The outrage is turning into steely resolve, uniting us in sisterhood and lighting a fire within us to fight back.
In 1970, Robin Morgan wrote:**
Women's liberation is the first radical movement to base its politics -- in fact, create its politics -- out of concrete personal experiences. We've learned that those experiences are not our private hang-ups. They are shared by every woman, and are therefore political.
Let the facts of our personal experiences be submitted to a candid world.
CayceP relays a story of one night on the job in Please Stop Touching Me, posted here at DKos Dec. 28, 2010:
Hello there! How can I assist you? Yes, it's three in the morning and the bars are closed. You're drunk and want a room? Great, I have a good rate for you ... But, you know what would be great? If you'd stop walking behind the front desk to touch me.
...Please list some more assumptions about me because of my gender. It's okay to ask me to do a thousand things at once because I'm "a woman so I can multitask!" Ask me about my relationship status and stare at my hands to see if there's a ring. Again. Make comments about my appearance. Ask me if my partner loves me and/or how much money they make. Brag about your employment.
...Order food. Follow me into the kitchen that is clearly marked STAFF ONLY. Ask me about my major. Demand to know how much money it will get me. Recommend I marry well. Be sure to do all of this behind a door marked STAFF ONLY.
Say something profoundly creepy to me when I deliver items to your room.
...Just be sure to touch me before you go. Touch my shoulder, my hair. Try and touch my face. Stink of booze while you do it. Try and hug me. Give me a high five. Touch my back. "Accidentally" touch my chest or buttocks. Take my asking you to stop as a joke. Smile when you apologize because if I tell you go to go hell, you'll write me a bad review and say I was bitchy.
In 2004, Ohioans voted to
approve what was sold as an anti-gay marriage amendment to the state constitution.
In November 2004, Ohio’s state constitution was amended by ballot Issue 1 to ban same sex marriage. Article 15, Section 11 of the Ohio Constitution now says that the state shall not create or recognize relationships of unmarried adults that approximates marriage. In 2007, the Ohio Supreme Court narrowly interpreted the reach of Issue 1 in the case Ohio v. Carswell, allowing the state to continue enforcing domestic violence laws even if the couple was unmarried.
The
Carswell decision came too late for community member Zwoof,
whose daughter was left without any protection against the violence and threats of murder from her former boyfriend.
On March 3, I was doing my morning radio show in Panama City, Fl. when the call came. It was my wife. "Come home, now." I told my boss and our listeners, "I have to go to the wife, my baby is having a hospital"
It was March 3, 1977. And our Little Alicia, came into this world. Back at the radio station my boss played Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely" and announced her arrival.
And this March, 30 years later, our Alicia left this world.
My Alicia and her friend John Mitchell were savagely murdered while her 4 children slept nearby in the sanctity of their own home by a madman released on a OR bond. A repeat violent offender with convictions for domestic violence, stalking, kidnapping and more.
As the sheriff’s domestic violence specialist, Deputy Robinson said she had worked with Alicia Castillon as far back as 1998, when Daniels punched and kicked his then-girlfriend in the stomach until she passed out.
The deputy knew about the three-year jail sentence Daniels was given for domestic violence crimes against Castillon in 2000. And she knew about an incident in December in which Daniels tied Castillon up, beat her, put a knife to her throat, and threatened to kill her. [Link]
...
Beginning in March 2005, a number of Ohio judges began ruling that unmarried couples aren't protected under Ohio's domestic violence law as a result of the amendment. ... But under the DOMA only married partners can technically face domestic violence charges. [Link from original not working]
(Original paragraph spacing edited.)
Zwoof, our hearts are with you as you approach what should have been Alicia's 35th birthday.
In 2005, Alysha Cosby wanted to attend her high school graduaction ceremony. But because she was pregnant, she was barred her from attending. Ms. Cosby had another idea.
A pregnant student at a Roman Catholic High School, told she could not participate in her graduation ceremony, announced her own name and walked across the stage anyway at the close of the program ... [Ms. Cosby's] mother and aunt, Debra Blackwell, were escorted out of St. Jude Church by police after Alysha Cosby headed back to her seat.
...
The father of Cosby's child is also a senior at the school and was allowed to participate in graduation.
Ms. Cosby could have had an abortion, but chose not to and was punished for it, as were her mother and her aunt. The father? Well, boys will be boys.
Also on the pregnant teenagers front, Detroit's Emergency Financial Manager last year decided to close a school designed just for pregnant teens, despite its demonstrated record of success:
Detroit Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb announced last month that he was closing eight schools, and selling up to 45 more to charter companies. Among those slated for clsoure was the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a school designed for pregnant teens and the only one of its kind in the nation. One reason the announcement came as such a surprise to students and teachers there is that Catherine Ferguson has a stellar track record, boasting 90% graduation rates and 100% college acceptance rates.
Emphasis mine. The news article also discusses
this diary by surelyujest about the peaceful protest staged by teachers and students and their inevitable arrests.
In her diary, The Rape Culture, LaFeminista highlights the treatment of a teenage girl who had the audacity to take a stand:
A teenage girl who was dropped from her high school's cheerleading squad after refusing to chant the name of a basketball player who had sexually assaulted her must pay compensation of $45,000 (£27,300) after losing a legal challenge against the decision.
The
news article LaFeminista links provides even more jaw-dropping details.
She was 16 when she said she had been raped at a house party attended by dozens of fellow students from Silsbee High School, in south-east Texas. One of her alleged assailants, a student athlete called Rakheem Bolton, was arrested, with two other young men.
In court, Bolton pleaded guilty to the misdemeanour assault of HS. He received two years of probation, community service, a fine and was required to take anger-management classes. The charge of rape was dropped, leaving him free to return to school and take up his place on the basketball team.
Four months later, in January 2009, HS travelled to one of Silsbee High School's basketball games in Huntsville. She joined in with the business of leading cheers throughout the match. But when Bolton was about to take a free throw, the girl decided to stand silently with her arms folded.
...
[T]wo separate courts ruled against her, deciding that a cheerleader freely agrees to act as a "mouthpiece" for a institution and therefore surrenders her constitutional right to free speech. In September last year, a federal appeals court upheld those decisions and announced that HS must also reimburse the school sistrict $45,000, for filing a "frivolous" lawsuit against it.
Here's the appellate court's decision (PDF). If you read it, note that the court says she was "contractually required to cheer." My Contracts professor owes me an apology. He told me that minors can't be contractually obligated to do anything. The point remains: This girl got sexually assaulted and was punished over and over, culminating in the insult by three federal judges that her outrage was "frivolous."
On December 6, 2011, in New York, a woman was grabbed from behind and her assailant touched her breasts and buttocks. A month earlier, also in New York, a woman was groped on the subway, but she kicked the guy's ass. These aren't even close to isolated incidents.
A man dubbed the "Upper East Side Groper" allegedly groped at least a dozen women in Manhattan before getting caught earlier this month. On the heels of his arrest, last week three gropings perpetrated by one man were reported in Queens, New York. Meanwhile, in northern Virginia, a man nicknamed the "butt slasher" has assaulted at least nine young women in shopping malls across the past few months. He has not been caught.
Aren't these just unfortunate, isolated, random incidents, you may ask. No.
The news stories simply bring to light experiences that happen to too many women. Recently, when a woman in Astoria, New York, blogged about a man groping her, 45 women emailed her with similar stories. More than half of 800 female survey respondents of a 2008 study said they had been groped or sexually touched in public. The majority of the respondents were only in their teens and twenties. When I was 18 years old, a man groped me on a street near my college campus, making me part of that percentage.
Friday happens to be Women's Equality Day in the United States. But equality is more of a wish than our reality when so many inequalities exist – including women's unequal access to public places because of gender-based street harassment, including gropings and slashings.
Emphasis mine. Obviously, this diary could fill the whole Internet, and I haven't even touched the legislative initiatives, like that in Virginia, that gun not just for abortion but also our dignity. I must add, however, that in the roughly seven hours I spent putting this diary together,
about 2,800 women were beaten in the United States and one was murdered by her husband or boyfriend.
Let me wrap this up with a passage from an excellent speech I heard at the 2004 Democratic Convention:
If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief -- I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper -- that makes this country work.
That sentiment is what the sisterhood is about by an order of magnitude. When one woman is demeaned, groped, witness to sexist jokes, harrassed, stalked, beaten, murdered, and deprived of her inalienable rights, it happens to us all.
**Robin Morgan, Editor, Sisterhood is Powerful,Vintage Books, p.xx (1970).