Senator Envy

I am often envious of people living in other states, or even other parts of my state, for their awesome state senators and representatives.

As I live in the Kansas City Metro Area, I read a lot about Missouri Sen. Jolie Justus, who represents a district including parts of Kansas City, MO. She's an out lesbian, and the first openly gay member of the Missouri Senate. She also generally seems to look out for her poorest constituents; whenever I see her quoted in the Kansas City Star she seems to be talking about how such-and-such measure would affect the poor, the disabled, the homeless etc. She seems to want to make Missouri a kinder, gentler, more inclusive place.

I have also had reason to wish that I lived in a different part of Kansas, so that Kansas Sen. Marci Francisco would be my senator instead of Sen. Greg Smith. I wrote to both of them (and the rest of the members of the Natural Resources subcommittee of the Kansas Senate Ways and Means Committee) concerning an effort to reintroduce black-footed ferrets on private property in western Kansas, and a resolution their committee was considering that would oppose this effort. Sen. Francisco wrote back to me, and gave the impression that she was well-informed on the issue, and that she shared my concern that the resolution being discussed was written in a hugely misleading way. She also told me about several efforts she had made to change the language of the resolution by amending it, and that she would keep trying to edit out the parts that she thought were wrong. (Sort of hedging one's bets, is how I took it: the ideal outcome would've been for the resolution to fail, but if it looked like it might pass, it would be less hostile to the reintroduction effort than it would've been without her intervention. I can appreciate that.)

Now I have another state senator to covet and admire from afar: Texas Sen. Wendy Davis. She's filibustering a particularly draconian set of restrictions on abortion that would close the vast majority of Texas's abortion clinics. Should the bill become law, only five clinics (out of 47) could stay open, and those five are all clustered in the eastern part of Texas.

Map:

Map showing all clinics in Texas that offer abortion (top), and all of those clinics that meet the requirements laid out in SB5. Graphic made by Whole Woman's Health

Anyway, Sen. Davis is taking heroic measures to block this bill! She's been standing on the Senate floor and speaking since 11:18 this morning, and she's going to keep speaking until midnight tonight. She has had to stay in that spot for the whole ten hours she's been speaking, and will have to stay there for the two hours and forty-five minutes she still has to go. She can't stop talking, leave (even to use the bathroom), eat or drink. Republican senators have even called foul on her for wearing a back brace at one point in her filibuster. At least she's wearing good shoes!

I am in awe of how hardcore she is. I'm a lot younger than she is, and in good physical shape, but I don't think I could do what she's doing, even on a pure physical level. (Seriously. I can work outside for six, seven or eight hours in the hot sun, like when I dug an 80-foot-long, maybe 18" deep on average trench in my mom's backyard to put in a brick wall border for a giant flowerbed we're still filling up. Did that all by myself, during peak sun hours in a Kansas summer. It was probably high 80s or low 90s*. Yet I am probably 85%-90% certain I would collapse before the end of the twelve-hour, forty-two-minute filibuster she's powering through.) Obviously I wouldn't have the quick wits to come up with original, relevant content to fill a twelve-hour filibuster; apparently in real life you can't just grab the nearest book and start reading aloud.

*For any international readers I might have, those numbers are on the Fahrenheit scale. In degrees Celsius, it was probably 30-35. Hot by my standards, anyway. Some of you might scoff at that, but I am a transplant from further north, and I miss winter. 

Andrea Dworkin on Female Rebellion

In her book Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin includes a chapter on female virginity, citing Joan of Arc and the two female saints who inspired her as examples of celibate women refusing to live the narrow, cramped lives to which their societies consigned them. For these women, their virgin state was both a practical strategy (since it's easier to risk your life when you have no children who depend on you, and no husband whose property you legally are) and a defiant gesture in itself:

The Church that killed [Joan of Arc] may now identify her as a martyr; but for women inspired by her legend, she is a martial hero luminous with genius and courage, an emblem of possibility and potentiality consistently forbidden, obliterated, or denied by the rigid tyranny of sex-role imperatives or the outright humiliation of second-class citizenship. Women have many martyrs, many valiant pacifists, sung and unsung; few heroes who made war. We know how to die, also how not to kill; Joan inexplicably knew how to make war. At her trial, Joan insisted that she had never killed on the battlefield, improbable since the combat was hand-to-hand; but she was known among her own men for standing against the commonplace practices of sadism on the battlefield. It is hard to believe that she did not kill; but whether she did or did not, she was an exemplary martial liberator -- nearly unique in the iconography and history of the European female, that tamed and incomprehensibly peaceful creature. Joan's story is not female until the end, when she died, like nine million other women, in flames, condemned by the Inquisition for witchcraft, heresy, and sorcery. Precisely because she was a hero whose biography brazenly and without precedent violates the constraints of being female until the terrible suffering of her death, her story, valorous and tragic, is political, not magical; mythic because she existed, was real, not because her persona has been enlarged over the centuries. Her virginity was not an expression of some aspect of her femininity or her preciousness as a woman, despite the existence of a cultish worship of virginity as a feminine ideal. She was known as Joan the Maid or, simply, The Maid ("La Pucelle"). Her reputation, her declaration, preceded her, established her intention and her terms; not in the context of being a holy or ideal female but in the context of waging war. Her virginity was a self-conscious and militant repudiation of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status, which, then as now, appeared to have something to do with being fucked. Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebellious and intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female. Being female meant tiny boundaries and degraded possibilities; social inferiority and sexual subordination; surrender to male force or violence; sexual accessibility to men or withdrawal from the world; and civil insignificance. Unlike the feminine virgins who accepted the social subordination while exempting themselves from the sex on which it was premised, Joan rejected the status and the sex as one thing -- empirical synonyms: low civil status and being fucked as indistinguishable one from the other. She refused to be fucked and she refused civil insignificance: and it was one refusal; a rejection of the social meaning of being female in its entirety, no part of the feminine exempted and saved. Her virginity was a radical renunciation of a civil worthlessness rooted in real sexual practice. She refused to be female. As she put it at her trial [a full transcript of which is available online here - Lindsay], not nicely: "And as for womanly duties. She said there were enough other women to do them."

...

We have role models; Joan had voices. Her voices were always accompanied by a radiance, illumination, an expanse of light. She saw angels and was visited by saints. Her two special voices, guides and consolation, were St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret of Antioch. While many of the elaborations on their legends show the iconoclastic individuality of the two saints, the main outlines of their lives -- the substance of their heroism -- were virtually identical. Both were desired by powerful men (heads of state), turned them down, were tortured and decapitated. Both were in mortal combat with male power, were militant in their opposition to it, did not capitulate, and were killed for resisting. Both were virgins.

St. Catherine was the patron saint of unmarried girls and also of philosophers and students. She was famous for her erudition, one of the rare and great women of learning. Her father, a king, wanted her to be married but she kept turning down suitors. One night she dreamed that Mary, holding Jesus, asked her if she wanted to be his bride. She said yes, but Jesus turned her down because she was not a Christian. She got baptized; that night Jesus, surrounded by angels and saints, put a wedding ring on her hand. When the Emperor Maxentius ordered all the Christians in Alexandria killed, Catherine went to him to argue for her faith. The Emperor made her debate fifty learned men, skilled orators; she won each debate and the fifty men were burned. The Emperor wanted Catherine for his mistress and promised that her image would be worshipped everywhere if only she would make a sacrifice to the gods. She refused, for Jesus and her faith. The Emperor threw her into prison and she was terribly tortured. The Catherine wheel, an instrument of torture, was invented for the purpose of eviscerating and killing her; but an angel destroyed the wheel. Catherine was killed by decapitation.

St. Margaret was the patron saint of peasants and women in childbirth, the latter not because she had children but because she was swallowed by the devil in the form of a dragon, and her purity and resistance were so great that he had to spew her up again whole and unhurt. Viewed as someone miraculously reborn uninjured, she became a symbol of hope in the life-and-death agony of childbirth. Margaret's father was a pagan priest, but she was secretly baptized. She tended animals in the fields. The governor, Olybrius, saw her, wanted her, and had her brought to him. She refused him and declared her faith. She was imprisoned, flogged, and terribly tortured. In prison she was swallowed by the dragon; and when she triumphed over the dragon, the devil confronted her again, this time in the form of a sympathetic man who told her that she had suffered too much:

But she seized his hair, hurled him to the ground, and placing her foot on his head, exclaimed:
"Tremble, great enemy. You now lie under the foot of a woman."

She was burned, torches applied to various parts of her body, but she acted as though she felt no pain. She was killed by decapitation.

The legends of both saints were well known in Joan's time and environment, common stories for everyone, not arcane anecdotes for the educated. The narrative details were so familiar that an evil and stupid person was even referred to, in the common parlance, as an "Olybrius." Women were named after these saints and celebrated name days. These saints were figures of mass adoration in stories of adventure, romance, and heroism. There was an elaborate and epic imagery in the churches to communicate visually the drama and scale of their bravery and martyrdom. The artifacts and paintings in the churches told the stories of the saints and their heroism and suffering in dramatic, graphic pictures; a bold, articulate, mesmerizing iconography not rivaled for effect until the invention of the wide screen in cinema. St. Catherine was pictured with the wheel named for her, St. Margaret with a dragon, both with swords. They were shown with swords because they had been decapitated, but the abridgement of the narrative into a martial image conveyed militance, not just martyrdom. Each faced what amounted to a state-waged war against her person: the whole power of the state -- military, physical, sadistic -- arrayed against her will and her resistance and the limits of a body fragile because human. This goes beyond the timorous ambition of today: a woman fights off a rapist. Each of these women fought off a rapist who used the apparatus of the state -- prison and torture -- to destroy her as if she were an enemy nation. Each refused the male appropriation of her body for sex, the right to which is a basic premise of male domination; each refused a man in whom male power and state power were united, a prototype for male power over women; and each viewed the integrity of her physical body as synonymous with the purity of her faith, her purpose, her self-determination, her honor. This was not a puerile virginity defined by fear or effeminacy. This was a rebel virginity harmonious with the deepest values of resistance to any political despotism.

Joan identified deeply with these women ... [s]he learned from them the way a genius learns: she did not repeat them in form or in content; she invented new form, new content, a revolutionary resistance. Joan did not die because men desired her; but because she refused the status, including the outward trappings (female clothing), of one who could be so desired at all. Virginity was one dimension of her overall strategy, one aspect of her rebellion; and, interestingly, her refusal to have sex with a man was not a dogmatic or ideological one. As Marina Warner points out in her book on Joan, the name Joan called herself and by which she was widely known, La Pucelle, "denotes a time of passage, not a permanent condition." Her own testimony at her trial seems to confirm this nuance:

Asked whether it had been revealed to her that if she lost her virginity she would lose her good fortune, and that her voices would come no more to her.
She said: That has not been revealed to me.
Asked whether she believes that if she were married the voices would come to her,
She answered: I do not know, and I wait upon Our Lord.

Had Joan simply learned a Church precept by rote or had she wanted to conform to a theological code of sexual purity, she would have held virginity to be a sacred state of being, one that would ennoble her for the duration of her life, a passive state intrinsically holy and magical with God's blessings. In her society, virginity was "an ideal wreathed in the finest poetry and exalted in beautiful Latin hymns and conventual chants." It was a common belief cited as fact by Church authorities with whom she came into contact that "God had revealed to virgins ... that which He had kept hidden from men." Instead for Joan -- and Catherine and Margaret -- virginity was an active element of self-determined integrity, an existential independence, affirmed in choice and faith from minute to minute; not a retreat from life but an active engagement with it; dangerous and confrontational because it repudiated rather than endorsed male power over women. For all three women, virginity was "a passage, not a permanent condition," the precondition for a precocious, tragic passage to death. As rebellion, virginity amounted to a capital crime. No woman, however, had ever rebelled the way Joan of Arc, virgin, rebelled.

Later in the chapter, Dworkin contrasts Joan's rebellion with the rebellion of a much later --- and fictional --- French heroine, this one created by a male novelist:

[Gustave Flaubert] wrote what a current paperback edition of his masterwork hails as "the greatest portrait ever written of a woman's soul in revolt against conventional society." The book is not about Joan of Arc. It is, instead and on the contrary, about Emma Bovary, a petite bourgeois whose great act of rebellion is to commit adultery. With this woman, called "my little lady" by her creator, the modern era begins: the era of the petite bourgeoisie seeking freedom. Female freedom is defined strictly in terms of committing forbidden sexual acts. Female heroism is in getting fucked and wanting it. Female equality means that one experiences real sexual passion -- driven to it, not faking. There is an equation between appetite and freedom, especially promiscuity (as one form of appetite) and freedom. A romantic distinctly not in the traveling, lyric tradition of Shelley or Byron, indeed, a female romantic with lightness in the head and fragmented fantasies feverish on the brain, "she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women ... who stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven ..." For Emma, Joan was such a comet, a figure of fantasy, in the ether, not ever having lived on earth in the framework of real human possibility. Emma's mind, murky with religious and romantic fantasy, wanted "the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts." In her sentimentality, "she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries"; and in her effete impotence, "[s]he tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing for a whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfill." Alternately agitated and bored, having a mind filled with fantasies rather than ideas or possibilities, having no purpose or commitment, having no action, no vocation, only the boring chores and obligations of domesticity; too self-involved to find either passion or emotion in commonplace human relations, including motherhood, she is incapable -- to use the language of Iris Murdoch -- of moral or artistic excellence, defeated because she is immersed in personal fantasy, "the chief enemy of excellence," "the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is outside one." ...

Preoccupied with fantasy, Emma does not see or experience the world outside herself except as a deprivation of attention from her inner fog, and so she remains essentially untouched -- by the husband who fucks her and by human possibility in the wider world of real events. Virginity is redefined through her, given a modern meaning: a woman untouched is a woman who has not yet felt sexual desire enough to be made sick by it, experienced sexual passion enough to crave it, and broken rules in order to be carnal; a woman fucked by her husband but feeling nothing, or not enough, no lust, no romance, no brilliance of sensation, is still a woman untouched. This new virginity of body and soul survives marriage, and marriage itself generates new, incoherent fantasies of romantic or sexual grandeur: "Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires." There is no freedom, no heroism, no ambition, no equality, outside the domain of sex experienced as carnal passion and also as the breaking of a rule. Danger is in the extremity of feeling and the risk of flouting convention; and the danger verifies the authenticity of the event, hidden from history yet having the significance of a male act of freedom inside history. The large, brave world of Joan becomes the tiny, suffocating world of Emma: and in it we still live. The old virginity -- with its real potential for freedom and self-determination -- is transformed into the new virginity -- listless, dissatisfied ennui until awakened by the adventure of male sexual domination: combat on the world's tiniest battlefield. It took Freud to call the refusal to fight on that little battlefield "repression" and to name the ambition to fight on the large one "penis envy." The cell door closed behind us, and the key turned in the lock.

Link Roundup, Feminism-and-Disability Edition

To take a bit of a break from all the long, involved thinky and researchy posts I've been doing lately, I'm just going to link to a few things I've seen around the Internet recently and been blown away by.

First, FWD/Forward, an awesome new blog that deserves lots of attention, has been running a series of posts on ableism in language. Each post in the series deals with one word or phrase, like "lame," "vegetable," "retarded," "cretin," or "hysterical."

Also at FWD/Forward, Amanda W. of Three Rivers Fog has enlarged on this older post of AnneC's, "Conceptualizing Autism," to show how it can be applied to all disabilities.

I also discovered FWD/Forward contributor Meloukhia's blog, This Ain't Livin', and really liked these two posts: "Default Settings," about the gender binary, cissexism and compulsory heterosexuality, and "How to Evaluate a Source of Information."

Elesia Ashkenazy of Aspitude! has a very interesting interview on her site, with an anonymous former behavior analyst who voices some problems ze has with ABA:

One day, I was sitting with one of my favorite clients. He was the sweetest nonverbal foodie (he ate everything) who smiled often, and listened well. We had just gone through his set of verbal training programs, and we were having a relaxing break. He was stimming [ex.: finger flicking/rippling, humming, rocking, spinning] on a musical toy and he began hyper hand-flapping. My job was to click each hand flap and *reset* his hands every time. I sat back in realization and wondered to myself: is this treatment truly helping him to become independent? Will he be institutionalized for his entire life? Why does it matter if he hand flaps? Will he find love in his life?

During this rush of emotions, it was like I saw a film reel pass my eyes, and I could see my client sitting in a home twenty years into the future, having never been given an opportunity to grow into his full potential. He had been stunted by diagnosis after diagnosis, prescription after prescription, and treatment after treatment.

How do we expect to *socialize* someone if we never give them a chance to interact socially, and we treat them as if they are rehabilitated animals at a nature center of some sort?

How, indeed. (Though I would argue that animals, too, should be free to engage in whatever odd behaviors they like as long as they aren't hurting anyone!)

Finally, via Shakesville, a wonderful article from Newsweek.com about Dr. Marci Bowers, who does reconstructive surgery, free of charge, for women who've had their genitals mutilated.

"...[Y]ou cannot charge a fee to reverse a crime against humanity," she said. "Sexuality is a right."

Dr. Bowers is transgendered, and she brings up her experiences with transitioning in the video clip, when she's talking about what led her to start doing this work.

EDIT: There's one more awesome thing I read recently, that I forgot to include: IOZ has a thought-provoking response to this New York Times editorial, in which he raises some really important, hardly-ever-asked questions about the nature of the American economy:

... [N]o one seems much interested in the fact that an industrial economy is necessarily pyramidal, that not everyone can be an inventor (or innovator, as goes the preferred neologism) or CEO. You know, even in the Imaginarium of Doctress Rand, it is taken as given that the Atlases of the world must at some point employ and direct the debased lumpenproletariat: there are no illusions that every man is a genius. ...
...
You cannot run a society of three hundred million people by requiring that each either invent the iPod or remain broke forever. Which rather brings up a tangential but dearly held point for the whole gang here at Who Is IOZ? Namely:

You cannot run a society of three hundred million people.

(IOZ is also probably among my favorite prose stylists in the blogosphere, after the inimitable Twisty Faster).

Doctor Murdered by Terrorists

Via Shakesville and Pandagon.

Dr. George Tiller, a Wichita-based gynecologist who ran one of only two clinics in the state of Kansas that perform abortions, was shot outside Reformation Lutheran Church this morning.

The police have a suspect, Scott Roeder from Merriam, Kansas. (Merriam is a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, neighboring the one in which I live).

Dr. Tiller has been shot at before: in 1993, the anti-abortion activist Shelley Shannon shot him twice, but he survived. His clinic is frequently picketed, and he's also been subjected to intense scrutiny by former Kansas attorney general Phill Kline, who seized the medical records of Tiller's patients to look for evidence of sexual abuse of underage girls --- this was seen by many people, including me, as a pretext to harrass Tiller and possibly close down his clinic, since an abortion clinic is hardly the only place one would look for underage rape victims, yet it seems to be the only context in which he mentioned this personal quest.

If I have anything substantive to say about this good, brave man's murder, it is this: There is no difference between the people who did this (and who bomb abortion clinics and stalk, harrass and murder doctors nation- and worldwide) and the Islamic terrorists who are supposed to be The Enemy.

None whatsoever.

R.I.P., Alyric

I learned from The Gonzolog that autism blogger Alyric, who wrote A Touch of Alyricism, has passed away, having fought cancer for a year.

Alyric was not a personal blogger; she preferred to write about the science of autism, the ethics of autism advocacy, and to debunk --- with astonishing wit and grace --- the fallacies of the anti-vaccination cranks and the nastier stereotypes of adult autistics.

Because she did not blog about her own life, I had no idea she was sick. From reading others' blog entries memorializing her, they were equally blindsided.

Even though I did not read Alyric regularly, I did find her blog intensely interesting, informative and well-written. Her husband and daughter have chosen to keep her writings visible online, so people who haven't had a chance to read her can still do so.

Here are some of my favorite things she's written:

"Blueprint for a 21st Century Witch-hunt" - an extended analogy between Internet communities and medieval villages, with specific focus on the way in which certain groups of people (she focuses on autistics, though I'm sure there are others, too) get scapegoated and demonized within these insular enclaves. It also features a lot of amusing figures of speech, of which my favorite would be her likening the "flat affect" characteristic of Asperger syndrome to a "witches' caul."

"Unnatural Selection" - a discussion of eugenics and the possibility of a prenatal test for autism

"The Infamous 166" - a closer look at the autism-prevalence statistics

"A Tall Tale - and about to Topple" - a detailed explanation of one of the more sophisticated autism-as-mercury-poisoning conjectures

"Indistinguishable From Their Peers" and "Review: Behavior Therapy for Children with ASD" - critiques of existing literature on ABA

We'll miss you, Alyric. The blogosphere is poorer without you.