hundreds still remain indefinitely held in immigration detentions at remote locations with little to no access to the outside world to even properly appeal their denied asylum applications.

How do you say the country is free to those who have been impacted by Canada’s broken refugee claimant system, which has failed people like Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam over and over again — particularly when the claimants are Black or Brown?

How do you say that to the families of people like Skantha Navaratnam, a Tamil man at the margins of his already marginalized community, who along with other men of color like Kirushna Kanagaratnam were targeted by a serial killer because of their race, and whose lives, disappearances, and eventual murders were dismissed repeatedly, carelessly, and callously by Toronto Police Services?

These Indigenous Feminists Are Ready To Lovingly Detonate The Patriarchy

How do you say that to African-Canadians who only represent 3% of Canada’s population yet account for over 10% of the overall prison population? How do you say that when the Black prison population has grown 69% in the last 30 years despite remaining such a tiny portion of the overall state population? When Black inmates are not only overrepresented in incarceration, but also subject to nearly 15% of all use-of-force incidents, and are more likely to be placed in maximum security institutions despite being at a lower risk of reoffending? (The numbers for Indigenous incarceration statistics are even more abysmal.) How do you say that when Toronto’s Black residents are targeted in 85% of racially motivated hate crimes and 27% of carding incidents?

“Freedom” and what it means to be free seems to only be a basic right guaranteed under the premise of whiteness, on this stolen land. Those of us that fall outside of that scope were never really free — no matter the comparatively small advancements we have managed to carve out thanks to our own determination, mobilization, resistance, and resilience.

Using the instance of an extreme tragedy as fodder to push some kind of “inclusive” and “tolerance” and “diversity” propaganda, when there are thousands of us who have never seen this equity play out in our lived experiences, is disillusioned at best. For those of us facing these very real realities, this is ahistorical, dishonest, and only continuing the cycle of unchanging conditions for the countless racialized people who do not benefit from the alt-reality that privilege and whiteness affords.

We can indeed be grateful to our brave fellow Torontonians who put their safety on the line and helped during the terror attack on Yonge street, and we can speak of their benevolence and strengths. But we must be mindful to do so without blatantly erasing the many racialized and marginalized people who still suffer under this white supremacist patriarchal capitalist system — people are who are in no ways close to being “free.”

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/it-is-not-the-job-of-the-oppressed-to-sit-with-our-oppressors-a2915d54d2be-2/ Wed, 25 Apr 2018 21:43:07 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2770 Read more]]>

It should never be the oppressed who must manage the pain of an oppressor realizing his wrongfulness.

flickr/Gigi Ibrahim

T he well-known South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was created to help form a unified society out of the ashes of racist division. Moving from a society carved out by legalized bigotry called apartheid to one made whole by equality was a mammoth task no one could achieve perfectly. Despite the violence done to people of color, particularly black Africans, the TRC called for “a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation.”

To obtain closure, victims and victims’ families could confront the agents of violence who had acted out of political motivations (from both the apartheid and anti-apartheid sides). The TRC aimed to provide amnesty for such people, if they gave satisfactory testimony: There was a fear that people would never find out the fate of loved ones or the identity of transgressors if amnesty was not offered. Instead of answers, there would be only silence. Amnesty would allow truth to blossom, and, as many know, silence is not conducive to stability, because when things are unsaid it also means they’re not resolved.

Whether the TRC was a success is its own discussion. But for all its faults, it recognized that it should never be the oppressed who are forced to manage the pain of an oppressor realizing his wrongfulness. It wasn’t the victims attempting to convey to their oppressors why they had done wrong. The wrongdoers themselves — out of fear, shame, desperation, or whatever — were the ones coming forward, carrying a knowledge of wrongfulness to the altar of amnesty for all to see. However bloody that altar became, we did not expect the victims to maintain it.

The wrongdoers themselves were the ones coming forward, carrying a knowledge of wrongfulness to the altar of amnesty for all to see.

This lesson doesn’t appear universal.

A few months back, in the United States, Frederick Sorrell was “charged with … intimidation after following a black Muslim couple in his car while hurling threats through the window.” He did this for twenty blocks, yelling racist threats and making violent gestures.

He pleaded guilty, and after being sentenced, Sorrell wept, claiming “I guess my ignorance and my stupidity is why I opened my mouth, and I shouldn’t have and I claim full responsibility.”

If he had stopped there, that would be dodgy enough: He doesn’t actually acknowledge he did anything wrong, only that he “shouldn’t have” acted the way he did. Does that mean he shouldn’t have acted then and there? Or that he should’ve waited for a better time when he would not have been caught? He claims responsibility for his actions but doesn’t tie his actions to being wrong. (In case you’re wondering, that’s how you make a proper apology.)

But he continued, saying “I would love to sit down and have an open conversation with [the couple he targeted] and have an open mind and apologize.” If Sorrell had his way, his victims would give up time, to sit with him and have an “open conversation.” They would gain nothing, while he would get a free education and good PR. They would sit in a room with a man who conveyed pure hatred and violence toward them, all for the gamble that their aggressor might emerge a better person.

Too often, people from various spectrums of privilege who might say or do something offensive to a marginalized group put out a call to be “educated.” Men who do or say something sexist call for women to “educate” them; white folk want to hear from black people why they can’t say the N-word; and so on. Like Sorrell, people like this are asking those already targeted by the status quo to do the emotional labor to educate them.

Consider men and our alleged ignorance about feminist issues. As Lindy West noted in her New York Times column, a lot of men claimed ignorance when confronted with various issues raised by #MeToo, such as affirmative consent and gendered socialization. But, especially in the digital information age, this can longer be an excuse. “The reason [nuanced conversations about consent and gendered socialization] feel foreign to so many men is that so many men never felt like they needed to listen,” she wrote. “Rape is a women’s issue, right? Men don’t major in women’s studies.”

They would sit in a room with a man who conveyed pure hatred and violence toward them, all for the gamble that their aggressor might emerge a better person.

These discussions didn’t emerge when women finally had Twitter accounts. Feminists do and have written on these various subjects for decades, so they’ve already carefully researched and argued the very points men continue to feign ignorance about. If you can work out how to operate a computer, you can find books and blogs and articles written by feminists on feminist topics you are ignorant about. Books exists, podcasts exists, blogs exist. You can even give money to such wonderful publications that aim to educate on feminists matters.

This applies to issues of race, disability, and so forth. Ignorance is only seriously condemnable if you do nothing to alleviate it once it’s pointed out. And it’s easy and lazy to respond by wanting those who’ve called you out on your ignorance to solve it for you.

The flipside of laziness is the condescending insult of assuming this education is what you are owed. Consider Sorrell again: How entitled must you be to think that the people who you targeted with horrific, racist bile should then sit down with a cup of tea and become benevolent educators? That they should be the ones to forgive what you haven’t apologized for? While ignorance might explain part of racism, it doesn’t explain aggression, targeting, and threats. Sorrell didn’t unintentionally make a rude remark in a public space this couple overheard: He followed them for a mile for the grave crime of walking in public while Muslim.

There Is No Middle Ground Between Racism And Justice

It is not the job of the oppressed to sit with those who think that, to one degree or another, they are less than people. It’s a nice, cozy ideal to expect the oppressors to be “better,” to go “high,” when everything is dragging you low. This is why it’s doubly insulting when alleged allies call on oppressed groups to not be “too hasty” or “dismissive,” to have a “dialogue” — as if we’re disagreeing about the best Marvel movie, not our personhood. If you think there’s “both sides,” rather than recognizing one side is bigoted and the other a target of bigotry, I’m not sure you’re the ally you think you are. If you want a calm response to bigotry, and you are not part of that targeted group, feel free to enter the fray. Indeed, as men, it is on us to call out other men’s sexism; it is our job as straight people to call out homophobia; it is our job as cis people to call out transphobia.

But we ought not to entertain these opinions as mere political views arising out of ignorance: They harm. To paraphrase Dr. King, sometimes the biggest obstacles are not the screaming bigots but the moderates who, even if they’re not the ones planting the seeds of hate, are flattening the soil with their shovels of civility.

The oppressed are not lost for words: books, articles, speeches all exist and those with bigoted views are welcome to them and, better, moderates are welcome to direct their bigoted friends to these words. We’ve spoken them already. We’ve in fact already done the work. It’s time to stop expecting oppressed groups to, with some preternatural calmness and civility, simply smile and calmly discuss a bigot’s bigotry, to their face, until it unravels and he reaches Enlightenment.

It’s not our job to yank them out the dark well they wallow in. They put themselves there and many ladders have already been stitched together. It’s their job to grab a rung and pull themselves out.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/slum-walks-aren-t-educational-they-re-glorifying-poverty-for-profit-2d0ae50b0b07-2/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 20:54:03 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2772 Read more]]>

You can’t assuage your guilt by gawking at the poor.

flickr/Francois Decaillet

A few years ago, when I was researching Indian tour companies online, I came across a banner ad. It had a small graphic with pictures of thin, half-dressed Indian boys with dirt on their faces, and the words “Slum Walks” on top of most of the image. It evoked that ever-frustrating thought of “how is this even a thing?” that just makes you spiral.

I didn’t come back to the idea of slum walks for years, but it stuck in the back of my head and bothered me every time I went back to India to visit my family. And a recent Google search showed me that yes, they’re still a thing.

Just to make it clear, slum walks are exactly what they sound like. You walk around in a slum. I wish there was more depth to it, just to make the idea of it less disgusting, but that’s really it — you pay real money to someone who doesn’t live in a slum, on the sometimes-provided promise that the money will be funnelled back into uplifting the people living in the slum, to walk around a slum and look at impoverished people. If I’m being too blunt, and not acknowledging that some people do this from the good of their hearts, motivated by the desire to help, it’s because I don’t actually believe that people’s motivation is coming from an entirely trustworthy place, nor is that motivation translating into something substantial in terms of social activism.

One of the first results when you Google “slum walks” is for a TripAdvisor page for tours run in Delhi by an organization called Providing Education To Everyone, or PETE. The service has five stars with 290 reviews. It took about 30 seconds into scrolling through the reviews for the slum walks for me to start crying.

“I noticed no visible resentment, just friendly greetings to someone visiting their neighborhood. I’m not suggesting that they like living in these conditions — no one in their right mind would. But to be able to show this level of grace while living under these conditions — pretty humbling,” writes a five-star reviewer. Where there are negative reviews, it’s because the poverty isn’t up to the tourists’ exacting standards. “It was a somehow disappointing, since the REAL slum where we were supposed to go was bulldozered away completely recently. Compared to the Dharavi slum tour in Mumbai, this tour was by far not as interesting,” writes a reviewer who gave them only two stars.

India has unbelievable economic disparity in which people who are “lower” caste, non-Hindu, trans, and/or disabled are disproportionately affected by poverty and homelessness. Though I was born and lived in India for a chunk of my childhood, I’ve never known poverty. I immigrated to Canada with my family where I’ve been afforded, thanks to my parents and to my own social privileges, stable housing and an elite education. My family has made several trips back to India to visit with relatives since we moved to Canada. In many ways, when I return to India, I am a tourist, and while I cannot speak for the Indians who are forced into poverty, I do feel a deep sense of frustration knowing that Indians are reduced to objects, usually by white tourists, in the practice of slum walks.

Slum walks/tours are not a new concept; in the 1830s, wealthy Americans (including Abraham Lincoln) would go “slumming” in the Five Points neighborhood of New York to see how the other half lived. That has evolved into modern “poorism,” as Travel Weekly called it a decade ago, which they defined as “a somewhat derogatory label applied to slum tours or other types of outings that bring visitors into extremely impoverished areas of the world.” Slum tours have expanded to Rio, Nairobi, South Africa, Mexico, and India, among other countries. Much like how slum walks in India exemplify how poverty and homelessness is disproportionately felt by marginalized people, the same is true of slum tours in places like South Africa, where tourists can engage in slum walks of all-Black townships that were most violently affected by Apartheid.

In a 2007 Globe and Mail article, David Fennell, professor of Geography and Tourism Studies at Brock University and author of Tourism Ethics, highlights Western tourists’ sense of entitlement when it comes to travel. “Everest. Antarctica. The Amazon. Wherever,” he says. “If you put your money down, you have a right to go.” But, simply put, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. People living in slums have as much of a right to consent to their interactions and experiences as anyone else. Just because slums are open, walkable, and don’t have “traditional” borders does not mean that we have any right to walk into people’s homes and lives for the benefit of our own education. Not only do tour companies not have people’s consent when they bring in groups of tourists to walk around the slum and investigate people’s houses and living conditions, most tourists who do slum tours will not be able to communicate with the people living in slums.

The Troubling Trendiness Of Poverty Appropriation

Where companies have people’s consent, it is important to question how this consent was obtained, how much about the reality of slum walks was explained to locals, how clear companies are about the payments they are receiving in comparison to how much they are giving back to the people living in poverty, and how much of a choice that consent really is. The removal of people’s agency and their transformation into objects during slum tours is something that doesn’t seem worth the small amount of paternalistic charity that might come their way. But it’s hard to say no if it’s that or nothing.

Slum walks are voyeuristic, and they commodify poverty and homelessness for the benefit of tourists. Yes, slum tours are at best a band-aid solution to the problem of systemic poverty in countries like India and cannot transform people’s living conditions overnight, but there is not much record of what work these companies are actually doing with tourists’ money in terms of activism, or helping those who are the subject of their tours. In a recent NowThis video, Samantha Nutt argues that what locals really need is to be empowered and supported in working on their communities themselves, but this is not in the interest of tour companies because it limits potential revenue.

After all, tour companies are companies first, and charitable organizations second, and if profits were coming from showing people the destitute conditions of people living in slums, would it be in a capitalistic tour company’s best interest to make those conditions better?

The irony is that slum tours could never be the “authentic” experience they advertise themselves as, because they completely center the experience of the visitor, and tokenize the experience of poor locals to appease tourists. This kind of “poverty porn” harms the people who need to be helped. It mischaracterizes poverty in many ways and perpetuates damaging myths that only keep poverty alive. Slum tours don’t teach about the systemic inequalities that create poverty and homelessness; they don’t address how a lot of tourism actually hurts locals. Instead, they weaponize tourists’ guilt at facing poverty on such a grand scale, and serve to make tourists feel better about themselves for using their vacation time to see “real” hardship.

If profits were coming from showing people the destitute conditions of people living in slums, would it be in a capitalistic tour company’s best interest to make those conditions better?

It’s irresponsible to ignore poverty when you travel, and slum tours promote themselves as transformative learning experiences precisely because they know it’ll attract tourists who are trying to be compassionate and thoughtful. But engaging in things like slum tours doesn’t actually help the subjects of the tours.

There are small ways you can travel ethically, such as supporting family- or independently-owned restaurants that use local ingredients, locally-based organizations with worthwhile ongoing projects that are bettering their communities, and independently owned stores and other businesses. If you want to learn more about historical, systemic inequalities in the places you are visiting, do this by reading about it and having conversations with people who may be interested in sharing their knowledge with you. With the internet at your disposal, you can access this information in advance and make meaningful choices while you’re travelling instead of taking part in exploitative, unhelpful things like slum tours. Because while they may sell themselves that way, gawking at poverty will never be charitable.

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