On false rape accusations

Do men live every day of their lives with a background level of fear that they will be falsely accused of rape? Are they taught from a young age how to avoid "misleading" behavior or "miscommunication" that may lead to being falsely accused of rape? When they start talking to a woman at a party or bar do they worry that the presence of alcohol may make them liable to being falsely accused of rape? When they go out, do they have an unspoken agreement with their friends to keep an eye out for each other, in case it seems like they might be falsely accused of rape? Do they avoid being alone with a woman in their apartment or dorm room, lest they be falsely accused of rape? Do they fear their own wives, girlfriends, friends, classmates, coworkers, unsure if someone they trusted might one day falsely accuse them of rape? Knowing that their prior relationship would implicate them in the eyes of many? 

No? Then shut the fuck up about false rape accusations.

Some days, it's like this

Some days, it's like this: get out of bed for the hundredth time to go to the bathroom. While you're there, you might as well put some lotion on your face. It can be awake even if the rest of you isn't. Take your meds. Walk into the kitchen to refill the humidifier. It's past noon. You know if you go back to bed now you won't leave the house today. Might as well make yourself some coffee. And if you're going to have coffee, you should have some cereal. Eat your breakfast in front of your computer. Play your daily Facebook games. You're halfway there.

The myth of "part-time"

NYT: Part-Time Schedules, Full-Time Headaches

This NYT article, collecting readers' experiences of part-time work, is a perfect example of the corporate monopolization of employees' lives that I wrote about in my last post.

Courtney Moore, a cashier at a Walmart in Cincinnati, said in an interview that she had been assigned about 40 hours a week until she told store management in June that she would begin taking college classes most mornings and some afternoons. She said she asked her manager to put her on the late shift, but to her dismay, the store reduced her to 15 hours a week.

“They said they need someone they could call whenever they need help — and they said I’m not that person,” Ms. Moore said. She said she would prefer being a dedicated full-time employee at Walmart but had to take a second job at McDonald’s instead.

In my retail job, I remember being told by my employer that I had to be available on weekends, period. I couldn't ask for Saturday mornings off (for a martial arts class I was taking), even if I was available Saturday afternoon and evening, Sunday, and every other day of the week. Even though in any given week the odds were that I wouldn't be scheduled to work that shift. They might've said something like, it's only fair for everyone to have weekend shifts off sometimes, but I don't doubt there were other workers who would have gladly committed to working Saturday mornings if they could just be guaranteed some other time slot to themselves. Or simply guaranteed more hours per week, for that matter.

A middle-aged New Yorker who lost his teaching job of two decades because of a budget squeeze in his school district said he had applied for retail jobs and was shocked by what he found.

“You had to be available every minute of every day, knowing you would be scheduled for no more than 29 hours per week and knowing there would be no normalcy to your schedule,” he wrote. “I told the person I would like to be scheduled for the same days every week so I could try to get another job to try to make ends meet. She immediately said, ‘Well, that will end our conversation right here. You have to be available every day for us.’

Get an education! Get a second job if you need to! Here are workers trying to do just that, and employers actively blocking those efforts. And if you try to argue that Walmart--a company that generated net income of 17 billion dollars in 2013, owned by a small group of people with a combined worth of $152 billion--can't afford to pay Courtney Moore for 40 hours a week, with benefits, I will laugh in your face.

It's awfully hard to pull yourself out of poverty when your employer confiscates your bootstraps.

See also: Debra Harrell.

Corporations are people. People that own other people.

1. Consider this New York Times article on the extremely creepy practice of companies taking out life insurance policies on employees:

There is no real risk to the company when non-executive employees or former employees die, so there is no traditional or perhaps even legitimate reason to buy life insurance on them. This suggests that company-owned life insurance (COLI, in industry jargon) is mainly a tool to allow companies to speculate in financial markets.

[...]

What do the employees get? Banks and companies say the earnings from the policies are used to cover long term health care, pension obligations and deferred compensation. But in many cases they can use the tax free-gains however they want.

2. Consider the Hobby Lobby decision.

One thing that people always seem to forget when contraception comes into the picture is that health insurance is part of your compensation from your employer. It's not a gift, freebie, or bonus that your employer grants you out of the goodness of their heart. It's something you earn by working, same as your paycheck. The Supreme Court saying that Hobby Lobby or any other employer can choose not to provide certain benefits, for whatever reason, is tantamount to saying that your employer can dictate how you spend your paycheck. Just one of the problems with tying health insurance to employment in the first place.

We refuse to adequately fund a social safety net in this country. Meanwhile, pro-business lawmakers are hard at work bolstering corporate rights at the expense of workers' rights. The result? Workers who are increasingly dependent on employers, and employers with more and more control over workers' lives. It's not a big leap from control to ownership.

3. Personal anecdote time: I worked for a big-box retailer for several months when I was 18 years old. At the time, I was between high school and college, living with my parents at home.

As an aside, I applied for the job twice: the first time, before my 18th birthday, I never received a response. I applied again after I turned 18, and got an interview. When I told the interviewer I had applied before, she said, "Oh, I'm glad you came back!" and told me that they basically never hired anyone under 18, since the rules for how much and when minors could be made to work were more restrictive. Not that this was stated anywhere in the information for applicants, of course. So, yeah, one more data point against the idea that most people working minimum-wage jobs are high schoolers working on the side who don't really "need" a living wage. Companies won't hire high schoolers precisely because employees with priorities other than work are inconvenient for them. Not so long as they can find plenty of adults who need those same hourly wages, which in the current economy, they definitely can.

Anyway. It wasn't a bad job, but one thing I always disliked was the unspoken idea that to be a good employee meant being loyal, enthusiastic, flexible, going above and beyond. Never mind that many/most of the employees were working part-time for minimum wage and no benefits. Doing the work you were paid for wasn't enough; you were supposed to act as if the opportunity to do that work was the greatest privilege imaginable.

At the time, I couldn't have articulated it as such; maybe I did have a "bad attitude", I thought. But in retrospect, I see this kind of corporate propaganda as truly insidious. There is something insulting and coercive about it when your employer pays you less than a living wage and wants your utter loyalty in return. It's not empowering to talk about employees as "team members" when "teamwork" is only used as a cudgel to enforce compliance. It's one more way of obscuring the logical link between labor and compensation, and the fact that companies depend on workers for their existence, not the other way around.

(See also: In the Name of Love, by Miya Tokumitsu, which got my gears spinning on some of this.)

To repeat: Companies depend on workers. Employers owe their employees. As a culture, we need to remember that, and as a country, we need laws that reflect that.

The cycle of poverty

I read these two stories back-to-back in the New York Times on Sunday. Together, they highlight how strongly the game is rigged against the "little people": the less you have to start with, the more every move costs you.

1) Held Captive by Flawed Credit Reports

[I]naccuracies often show up in consumers’ credit reports, and these errors have real consequences, like increasing borrowing costs or barring people from financing a home or renting an apartment. And once an error is found, getting it fixed can take months of exasperating work.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission found that 5 percent of consumers — or an estimated 10 million people — had an error on one of their credit reports that could have resulted in higher borrowing costs.

The F.T.C., which oversees the industry along with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has been busy bringing cases in this arena. Since 2000, it has filed 18 enforcement actions against reporting bureaus; 13 were district court actions that generated $25.7 million in penalties.

Consumers have also won in the courts, on occasion. Last year, an Oregon consumer was awarded $18.4 million in punitive damages by a jury after she sued Equifax for inserting errors into her credit report. But the fines, settlements and judgments paid by the larger companies are not even close to a rounding error. Experian generated $4.8 billion in revenue for the year ended March 2014, and its after-tax profit of $747 million in the period was more than twice its 2013 figure.

Not discussed in this article is the fact that when you're poor, you consequently have fewer resources to devote to getting a mistake on your credit report fixed, if and when you even become aware of it. Also not discussed: the widespread practice of requiring a credit check as part of the hiring process, which further disadvantages already-marginalized groups.

And the cycle continues.

2) A Job Seeker's Desperate Choice

On the morning of March 20, Shanesha Taylor had a job interview. It was for a good job, one that could support her three children, unlike the many positions she’d applied for that paid only $10 an hour. The interview, at an insurance agency in Scottsdale, Ariz., went well. “Walking out of the office, you know that little skip thing people do?” she said, clicking her heels together in a corny expression of glee. “I wanted to do that.”

But as she left the building and walked through the parking lot, she saw police officers surrounding her car, its doors flung open and a crime-scene van parked nearby.

Taylor, who had no permanent housing at the time of the interview, was arrested and charged with two counts of felony child abuse for leaving her young sons in her car while she went to the job interview. She spent ten days in jail, and her three children were removed from her custody. Why were the boys in the car? Because she had nowhere else to leave them.

The night before the interview, she put the children to bed at her parents’ house and went to a Walmart parking lot, where she spent hours scrounging up recyclable cans and asking passers-by for gas money, to make sure she had enough for the 35-mile drive to the interview. Her parents would be at work the next day, so she had arranged to leave the boys at a babysitter’s house, she said. But when she arrived, she said, no one answered the door.

“I felt like this was my opportunity to basically improve life for all of us, and the one key part of it is now not available, so what do I do now?” Ms. Taylor said. “That was my only thought: ‘What do I do now? What do I do now?’ That was kind of what started the whole chain of events that day.”

I strongly encourage you to read the whole article and hear Shanesha Taylor's story in her own words.

On loneliness

Girls get lonely, too.

That may seem like an obvious statement, but in the wake of yet another angry, socially frustrated young man going on a violent rampage, it seems in danger of being forgotten. There's been a lot of discussion of men, and how men view women, and how women's lives are affected by how men view them. And a lot of that discussion has been good, and needed. But one thing that's left out in all this discussion of men feeling socially isolated and what are appropriate and inappropriate ways of dealing with that is that simple statement: girls get lonely, too.

None of these feelings we're talking about are the exclusive preserve of men. Loneliness, social isolation, awkwardness, sexual and romantic frustration, pain and anger about any of the above. I know this because I'm a woman and I've felt and do feel all of them. And ironically, the more we talk about lonely young men without any mention of lonely young women, the more it makes me feel invisible, exacerbating the feelings of loneliness, isolation, and frustration. Which I guess is why I'm writing this, because otherwise I might just scream.


What happens when women do talk about their loneliness? From what I've seen, there are two basic scenarios:

1) If you're an "unattractive" woman (defined by an arbitrary, shifting standard), you shouldn't expect to receive attention or affection, and any expression of want to that effect will be scoffed at. You should feel grateful for any attention you receive, be it wanted or unwanted. Your feelings will be dismissed.

2) If you're an "attractive" woman (see above), it's inconceivable that you could feel socially isolated, awkward, lonely, lacking attention and affection. Any expression of want to that effect will be met with disbelief. You should be resigned to any unwanted attention you receive, because what did you expect, being an attractive woman in the world? Your feelings will be dismissed.

Exhibit A: I have learned to hate the response I get when I tell someone that  no, I'm not seeing anyone--or, until well into my twenties, that I'd never had a boyfriend (or girlfriend, for that matter, but no one ever asks that). People almost universally react with surprise, even denial. "Why not?" they say. Or sometimes: "But you're so pretty!"

These are real things people have said to me. I know they mean well; they mean it as a compliment. But the effect of all that disbelief is to make me feel like I can't talk about my own life, not without some explanation that I don't have. Oh, I took a voluntary vow of celibacy. I slept in late on the day they were handing out boyfriends. I'm actually an alien.


The truth is, no one has asked "Why not?" more than me, so believe me, I'd love to have an answer.

I did not date in high school. No one ever asked me out. No one asked me to the dance. I did not kiss anyone. I had crushes, strong and plentiful. I had fantasies about the cutest, most popular boy(s) in the whole school passing by everyone else, walking up to me and asking me out. Suddenly everyone would realize how special and wonderful and desirable I was.

I would've died rather than admit those fantasies, because on the outside, I rejected everything "popular". I went through various phases, ranging from androgynous, baggy clothing to goth and punk aspirations. I was friends with skater boys, and I resented when they dated or pursued preppy girls. They rejected preppy aesthetics and values for themselves, but they still wanted to date the cheerleaders? I raged inwardly at the unfairness of it.

(No, things did not magically transform once I got to college. Just FYI.)

As a young woman, of course, you learn that your role is to be passive, that men are supposed to approach you. No, gender roles aren't as strict today as they were fifty years ago. But women who ask men out, or to dance, or to marry them, are still an oddity. Even if you overcome this conditioning (which takes a lot of courage), why would asking someone out be any easier for women then for men? It isn't. The fear of rejection looms just as large, compounded by the fear of having put yourself out there as a woman--overstepping your gender role, revealing that you have wants--and still being rejected.

Women, too, want things--and people--that they feel they cannot get. Women, too, can look around and see seemingly everyone else enjoying something that eludes them, and think, Why me? For myself, I did not conclude that something was wrong with men, as a whole, because they didn't pay attention to me; I concluded there must be something wrong with me. I directed my pain and criticism inward. I suspect the same is true for many women.

The point is, most people, if not all, want to form meaningful relationships with others. They want love, sex, affection. And I'll wager it's not easy for anyone. It may be harder for some than for others. But you can't tell just by looking at someone. Someone may appear attractive, socially well adjusted--but you don't know their inner life. And to deny someone's inner life, to ignore its existence, is to deny their very humanity.

So to every lonely girl and woman out there, I just want to say: I see you.

Thin and angry

[Content note: language and images of fat-shaming.]

So I started this post almost a year ago and never finished it. I started writing it in the first place because of a typically great post by Melissa McEwan over at Shakesville about thin "allies" who aren't: Fatsronauts 101: Permission, Continued.

In it, she says: I need people with privilege to be as angry about the fact they're asked to hate my body as I am.

With that sentence rattling around in my brain, I wrote the bulk of this post one sleepless night and then lost my confidence in it in the daylight. But wouldn’t you know, it was a series of tweets by Melissa yesterday that prompted me to finally finish it. You should go read all of them, but here are a few highlights to put this post in context:

While I love with so many hearts the return of warm weather, that also means the returns of people shouting at me from cars w/ open windows.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014

My fat female friends all experience this. This hasn't happened to me, but several friends have had food waved at them out car windows.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014

Now, imagine what it's like to be a fat person who has these experiences and have to listen to admonishments to "get outside and move."
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014

If you stay indoors to avoid constant harassment, you're a lazy fatty. If you go outdoors and move around, you're a gross visible fatty.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014

If you want to be an effective ally, you really need to be getting ANGRY about that constant dehumanization.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014

What Melissa says about anger resonates so deeply with my experience as a person with thin privilege trying to be an ally to fat people. I do feel anger, unreservedly—and I don’t mean to be at all self-congratulatory in noting that, because it was a genuine revelation to me when I started to feel that way, a development of something I’d cultivated but for which I certainly can’t take all the credit.

I notice my anger because I think people find it confusing and off-putting. Obviously, I don’t receive the same open hostility that a fat person would when I talk with anger about fat hatred. But on the few occasions when I’ve spoken openly about some anti-fat messaging that’s upset me, like these horrible NYC subway ads, to friends and colleagues whom I don’t know to be fat-accepting, I’ve felt that people are, at best, bemused by my anger. There’s resistance to what I’m saying, a) because it goes against all the cultural messaging (with all the force of medical authority behind it) that fat=bad, obesity=a public health crisis, etc., etc., but also, b) because they’re thinking, “Why are you so upset about this? You’re not fat! What’s it got to do with you?”

And the answer, of course, is that standing by while people different from you are being oppressed is a really shitty way to behave, but also that the culture of fat-shaming and body policing has everything to do with me, with all of us, fat or thin. There’s no one in this culture, especially no woman, who is unaffected by body policing. And it doesn’t take a great deal of insight to see that fat-shaming and other types of body policing are part of the same toxic package. It just takes a willingness to see.

There’s a lot of self-interest in my anger about fat-shaming. I’m angry about it because social attempts to control marginalized bodies, and to marginalize people for their bodies—their shape, size, color, reproduction—is harmful, kyriarchical bullshit. Period. The end. Let the fat lady sing!

---

Story time!

Around the same time as I read that Fatsronauts 101 post, I was talking to a dear friend about some medical issues she was dealing with. She’d had multiple doctor’s visits and tests, but no definitive diagnosis or fix had been offered. She mentioned one or two possible “next steps”, but dismissed them with a shrug: “They’re just going to tell me it’s because I’m fat.” From the way she said it, it was clear that she was speaking from experience.

I immediately recognized that resignation and impulse for self-protection. I struggled for years with insomnia—basically nonstop since at least adolescence—without ever seriously considering seeking medical help, because I’d internalized the messaging that said regulating my sleep patterns and dealing with anxiety was a matter of making the right “lifestyle choices” (sound familiar?). Even when things were really bad, I never asked for professional help for fear of being seen as drug-seeking, weak, lacking in willpower. Ironically, it was easier for me to seek counseling for depression, despite the stigma attached to mental illness, than to seek help with sleep. (I could go on a rant here about an academic culture that glorifies overworking, one in which students complain-brag about how few hours of sleep they routinely get by on, but that’s another post for another time.)

Of course, the end result of my story is that after a really bad week that made me desperate enough to make an impulse appointment at my school’s health center, and after I started crying at the sympathetic doctor when she started suggesting those exact same “lifestyle changes” that I’d tried (and blamed myself for failing) so many times, I got a referral to a psychiatrist and actual, serious medical help for insomnia and anxiety, and no one shamed me. Which is not the outcome that many fat people have when dealing with the medical establishment, obviously. The weariness in my friend’s voice, her resignation to not getting the medical care she deserved, struck me deep. 

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what to say except that really fucking sucks, and it makes me so angry for you.”

I remember that she thanked me for my anger.