4 posts tagged “women's empowerment”
I've always liked the phrase "stickin' it to the Man," used to describe some overt or covert subversion of authority. Getting something that the dominant cultural paradigm would like to deny you. Triumphing over petty bureaucracy. I pretty much stick it to the Man every day by using some of my work time to write.
So why don't we have a companion phrase like "stickin' it to the Woman"? What would it mean if we did? It sounds like it could be kinda sexy and dirty, but I don't think it is. Women don't now nor have they ever held the kind of unassailable position of authority in our cultural pantheon that men have held. We didn't even have the right to vote until 88 years ago. Women as a group have largely been property for the last several thousand years. Something a man could own, sell, and dispose of as he saw fit.
Stickin' it to the Woman then would pretty much just describe the way women have traditionally been treated. It would describe the act of a more powerful group of people trampling on a less powerful group of people. Using social pressures and cultural expectations to force someone to do things they didn't want to. Using petty bureaucracy to keep people from exercising their rights. Taking advantage of traditions to enforce unspoken rules of behavior.
Today, as a nation, we're making one small push back against the people who still think stickin' it to the Woman is okay. For 19 years Lily Ledbetter worked in a Goodyear Tire plant, doing her job well and taking home her hard-earned money. Then one day she received an anonymous note in her locker, telling her that she was making as much as 40% less than the men who performed her exact same job. These were not men with more experience or education. In some cases, they weren't men with more tenure on the job. They were simply people who had the happy blessing of being born with a cock and balls. For that they were receiving more money than Ms. Ledbetter.
She sued Goodyear, but the Supreme Court overturned her win on the grounds that employees only have 180 days to dispute unequal pay. In short, she was supposed to have filed suit before she even knew that she was being cheated. And how was she to know she was being cheated? (There's no law requiring employers to disclose pay rates to workers in the same job.) One has to assume that the law exists only to give lipservice to the idea of equal pay, while rendering it virtually impossible to enforce.
The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law today, does away with that 180-day statute of limitations by resetting the clock with each discriminatory paycheck. In short, as long as a person is still employed by the company, he or she can sue for reparations, and up to six months after the last paycheck. It does not, however, lift the paltry two-year limit on back pay. Lily Ledbetter, after 19 years of discrimination, would only have been eligible to be paid for two of those years.
According to the Census Bureau, women on average still make only 78 cents for each dollar men earn on average, and I can only imagine that there are large numbers of people experiencing the same discrimination for reasons of their race, religion, or physical disability.
When I worked for the Church of the Valet, I was an administrative Jill of All Trades. I did the newsletter, funeral bulletins, bookkeeping, website updates, database maintenance, bulk mailing. Everything that needed to be done, I pitched in and did it. A year into my tenure, one of the other administrative assistants quit and the church hired someone new. A man. We'd had another man in an administrative position, but there was always some discomfort. The discomfort usually ended in me doing some of more menial clerical work and ultimately produced a promotion for the male admin. asst.
Gymbag, the new male admin. asst. was touted as having a lot of computer experience and a lot of experience doing website design and corporate communications. In fact, he was going to have a different title, too: Communications Coordinator and Webmaster. Two weeks in, it was clear to me that Gymbag was incompetent. Not only did he know almost nothing about doing corporate communications, he couldn't be taught some of the most basic parts of his job. (Like how to operate the folding machine that folds newsletters for mailing.) So you know who did them.
By the time I found out that Gymbag was making $4,000 more a year (and doing at least 50% less work) than I was, I had already turned in my resignation in preparation to move to Kansas. I have no doubt that the real motivation in giving Gymbag a trumped up job description and a higher salary was to assuage the egos of the men on the hiring committee. It probably hurt their pride to see a fellow brother fallen to the embarrassing level of "administrative assistant."
It continues today. At the Church of the Valet, Gymbag continues in his glorious reign of incompetence, and he continues to make more than the other admin. assts. More tellingly, even the specialized parts of his job that I supposed were meant to justify his higher salary...they've been foisted off on the other admin. asst. The Fabulous E is learning Dreamweaver so she can take over doing website maintenance. (Turns out, Gymbag doesn't even know how to use Dreamweaver. He was using some little dinky updater program, which explains why the new website design never got implemented.) No one can quite tell me what Gymbag does to earn his paycheck, but the evil part of me hopes it's something dirty and humiliating that takes place behind the pastor's closed door. Enough women have been forced to debase themselves to keep their jobs.
The Lily Ledbetter Act is a small step, but at least it signals the new administration's willingness to put a stop to people stickin' it to the Woman. We need to keep an eye open for the ways in which the system is built in. Women are in the majority in America, but we still operate like a minority. The truth is: Stockholm Syndrome is real. Culturally speaking, we've been held hostage to a discriminatory system for so long that we still sympathize with it. It's the same story for black Americans of both genders--they're still struggling to break free from that feeling of being hostages and needing to appease their captors.
If that sounds radical, think about these parallels. At plenty of jobs I've been asked to do menial tasks that no one ever asked the male employees to do. Often I did them. Why? Because when I rebelled I was punished in some way--often socially. Because when I was a little girl and one of my uncles said, "Bring me a beer," or "Get the ashtray," there was no use in wondering why the boy cousins were never forced into service like that. They just weren't and for the girl cousins to refuse to serve resulted in punishment.
The prairie dress: it's the new burqa.
Here we are in the 21st Century, surrounded by amazing technological advances, access to knowledge beyond our wildest dreams, and opportunities that transcend race, class, and seemingly gender. Yet men are still using the bodies of women as political objects. Covered, uncovered, altered, mutilated, all for the political purposes of men. Certainly, women have used their bodies for politics, but almost always personal politics. Even the bra-burning of the sixties was more personal than cultural politics. An act of defiance by a few women, not a movement.
When we see the women of the FLDS in Texas in their lovely, modest dresses, we're witnessing women being used for two political purposes. The first is the politics inside their own culture. The dresses serve to remind them that they are the property of men, that they are dangerous creatures, whose bodies must be tightly controlled. To remind them that are provokers and promoters of sin and fornication and damnation. Unclean.
Outside, in American consumer culture, it's the politics of faux-freedom. Out here, the women are presented as examples of oppression, repression, the down-trodden, the thwarted. These are women who can't wear make-up, who are forced to wear a strange hairstyle, who don't have modern clothes.
The difficulty, as a woman in 21st century America, is in parsing where the truth lies in between these two political stories. Both steal freedom. Both put women's bodies under the power of men. If you love your body and the freedom of sex, then the burqa-like prairie dress and all its cultural accoutrement seems unbearable. If our cultural obsession with "perfecting" women's bodies horrifies you, or your own body horrifies you as a result, or if you're simply a modest person, that pastel prairie cover-all looks better than a pair of hot pants to bare your less than perfect legs, or a tube top to reveal your less than inspiring cleavage.
At the bottom of both political mechanisms, there is still this truth. We can put a man on the moon* and decode the human genome, but we have not yet undone this sense that the only thing men can truly own, can truly put their mark on, is women. For women, there is the dual cruelty of owning a body that is desired and vilified, almost in the same breath. To be creatures whose capacity for lust is so dark, so consuming that it must be chained, either in modest dresses or in the trappings of sex. To be creatures whose bodies are communal property.
*I cede this point only grudgingly for the purposes of rhetoric.
You can't make shit like this up, people. As someone who has quite a bit of personal and professional experience with making up unbelievable shit, I'm telling you that what is about to follow could only exist in the non-fiction world. No self-respecting fiction publisher or editor would let a thing like this fly.
A few days ago I happened across a post by Miss Scotch about her exciting days as an English tutor for the child of some Italian yoga Hindu cultists. She posted a picture of their guru that got me started on one of my random internet searches. That random internet search brought me here: Woman Thou Art God, The University of Mother God Church, presented by its one true prophet, Rasa Von Werder.
In detailing her many visions and conversation with Jesus (and several other historic religious figures, this is what the website of Woman Thou Art God has to say:
In 2002 Rasa dreamed about being married. This always means Jesus because Jesus has actually betrothed her with three rings in 1978, and married her in a mystical experience in 1982. In this dream, she's looking at her husband who is standing next to a fireplace. He is dressed in black, and He is Tom Selleck, suddenly she is shocked because she has not really seen her husband so beautiful as if she was blind before. The next scene he is on top of her making love, she knows his penis is inside of her but there is no feeling of grossness...only a feeling a divine love.
That's right, folks, Jesus appeared to her as Tom Selleck.
Here is what Rasa has to say about why Jesus appeared as Tom Selleck:
By the way, Jesus rarely appears rarely looking like the long-haired, robed person in classical art. He appears as we said, as the most handsome, sexiest man that Rasa can conceive of. Handsome and sexy means beauty, and God is beauty. On the other hand, the devil is ugly, and when he appears he is always ugly except in rare cases when he tries to fool you with outward appearance and appears attractive, but there is a sinister feeling to his looks.
Thanks, crazy lady, because regular religions don't already stress the "evil is ugly and ugly is evil" theory. You're really breaking new ground here. Had enough? Me neither, let's read on:
There is a saint named Baba Muktananda that Rasa has had the closest relationship with, next to Jesus. [One] night, [Baba] was on top of her and he was transmitting the lotion of consciousness into her being. She didn't feel anything like sex or penis, but his being on top was a symbol and a sign that he was downloading grace into her. Another time he appeared as Jean Claude Van Damme, one of Rasa's favorite stars and yet another time as the star from "The Highlander" -another super-handsome man.
Or how about Mohamed came to her in a dream as David Hasselhoff, and he was naked, holding two puppies. Like this:
Perhaps the bizarre part is that beyond all the total fruit and nut religious visions and spiritual sex, the website has some interesting articles on women's empowerment issues, like breastfeeding and polygamy.
I used to teach English Composition at Kansas State University in Manhattan. It's not far from Ft. Riley, where the Big Red One used to be based. After the first Gulf War--you remember, the one that was legitimate, that we gave up without taking out Saddam Hussein, because he was still our buddy...
It's happening again, as I knew it would. War has always made people behave monstrously, and no surprise. I don't know about the rest of you, but I was raised to think it was wrong to kill people. Murder was a sin, they told me, and yet you'll find plenty of war-supporters who'd like to have the Ten Commandments posted in all kinds of public places. You can't expect that a.) a person who thinks that killing is wrong will come out of war mentally okay, or b.) a person who thinks killing is pretty cool will not snap some xcellent pics of him and his buddies with some raghead they kanked. Those are the two kinds of people you end up with in the military--good guys who will end up with mental problems and guys with mental problems who will enjoy it.
