Oooooh boy, Dove, you have no idea what you’re getting into here, do you?

The subcontext here is incredible. Jess uses a wheelchair. She’s happy and perky and having fun. Katie is visibly healthy. She has low self-esteem and her self-hatred keeps her from even being able to greet Jess when she comes to the door. Instead, she slouches to the ground in despair.

There is a reason they put Jess in a wheelchair. In doing this, Dove sets up a contrast: the physically disabled girl who feels good enough about herself to go about her life; the able-bodied girl who hates herself so much she can’t even go out with the people least likely to judge her at all.

The only way this contrast is meaningful is if it rests on the assumption that the physically disabled girl has reason to think less of herself.

Dove, here, is deliberately driving home the message: It’s such a shame that the “normal” girl thinks less of herself than does the girl in a wheelchair!

The shame conveyed here is that each girl does not recognize her true place in the social order. The normal-bodied girl is pretty, but can’t see her prettiness in the mirror. The girl in the wheelchair does feel good about herself. This is out of order, backwards. The girl in the wheelchair should be the one who sees herself one step lower; the normal-bodied girl should recognize her innate goodness in being able-bodied and conventionally attractive.

The dissonance Dove deliberately draws here relies on the recognition that Jess is diminished by her disability, but Katie is so dragged down by her poor self-esteem that she ends up in an even lower place than Jess. This is not right! This is not how things should be!

How should they be, then?

Of course, the commercial is also contemptible for the simple reason that it uses the girl in the wheelchair as an object to develop the human character of the able-bodied girl. In this setup, Jess is not a character; she is a tool. We don’t see Jess’ character explored, developed, reflected upon. She is introduced for only one reason: to act as a foil to Katie. To demonstrate just how low Katie has sunk.

Because you know it’s a fucking shame when she falls even lower than the cripple.

DIsability, here, is set up as an awful tragedy, the lowest a person can sink in life. This is what the title communicates. Disability is a reason to be sad, upset, mournful, pitied. This is what Dove purports to save young women from — a life of suffering. This is the reason Katie is to be pitied: she has fallen into the state Jess should be in.

Finally, the issue of appropriation. I’ll make it simple. Never, ever, ever, ever appropriate another group’s cause. White folk, you are simply not allowed to flip a situation to make it on a black person to try to communicate how outrageous it should be. Abled folk, you are simply not allowed to purport yourself disabled to communicate how tragic something against you is. Period. (The comparisons are slightly different in effect and implication, but my point applies to both.)

This assumes that to be disabled (black, gay, female, etc.) should always be understood to be a bad thing. It assumes that discrimination against disabled/etc. folk, or other forms of oppresion against them, are always taken seriously. And the subtext in these comparisons just screams out: How dare *I* be treated like those people!

Like it or not, whether you were thinking it or not, when you use these tropes, you imply that wrongs against you are worse than wrongs against the other group, that people should be outraged that you have been lowered to their level. What you are protesting, like it or not, is that your privilege over them has been violated.

Seriously, there is never a good reason to use the comparison trope. So just don’t do it. Ever. Period. End of story.

Via Wheelchair Dancer

In honor of 4:20; fashionably late.

It is a given that, when there is cause to mention my fibromyalgia to anyone who did not formerly know of it, there is a high probability that a person will “helpfully” “suggest” some miracle treatment they’ve heard about, or know someone who knows someone who’s tried, etc. Honestly, you get all kinds of suggestions, from warm water pool therapy to probiotics to eliminating aspartame from your diet to … yes, my friends, pot.

Marijuana has been shown to have analgesic properties, you know! There’s no way a chronic pain patient has ever heard of that before! (Honestly, I think  these sorts of pot evangelists latch on to the idea of someone they know who might need pot for a medical purpose! because it legitimizes their own use in their minds. But that’s not what I wanted to write about.) Anyway…

I’ve never smoked pot. Or tobacco. Not one sip of alcohol has ever passed my lips. I’ve never tried any of the recreational drugs that are so popular on college campuses.

Make no mistake: I take drugs. Oh, do I ever! But I take them by necessity. I do not take them for fun. I would rather not have to swallow 14 pills/day (minimum) to be able to function on a basic level. Honestly, I hate taking most of them. A couple of them, fortunately, offer significant benefit with no downside beside the price tag. But others have unpleasant side effects and addictive properties. I have a long-time love/hate relationship with Vicodin in particular (pros: allows me to get out of my bed/chair and do things; cons: digestive issues, artificial mood high/”manic” phases, problems with focusing and retaining information, problems relaxing, probability of developing a tolerance a.k.a. dependence*). While there are incredible benefits in taking these drugs, there are also considerable downsides that can’t be ignored.

So the last fucking thing I want to do? Is take more drugs. For the hell of it. I take more than enough medication that I fucking hate taking, for reasons too varied to fit in one blog post. I have a fucking awful relationship with taking medicine. Me and taking medicine don’t get along, yo. I don’t think about it on a daily basis, but it’s sitting there under the surface every time I pop those pills in my mouth. I don’t think it’s something any fully healthy person can ever understand that inner conflict. And y’all know I will stand up to anyone who tries to judge me for taking this shit. I would not be where I am in life right now if I did not have all these drugs to rely on. But that doesn’t mean I’m totally ok with taking them.

That means I have zero interest in taking any drugs for any reason other than it will help me do more than I can do right now. (And even then, I’m not terribly excited about it.) Especially when those drugs could have serious and potentially fatal interactions with the drugs I’m already taking.

This is not a judgment on anyone who does use those drugs: the social drinker, the recreational marijuana user, even the beleaguered cigarette smoker. There are real downsides to every drug, but that does not erase that they can be enjoyable and beneficial for folks who use them responsibly. And this is yet another time to emphasize that a person can, in fact, hold two ideas in one’s head at the same time: I can vehemently reject recreational drugs for myself while being perfectly content with my friends smoking a bowl or heading out for a drink. I make no judgment, moral, character or otherwise, on recreational users. The only judgment I make is on my life and my needs.

Here is the thing about these “suggestions”: they’re not just unhelpful; they’re insulting. They rest on the assumption that there’s no way I could have a basic understanding of my own body, that there’s no way I’ve ever heard of this treatment before, that there’s no way I could have tried it already, that there’s no way it could be a bad choice for me individually for any of a million different reasons. This is not what’s running through a person’s mind as they make this suggestion, but if that person stopped to think for half a second, and reflected on these assumptions, they would most likely decide against making the suggestion. Because there is no way that a person could recognize my individual humanity — recognize that I have my own individual body which has its own ways of working and its own needs and its own history — and still make that suggestion.

Consider, for example, my family background, which is a major factor in my decision to stay far away from pot and alcohol. My three siblings were a generation older than I, old enough to have children who were the same age as me. (My oldest brother is in his 50s. I’m 23.) My sister lived sixteen hours away in northern Oregon; my two brothers lived in town, and I spent a good amount of time with them (including several years actually living in their respective homes as one brother was going through jail).

My entire immediate family is mentally ill. Both brothers have been diagnosed with schizophrenia with psychotic episodes. My mother fits every criterion for borderline personality disorder, though she has never seen a mental health professional in her life, and the suggestion that she might need to would be met with accusations of a conspiracy to run her out of town. (This is not an embellishment; it was a regular pattern throughout my childhood.) One brother and my sister have bipolar disorder. And all four (my mother, sister and two brothers) suffer clinical depression and anxiety to varying degrees. My sister is the only one to seek any treatment, and even then only intermittently.

And I’m sure you can guess where this is going.

My brothers drank. Casually, throughout the day, totaling at least a six-pack each on a normal day, for awhile. It went up and down throughout my childhood, and once in awhile one brother or t’other would swear off the stuff, declare himself clean, but be back to it a month later. And yeah, you know, anyone drinks that level, they’re going to get drunk. But my brothers didn’t just “get drunk.” They got… well… crazy. The worst incidents I can remember as a kid always involved alcohol. Severe paranoia, apparent hallucinations, imagining things that didn’t fit in reality at all. Psychotic episodes. Several times, they were targeted at me, as young as six and continuing into early adulthood. I was never physically assaulted, fortunately, but I can’t exactly say I was unaffected.

Given my experiences as a child, suffice to say, I don’t want anyfuckingthing to do with alcohol.

And, of course, marijuana can exacerbate schizophrenia. (Please, please take note of the word exacerbate, not create, and don’t lecture me in comments.) Um, severely.

And I am keenly aware of my relation to these four people — immediate relation — and the severity of their conditions. (It waxes and wanes, over the years, as any condition does, but it is quite severe during the bad times.) And I am also keenly aware of the tendency of these two drugs to tap into a predisposition to these conditions. And, though I seem to be ok so far (getting away with “mere” anxiety disorder), I’m not going to make the mistake of assuming I’d be any different. Schizophrenia, in particular, tends to lie dormant in women until their twenties and early thirties. And I have to live with that hanging over my head (and my husband’s) for some time yet.

Given all that, do I want anything to do with pot? Well. No.

Do you think any of that flashed through the mind of my eager acquaintance when they decided that all I might need is a small toke? I don’t think so.

That’s my individual story. I’m one person. I don’t know what the hell is going on in the life of the next chronic pain patient you might meet. That’s the point. You just don’t know. You don’t have the slightest concept of what their background is or how their body works or what they’ve tried before. So why do you assume it’s totally benign to throw this in their face? Why are you acting as though you know their body, their history, their experiences better than they do?

Do I have the time to detail everything above every time somone “helpfully” informs me that marijuana can be good for pain relief? Should I have to reveal all this stuff to total strangers, or even acquaintances, coworkers, casual friends? Even if all this stuff wasn’t there, and I just didn’t feel like using it: why can’t I have that decision respected?

Drugs are not, and never will be, an enjoyable experience for me. They are a necessary… well, not evil, but certainly not altogether positive. Either way, they are a necessity for me to be able to live the life I want to live: to be able to do the normal things most people take for granted. You know what doesn’t feel like a nice, relaxing escape for me? Yeah, I’ll let you answer that for yourself.

Bottom line: Respect every person’s sovereignty, every person’s ultimate control over their own life. We’d all appreciate it.

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* Repeat after me: De-pen-dence. Not “addiction.” Physiologically, the two can be identical. But a person is addicted when they have no need for the drug; they are dependent when there is a need for the drug for medical reasons.

The specter of “addiction” is weilded against pain patients — acute and chronic — and make no mistake: anyone who speaks threateningly of “addiction,” when you are in real pain, doesn’t have the faintest understanding of the interesctions between substance abuse and chronic/acute pain treatment. Dependence is a real issue in pain patients, and as such, they must be monitored closely by a medical professional who knows wth they’re taking about. But the possibility of dependence does not automatically exclude controlled substances from the list of possible treatments. It is one of many issues which must be handled with care and nuance; the possibility of dependence should inform the decision, not make it. Each individual patient will have to make decisions with hir MP based on all the factors in play, including what type of pain (which can change which drugs are in play), how severe, how long it is expected to last, the patient’s physical and mental condition(s), interactions with other drugs, how certain drugs have worked (or not) on the patient in the past, and so forth. Anyone who automatically skips that conversation to get into scare tactics and character insinuations about addiction is not worth the trees that were killed to make fancy sealed papers hanging on their office wall.

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Addendum: This post took me a good four days to complete. It’s a very deeply personal subject to me. It is definitely scattered, definitely defensive in tone. But I don’t feel I have the energy to rework it to be more coherent without also destroying the heart of it. I meant to get across the insult and violation of privacy I feel when someone lobs the pot “suggestion” at me, to continue exploring how these “suggestions” affect people with disabilities and chronic illness, to make clear why no, not all things are good for all people, and that right to refuse, that sovereignty, must be respected. I do feel I must add that intellectually, I know that there is nothing “wrong” with taking prescription (or any) drugs, but unfortunately it’s not so easy to accept that emotionally (much how the fat-accepting person still has trouble with body-negative thoughts). But my decision to stay away from recreational drugs is, well, fraught, and I don’t think a lot of people understand that — understand how using drugs can be so exceptionally not fun for somebody who has to rely on drugs to be able to brush hir teeth and get dressed most days, much less anything more involved than that. So: it is definitely a “brain fog warning” post, definitely a harsh tone, but it came directly from the heart, so it stays as it is.

Most people will use “able-bodied” as the counterpart to “disabled.” There’s also the phrase “temporarily able-bodied” or TAB, which I find delightful due to its emphasis on the impermanence of ability, but it falls prey to the same weakness — it centers physical disability as disability, erasing mental illness and other nonphysical conditions which are surely part of the disability spectrum.

For lack of anything else, I’ve taken to using “fully abled” or “able privilege” but they just don’t seem to fit right. I’ve struggled with this for awhile, and I wanted to open up a question to the disability community and the justice-minded blogosphere as a whole: what term should we be using to indicate lack of disability?

I encourage folks to link this around, cuz I’d like it to reach a wider audience… I want to hear from as many people as possible. If it gets around, I’ll collect a summary of responses here. Thanks.

the big screen on flickr

The greatest thing to happen to the world of sports since the advent of the telecast.

During their run for the Stanley Cup in spring 2008, the Pittsburgh Penguins, teamed with Consol Energy and Trib Total Media*, decided to put up a giant LCD screen facing the grassy area outside Mellon Arena, so that fans without tickets to the game could stop by — or camp out — and watch the game. For free.

Every game (weather permitting), home and away, was shown on the Big Screen. And fans responded. The place was packed. The energy was incredible. Even better the chance to gather and watch the games that did not take place on home ice.

As entrance (such as it was) was free, the team collected no direct revenue. But they set up concessions — barbecue grill and so forth — and made a good penny off of that. But you could still bring your own food, non-alcoholic drink, your own chairs/blankets/accommodations, and so forth. It was an open and free atmosphere. The area was not roped off, not guarded, not ticketed.

And it’s the most freaking genius thing ever. Yeah, they weren’t gonna make a buck off tickets, but they drew a whole lot of fans to the arena. They fanned the flame of fandom, cementing enthusiasm for hockey in the budding fanbase of Pittsburgh — an area that previously cared only about its precious Steelers. (My husband, a Pirates fan, has quite the complex about this, and I actually share his distaste for antagonistic element of Pittsburgh football fandom.) They found a way to make money off of local fans even when the team was playing an away game. And for once, more people than those who could afford the price of playoff hockey tix were able to gather in support of their team.

It’s playoff season again in Pittsburgh. We never would’ve thought it two months previous, when the Penguins were in such a slump that they aspired to a tenth-place finish in the Eastern Conference, but their fortunes rose and here they are: first round against their bitter rivals the Broad Street Bullies. If there’s one way to draw a crowd to a Penguins game, it’s to play against the hated Philadelphia Flyers! (I think it betrays Philly’s inferiority complex: why would they care so much about little ol’ Pittsburgh if they did not see us as a threat? Ha.) And fortune indeed shone upon us: the Pens get the home ice advantage.

And the team was smart enough to agree to put up the Big Screen again this year! A fan can’t help but be excited. Having had my share of bad experiences with booking overlord Ticketmaster, and being newly unemployed, I can’t exactly afford the price of playoff tickets. But I can afford the two-dollar T fare up into the city. And indeed, we are planning to go to every game possible. Because it’s an incredible experience, one I wouldn’t miss for all the world. I will always cherish the memories of the games we were able to attend last season, when I was new to the city, settling in to my new home. Forming an identity.

And I’m glad someone had the bright idea to do it. I can’t wait til tomorrow night.

See scenes from the May 4, 2008 game against the Rangers pictured above in my Flickr stream.

* Yeah, I’m not happy that my hockey team’s fortunes were sold to** Big Coal. And I know progressives aren’t a huge fan of the Scaife media. But one out of three isn’t bad, right?

** God, I’m going to miss Mellon Arena. Oldest arena in the country, and the city sees that as a bad thing. I love that fucking place, inaccessible as it is (and O, is it inaccessible!). But I’m still both a hockey newb and a swPA transplant, so I don’t get to make that call. Unfortunately.

I finally decided to buy an upgraded Flickr account so I can post my pictures without them all getting lost — I have, uh, a lot more than 200 in the works. I started uploading what I’ve processed so far yesterday. Head over to my photostream and browse around. :)

Photography is more than a casual hobby for me; it is something I genuinely love to do. And I like to think I do a pretty good job of it. Playing with color, angle, perspective, focus and detail — I feel the same thrill I feel putting brush to canvas. There is something about art that truly does reach into the furthest depths of self. My photography has carried me through several particularly rough times in my life, and added unsurpassable depth and joy to some of the best times. It is also an art I can put to work even when I am not at my physical best. I don’t know that I can express how valuable that is to me. And I can only hope that others find some enjoyment in the work I put out.

Right now the pictures are from two Penguins playoff games last season, with some kitty pictures sprinkled in between. There’s much more to come.

Incidentally, a friend of mine just posted some of his pictures, and he has more patience than I — he’s described each photo, and he manages to be rather funny doing it. It’s worth checking out, seriously.

Mattw and I go out on a Friday date every week. I was thinking today we could look around for a plant to grow together in the apartment. (We don’t even have any fake plants!) I’ve wanted a sago palm for a long time, so I’m not totally without palm trees here in the land of brick buildings. I also love pussywillows, and tulips. But flowers are rather more fragile, and I want something we can keep alive long term, not just seasonally.

But I’m a total plant newb, so I don’t have the slightest idea where to start.

So: Any suggestions for plants relatively easy to care for, apartment-friendly, and safe for cats?

Renee wrote an excellent post responding to an emailer who wanted to know whether a white woman can call herself “womanist. I’ll pull a Renee here — here’s a quote to get you started; you’ll have to head over to her blog to read the rest:

I understand why womanism seems attractive from the outside.  It truly advocates for the equality of all beings however, it is a movement spawned by the rejection of WOC; more specifically black women by mainstream feminism.

When we look at social justice movements across the western world they all have one thing in common, they are lead by whiteness.   Despite a claim that said movements are about equality, the racial dynamics are positioned in such a way as to reaffirm our dissonance in worth and value.   This purposeful erasure,  or more specifically absence of power is a result of the social belief that whiteness is not only naturally fit to lead but ordained to do so.

How many times have blacks and whites worked together in various organizations only to find that our voices are silenced?  We continually make  suggestions for activism only to have it denied and then later accepted when it is rephrased by a white member of the organization.  The racism in this activity is never acknowledged and the white person is given the credit for the idea.   When we make a comment as to how race interacts with an issue, we are again silenced and told that we “are imagining racism”, as though whiteness is any position to decide what is and isn’t racist.

In a recent post Monica of TransGriot suggested that feminism needs to work on its own issues first and I must say that I highly concur with this point.  There are so many divisions in feminism that we cannot even begin from the basic idea that all women are equal and face multiple forms of oppression.   What we find is that different offshoots tend to privilege their experience over that of another and then declare themselves fit to judge how other women live their lives. We have radfems slut shaming sex workers,  third wave feminists stumbling on their privilege while ignoring critical anti-racist work, eco-feminists who promote  environmentalism based in an essentialist understanding of gender, Marxist feminists  that are blind to anything that is not related to finance and liberal feminists who only want to be the “equal to a man”, never thinking about what constitutes “woman”. While there can never be a monolithic woman, the lie that sisterhood will save us all continues to be repeated.  Privilege has always been and always will be the Achilles heel of women’s organizing….

Go read the rest

Seriously, go read Renee first.
What follows are my own personal reflections as a white woman watching womanism with interest.

I know what I am. I’m a privileged white girl. I may’ve grown up poor but I sit in a seat of comfort now. I live with a disability, but one which grants me a fair amount of privilege even within the ranks of pwd. And… that’s really about it. I am privileged in every other way. White, young, cis, straight, heteronormative, middle class, thin and healthy-looking, native English speaker, mobile, disabled but “pass”able.

So, there’s a lot of bullshit to bulldoze thru’ before I can start to see things clearly.

It took a serious smack in the face for me to get off my ass and start seeking out the opinion of WOC during the conflicts that broke out in the feminist blogosphere (iirc) early last year. Race has been part of my background, growing up — something I was definitely aware of, something I cared about on a core level, but something that stayed safely in the background at all times. That’s privilege. I never had to think about race in my day-to-day life.

But something in that conflict just got under my skin.

And I wanted to start thinking about it. I wanted to learn, I wanted to listen. I wanted to be an advocate, a friend. I wanted to be witness to what I saw going on in their circles, something that just looked right.

Honestly, that’s the same way I was drawn into the feminist blogosphere a couple years previous.

Feminism… it is what it is. Feminism is what gave me a framework for understanding social justice. I’ve learned so much from feminism. And I’ve met so many awesome women through this community. But there is no doubt in my mind that feminism, for its strengths, is a movement centered, to a fault, around women like me. The feminist movement is built to serve the interests of white, higher-class, straight, cis, fully-abled, “enlightened” liberal, “health-conscious” women. And it is a movement which is undeniably hostile to those who challenge that paradigm — purposefully alienating.

Which is why womanism came about. So women of color had a space to work for the benefit of women where they were the center — where they weren’t treated with disdain, like dogs at the table begging for scraps.

It’s incredible to watch what results. These are amazing women doing amazing work. And there is something about the movement that really cuts to the core of social justice. There is something about womanism that centers people as people in a way that feminism, in my eye, just doesn’t, when looked at as a whole.

I’ve seen that same something in the disability community, and in the trans/queer communities. There is just something about these people, beat upon by the world, who reach inside and dig down to the core of humanity. And it shines through. The movement does not aim to simply grab power for a class of people. The movement aims to find those most hurt by a hostile society, and to treat them with dignity and respect. No matter who they are.

There is a heart in these communities that I only see in part of feminism. People who are taking the beginning principles of feminism and attempting to strip them of the privilege-upholding layers of shit that have been laid upon them through history. But it’s not enough to make feminism better. To make feminism not a privilege-upholding, power-seeking movement.

But there is something in womanism that works differently. That moves, not for power, but for justice. And that something — it just feels right.

These movements are not perfect. There are dynamics in every movement that merit a critical eye. Humanity is messy.

I admire the hell out of these movements. But I can only lay claim to one. The others, no matter how I identify with the heart of them, I do not get to claim. I do not get to be part of. They are not mine.

They just are. They exist. For their own purposes.

When I see a woman I admire the hell out of speaking about how deeply she was hurt, by my movement, a movement to which I contribute — she speaks about how she tried to work with them — us — and was betrayed — and now she wants nothing to do with us, that they — we — I, make her skin crawl…

I am anxious. I feel awful. But I know what she is saying is truth.

I call myself feminist. It’s the best shorthand I’ve found to convey what it is I care about. But I know what else it conveys.

And I have to own that if that’s the movement I’m going to claim. I have to own all that bullshit. I don’t get to say “Well, I’m feminist, but I’m not one of those feminists.” It doesn’t work that way. I have the same damn privilege. I’ve been part of the same damn problems!

It’s tempting, confronting this, to toss away the label “feminist.” And to look longingly at the label “womanist.”

But that’s not my movement. I don’t get to lay claim to it. I don’t get to use it to cover up for all the bullshit that happens in my name — the bullshit I, inevitably, am part of making. That is not fair. That is not just.

That is, yet again, white women moving up a step on the backs of women of color. It is, yet again, white folk appropriating that which POC have built, by their own damn selves, for their own damn purpose, and using it in a way which not only makes them and their work invisible, but sets foot in their space, centers their community around us, again.

Takes over.

No. We don’t get to do that.

I want to be your friend, not your leader.

And the only way to do that is to stand back and let you do what you were already fucking doing.

Jez-eb-el, specifically, but not only them.

When you do something so incredibly fucking stupid and offensive, I don’t give a shit if you apologize. I don’t even pay fucking attention. I don’t care what kind of apology or nonpology it is or how much you care or how much other people find it convincing.

Because fact is, if you “apologize” and then go on with business trying to ignore whatever issue you displayed astounding ignorance on, you don’t deserve forgiveness, I don’t care how awesome you may be in other areas.

The only way you’re worth our attention is if you use that moment of stupendous foolishness to educate yourself and turn around and use that knowledge for something. To fight for the people you wronged.

And we can tell when its genuine, folks. We can tell when it’s done out of foot-dragging obligation/image maintenance vs. sincere desire to better oneself/one’s world. To leave things better than you left ‘em.

You can’t cut off my leg, but then give me a really smashing manicure and try to call it a day. What you do to make up for things matters.

Absence of idiocy is not enough.

That is all.

ETA: Of course, Jezebel didn’t even make a sincere attempt to apologize; this post seems to imply they at least did that much. They didn’t. And it wouldn’t have mattered if they did. Because in the meantime, there has been an absence of sincere attempts to make something good out of it. Instead, there has been an attempt not to make one’s own self look bad again. That is what I’m getting at.