2016 Fucking Happened

The idea behind this quote was also super-racist:
 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/21/sanders-identity-politics/94221972/

"There is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton," Darren Linvill, associate professor of communications and one of the researchers who worked on the study, told The Post. 

Linvill said the tweets analyzed as part of the study "give us a much clearer understanding of the tactics they were using. It was certainly a higher volume than people thought."

Sanders was "just a tool" to the Russians, Linvill added, and "a wedge to drive into the Democratic Party." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04/11/741d7308-5576-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html

Painting the painting above was meant to bring me relief, but it made my blood boil over and over again. It brought back all of the physical sensations of fear and abandonment and shame, tensing up as the notifications rolled in, as stranger friends-of-friends lined up to tell me how stupid I was, what a liar, how if we lost the election, it would be Hillary supporters’ fault for wanting representation—Oh, sure, a woman, just not THIS woman. The horror and sadness and moved-to-loudness I felt when my friends and then even Roxane Gay said they’d been afraid to speak up for Hillary. All this was before it had really sunk in that Trump could be our rapist-in-chief. Before the regrettable, inarticulate fury with which I ruined Thanksgiving and then rage-drove five hours, only able to find comfort in the new Gilmore Girls episodes.

Since then, I’ve learned to use my anger mostly-constructively. I’ve been so heartened and lucky to be in a city with progressive values and frequent marches, so glad that it’s only a day trip to yell directly at the White House or the Supreme Court. I’ve come to rely on visits to the Hope Diamond or long stretches of phone-games-in bed to calm down after protests. I have written every strongly worded letter that came to mind. I made a chart in case I can’t pick what to write to congress about on any given day:

And I’m very happy to be going as Rose Quartz for Halloween, because it means I’ll be ready with a DON’T MAKE ME GET MY PLANT ARMY sign come the Women’s March.

 Over the summer this year, my BFF and I listened to the Lawfare Blog’s Mueller Report podcast (https://www.lawfareblog.com/introducing-report-podcast-series-lawfare) on family trips and on dreamy drives home from the beach. The jazzy music that plays to indicate direct quotes was our song of the summer. It was a weird comfort to listen because so much of the time we’re gaslit into forgetting our election was stolen, but it was. As paranoid, panicked, as fight-flight-or-freeze as I’ve always been, even my anxious imagination could not have come up with THE SHIT THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

As outlined in the epigraph, a tyrannical enemy leader was able to exploit Bernie supporters’ misogyny to commit an act of warfare, to steal our election, and somehow this contingency still thinks they have the moral high ground. And it’s not just bigoted white men on his side—plenty of badass women who have NO ACTUAL NEED of obedience have joined the #BernieSquad rather than supporting any of the wildly qualified women who are running. AND YET I STILL FEEL BAD FOR NOT BEING NICE ABOUT THIS.

Sometimes Bernie/Russia rage comes out when I don’t necessarily want it to, especially when it comes to my better-behaved straight white lady friends. They do plenty of activism in their own ways, but I’m honestly sick of them guarding their social capital by outsourcing their anger to less-gender-conforming women like me. I found myself on a tear during a lovely Longwood Gardens brunch, during a beautiful walk in the autumn woods that is supposed to be abut other things.  I want to ask them to stop being so obedient, so diplomatic, to stop hiding in the shelter of their agreeableness and appeasing the men and the institutions they serve. I seriously hate it when people blame women for Trump, but I also seriously need these ladies to be braver, to close their empathy gaps, honestly to be just better friends to me and to America.

As these conversations progress/dissolve, I become conscious of the other lady’s “civil” moral high ground. Why does everybody have to argue, they ask. Why couldn’t you have been more diplomatic? Just be in community and everything will be okay. Perceiving their assurance of the innate superiority to my unhinged self, I feel more unhinged. I apologize a thousand times for being so mean. I don’t want to apologize any more.

2018 in Protest Art (For Heather Heyer)

HOPEFUL was my word for 2018 and I definitely honored it every day.

Philly Women's March!

First art after Parkland.

More for Parkland, now and forever.

Seriously read this book, it will save your life!

(Except staple guns!)

The kids made me feel so honored when they used my posters for their walkout! I felt like a mini Shepherd Fairey but more importantly I was awed by their power and dignity. 

March for Our Lives, Washington, DC

This little girl was the best thing that ever happened to my art. 

Mourning Stephon Clark.

People will always be trying to convince Hillary supporters that she was (and we are)  no good, but we will always know better.

Remember Kesha at the Grammys?!

My love for Taylor Swift abides. 

Work epiphany!

My Say Her Name series helped me learn a lot about women of color who were murdered by the police. Committing to always learn more. 

 The absolute best thing that happened all year--protesting for Immigration Rights with my sister and nephew!!! (and my bff of course) 

We yelled at Mike Pence when he came to town,

Trans people continue to be targeted and terrorized by I.C.E.

Inspired by the Dietland show, I give my silhouette some love!

Counter protesting Unite the Right in D.C. We 100% WON this protest.

Ohhey remember how the Blue Wave turned out to be a thing?!

Hope she declares her candidacy for 2020 soooooon! 

Dirty Computer is the boss of my life forever. 

Two seconds away from being unhinged at the Capitol the day of Kavanaugh's confirmation.

Sobbing on the Capitol lawn but not giving up.

She survived Hitler but not Trump.

For the Proud Boys counterprotest in Philly--another time we  100% won.

Pausing on the Philadelphia Art Museum steps to listen to the Women's March rally,
I heard the crowd singing this to the tune of "We Will, We Will Rock You." It seems like a manifesto for the entire year.

I started off the year wanting to lose 40 lbs, but I got Fat Liberation instead. Thanks "She's All Fat" Podcast, "The Body is Not an Apology", and "Dietland." I hope to never again regret taking up space.

Victimhood Isn’t Shameful, Permanent, or Absolute

Fuck Tony Robbins. When he literally, physically pushed a woman repeatedly to prove that she was hurting herself with her #metoo anger and “victim mentality,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmkiqfmobqI the world (or at least the world that shares my algorithms) was horrified, and he was indeed a terrible monster, but he was also pushing a belief that runs throughout all throughout pop psychology. Even though a crime happened to us, a terrible act of aggression and chaos that may have (or may not have!) jarred our lives onto a new course, we are not allowed to call ourselves victims. (Except Roxane Gay. She said at the beginning of Hunger that she doesn’t feel like she owes the world a heroic narrative, and it was SUCH a relief to read that sentiment.)

Watching Tony Robbins be a gaslighting creep onstage reminded me of the time (Waaaaaay before I’d ever thought about trauma work or survivorship or PTSD) my poor Aunt Melinda accidentally sent me to triggertown by quoting another pop psychology patriarch: Dr. Phil. “You teach people how to treat you,” she said, frustrated after listening to a relatively minor tale of roommate woe. I was speechless with anger, feeling the weight of every abuse I’d even been blamed (or blamed myself) for. I’m sure I said nothing helpful or articulate. I still feel the weight of that rage, that mute fury, but luckily there’s blogs and Twitter and being a street artist now, so I find the words. I’ll be finding the words for the rest of my life.

***PLEASE NOTE*** My beautiful anxiety brain is about to take us on a journey, in several leaps, from my personal trauma to the global trauma of history. I don’t equate my trauma to ANYONE else’s. This paragraph is to show the way my trauma helps connect me to the other much more serious pains of the world, and how gaslighting and victim-blaming helps perpetuate the smallest harms and the largest.***

I have never been able to separate “You teach people how to treat you,” from “you were asking for (rape, abuse, terror, etc.)” Did I somehow “teach” the group of teens who drugged, conspired to rape, and assaulted me that that was the kind of treatment I deserved? Did Trayvon Martin TEACH George Zimmerman that he deserved to die, or was that CENTURIES OF COLONIALISM, WHITE SUPREMACY, AND NRA INFLUENCE? For that matter, did the nations and cultures that were colonized, tortured, and sometimes even erased by Europe “teach us” that they wanted to be dominated and oppressed? No. We dominated and oppressed them because we wanted to. That’s what abusers do.

Aside from the abusive aspect of victimhood-stigmatizing, we do it to ourselves as well. God forbid I should accidentally call myself a “victim” instead of a “survivor” in a feminist thread—I’d be accused of demeaning myself and others, but why? Why should it be demeaning to admit that something bad has happened to us? (I’m worried that I’m accidentally plagiarizing Roxane Gay here. Seriously, read everything she’s ever written.)

I think it comes back to an ancient and stultifying thread of magical thinking. To calm the chaos of the world around us, humans still believe deep down that if something bad happens to you, you must be bad. On that idea is built every atrocity, every erased voice, every abuse from personal to global. Because of that magical thinking, we suffer instead of getting treated, we are pressured to perform heroic survivorship or at least general okayness, we try to empower ourselves with self-blame, we shut off every tributary of empathy. I was seriously once told by an opponent of Obamacare that I got hit by a car in the crosswalk because having insurance invited injury. That is how desperate people are to find order by placing blame, but why not place it on, I DON’T KNOW, the person who was driving?!

If we’re hurt, we must be bad, and if we care for the hurt, we just invite more badness, goes the magical thinking. Teaching the Universe how to treat us. Primal. Understandable, maybe, but the root of every violence and oppression.

Because I’ve had a bajillion years of cognitive behavioral therapy, I can occasionally question my own false absolutes, the labels we place on ourselves and others that can obscure the bigger picture. A few weeks ago, a teenage white supremacist facebook troll told me that minorities should “let go of (our/their) victimhood and be stronger.” He was wrong on every level and I told him why, but his ignorance helped make something clear for me: Victimhood can’t change anyone’s value—why would it? How could a thing that happened to us reduce our worth? A trauma or oppression may change our outlook, it may give us new insights and growth, or it may not. Victimhood may change us, but I don’t think I ever realized before, it isn’t us. The things that happened to me are not the same as what I am. (Pause for two decades of therapists to rejoice.)

The crimes and oppressions that influence us, our various forms of victimhood are not fixed or permanent. Engaging with them doesn’t make us worse or invite more misfortune. Recognizing the ways I am oppressed doesn’t take away my power, it gives me more. Understanding the obstacles that I and my fellow humans face can burnish us to alchemist’s gold, help us change the world, or just help us empathize with our own shitty/miraculous fate as we head off to conquer another day.

If I could take away one idea from the world’s consciousness, it would be the idea that if something bad happens to you, you must deserve it. It’s a toxic, rotten, compelling idea, a holdover from the time when we believed that illness came from demons, that misfortune must reveal some secret sin. It would be especially be good to get rid of this idea because THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO DO THE BAD THINGS! WHERE IS THE COMFORT IN BLAMING THE VICTIMS INSTEAD?

While we work on eradicating victim-blaming, I’m happy to be a little more free of victim-shaming, to see trauma as a shifting influence, survivorship as multifarious and not something at which I have to be amazing. It reminds me of when my BFF/ex-wife were watching Kesha’s Grammy Performance  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buM8OErfvu0 and Amy, eyes full of tears at Kesha’s monumental, beautiful, grumpy transcendence said “She’s too nice!”

“It’s only one song on the album,” I said, and that’s how I feel about all of this. Kesha’s survivorship is a diamond-brilliant facet of her artistic identity, but so is her goofiness, her feverish dance beats, her sly romance. For anyone to reduce her or the #metoo movement to stigmatized victimhood is only to see a very, very narrow part of the picture. Everything I make will be an attempt to break that narrow lens.

#TimesUp Means We Get to Claim All the Spaces

            Last Friday night, I went to Goth Night with a favorite friend and some of his favorite friends. Though I’ve been going to Goth Nights for about 25 years and my friend could NOT have been more welcoming, I was brightly-clad fish out of water. The people around us were all young and fit in their perfect black clothes, impeccably made up.  (Including these teeny tiny star decals—how did they know how to do that?!) But my perceived disconnect with my fellow dancers could not have mattered less—my pal and I were the smiliest goths in all of history and I could NOT contain my glee at getting to dance to Nine Inch Nails just like I did when I was 19.

            At one point, a bro-y guy sort of got in our space and maybe without even meaning to, my pal and his beautiful variously-queer squad formed a dancing wall between the bro and ourselves until he faded off away—a gift and a miracle.

            As I flailed around awkwardly and joyously, I compared this evening to the dance nights of my twenties and felt a PROFOUND difference—I’m all the way here on the planet more than I’ve ever been. My dorky fake converses felt grounded to the earth, solid in a way it’s taken me so long to achieve. I’m not just reacting to the currents of life anymore, I’m planted. Even when I’m not in my perfect blue bubble of an apartment, I’m home.

            I wanted to hug my twenty- and thirty- and forty-year-old selves, tell them how proud I am of how far we’ve come, how strong I am now, but instead I settled for leaping about like a demented cheerleader to the supposedly bleak music. I was so, so happy that I’d put on an outfit and gone.

            Earlier last week, I had a far less joyful but just as grounding experience, writing this bummer of a letter to my neighborhood gym:

“Dear --------------,

I am writing today to tell you a story that may be triggering. I do not currently feel safe attending (gym name) and I hope that you can help me. I am planning to pause my membership for three months to give the issue time to resolve.

On Saturday, January 28 at about 12:20 PM, I was sitting in the hot tub when a man came and sat down on the hot tub steps, directly across from me, blocking any comfortable exit. He was white, medium-height, bald, and had a mustache. As he settled into the water, he started contentedly rubbing his crotch, as if there were no one else in the room. He did this for several minutes, alternating with splashing water on himself. I felt very uncomfortable and violated. It didn’t seem like he was directing the behavior at me, more like my presence and the presence of other gym patrons didn’t matter at all.

When I asked him why his hands were in his crotch, he denied it, got very flustered and angry and stormed off. Although he had left the room, I did not feel safe and was forced to leave my workout early and go home.

I called and reported it on Monday morning, January 29^th, at around 7 AM. The woman at the desk was very kind and receptive, but the situation still feels unresolved. I often enjoy attending the pool at night, and I don’t want to risk being alone in the pool area with this man. I absolutely do not feel that this is something I should have to worry about at the gym (or anywhere!)

Female customers should feel just as safe and entitled to their space at the gym as men do. We are paying the same amount and we deserve the same access to services without fear of violation.

Here are the fixes that I am asking for:

1.      This man should have his gym membership revoked.

2.      The gym needs a clear sexual harassment policy, sent to members, visible on the website, and posted clearly in all gym areas.

3.      A female staff member should be posted in the pool area at all times.

4.      Staff should be trained in sexual harassment prevention and trauma sensitivity so that patrons can feel comfortable coming to them with any concerns.

I would be happy to meet with you and discuss this. I have otherwise enjoyed my time at (gym name) and I hope that we can find a just solution for me and for your female patrons.

Best,

Jane”

            I’m so annoyed that I had to spend my time on this, and that I’ll probably have to go to a meeting about it and/or find a way out of my membership contract, but this is the widest margin I’ve ever given myself for recovering from this kind of thing. I didn’t want to write the letter, but I asked my body what it wanted and this was the only answer that I got.

            This vexingly commonplace incident reminded me of an earlier one, from when I was sixteen or seventeen. I used to like to take the bus from the suburbs into what seemed at the time like the “big city” of Syracuse, NY. On this particular day, I had spent the day at the big library, picking out an art-themed and vaguely beatnik-y book of poetry.

            I was dressed as I dressed for most of high school-- a polyester thrift store find, a short, red floral print dress and probably lug-soled mary janes—I love the Nineties SO MUCH. It was spring, just warm enough to go to the park and read. I sprawled beside a tree with my poems and almost instantly, a man sat down next to me. He had curly hair and a shiny grey mustache and was wearing several mismatched hippie prints—and there was clearly something just…wrong with him. No one had taught me that you can tell someone to go away, so I just tried to ignore him and concentrate on my poems.

            I heard a terrible slish and looked up to see him tugging on his flaccid, worm-white penis and staring at me intently. In a wave of revulsion I stood up quickly to go and he said incredulously “You’re leaving?”

            What happened next is so cliché that I don’t even want to type it—the police station was like RIGHT THERE next to the park, they totally could have nabbed the guy. The policeman, though, like a villain out of some perverse after school special, said “What are you doing alone in the city, and what are you wearing that dress for?”

            I quoted the cop in a bad poem at open mic night that night (I tried for decades to get his line into a good poem, it’s just too stupid!) but I’d gotten the message from both the regular creep and the cop-creep: This city, this space, is ours, and anything that happens to you in it will be your own fault.

            The thing is, though, that park was just as much mine as anybody’s. Despite the policeman’s assertion, nobody had planted the trees and flowers so that guys in mismatched hippie clothes could take full advantage of whatever glimpse of teenage leg he happened to get. That park was mine to read in, just like the gym’s hot tub is mine to soak in. This is my world too, and I am sick and tired of feeling intimidated out of it.

            Women and other people with marginalized bodies (i.e. everyone who isn’t a straight, white cisgender man) should always get to feel as welcomed, grounded, and safe as I felt on that dance floor Friday night. I’m angry at the amount of emotional labor it is taking to move us all forward, but I’m so, so glad to help us claim our rightful place, which is everywhere.

Some Ways to Be a Better Ally to Rape Survivors

With deep, heartfelt thanks to Janelle Monae  

and Kesha  for giving me the strength to try and get this out.

Saturday before last, after I marched with two of my closest friends and thousands of movement-mates, after my friends and I stopped into the Philadelphia Museum of Art for coffee and rest, I went outside to see the view of the crowd and skyline from the museum steps. The parkway was crowded and pink, and the speeches were in full swing. After I took my pictures and listened for a while, I turned around to go back in, but I was stopped by maybe the most beautiful sound I have ever heard: the entire march was singing “We will not be silent.” It was to the tune of “We Will Rock You,” but in no way did that detract from the sacred dignity of the moment.

The Women’s March gave me the courage to push back against some of the ways our own side, my own (now former) friends have worked against the cause of ending rape culture.

Here are some ways I would like to see survivors more supported, treated more kindly and humanely:

1.      When accused men take responsibility for misconduct, let them.

One of my worst #metoo era panic attacks happened on a facebook group. When the Al Franken sleep-rape-joke picture started circulating, I was shocked and heartbroken to see how many people I trusted, people who up to that point had steadfastly stood up for women went RIGHT for victim-blaming, conspiracy theories, and just old-fashioned slut shaming.

Al Franken, lukewarm as his apology was, did the right thing and took responsibility, but in a pattern I keep seeing for “nice guy” harassers, countless people who no doubt consider themselves anti-misogyny were willing to throw the accusers under the bus.

As with the Aziz Ansari story, not only did I lose a lot of faith in someone I admired, but I felt abandoned by those who turned on the accusers instead of the wrongdoers. This is supporting rape culture and shoring up the status quo.

2.      Stop policing our expression and our motivation—give that scrutiny to offenders instead of those harmed.

I work in a bookstore and yesterday I took Aziz Ansari’s book off the shelf and stashed it because it’s triggering. This isn’t because of his offense, although I could go a whole lifetime without hearing another coercion story. The reason I won’t be watching Parks and Rec again anytime soon (sorry Leslie!!!) is the way that people in my social circle reacted to the news—again, being angry at the accuser, even at the #metoo movement itself. One article said that we’d “jumped the shark”—like we’re fucking HAPPY DAYS.

The urge to blame the victim is so deeply ingrained, so thoroughly rewarded, that even the kindest among us will defend a “nice guy” creep instead of standing with survivors.

3.      No more gatekeeping about who got raped enough to participate.

I get it, sometimes I feel empathy for the wrong person, and trashing Taylor Swift can get you all of the likes, and in fact there are plenty of reasons to dislike her, but the fact is, a man felt entitled to put his hand up her skirt while she was working, and then sued her for it. No one, no matter how privileged or how you disapprove of her way of performing femininity, deserves that, and she deserves credit for facing down her accuser.

In fact, that’s why I’ve unfollowed all of my favorite feminist magazines and podcasts for now—I can’t STAND the endless dissections of which women are performing their survivorship wrong. It ends up reinforcing the patriarchy’s position that we are only things, here to be admired, used, or critiqued. We are not.

Again, direct the scrutiny at the assaulters, not the survivors, even the survivors it’s cool to hate.

4.      Next time you’re tempted to criticize #metoo, consider reaching out to offer kindness instead.

For me, the panic, depression, and hypervigilance that come with survivorship can trick my brain into feeling isolated, even in the midst of a worldwide movement, even with Oprah and Janelle Monae and Kesha on my side.

Every person who reaches out in kindness and solidarity helps, and every put-down stings. I’m glad to finally be telling you this.

5.      Hear us when we say no, in bed and in life.

Coercion is deeply imbedded in capitalism and in gender roles, and we need all hands on deck to resist it.

            This is how beautiful we are saying no: