P.O. Box 339
Berkeley, CA 94701
Phone: (510) 893-4648
Fax: (510) 893-4607
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.prisonactivist.org
Personal commitment to a cause can take you far … but the fun really starts when you have a whole Babe Brigade at your side. Besides that, you accomplish more with a posse.
When a woman pools her talents with the energy of others, her ability to effect change increases exponentially. Most important, she is taken more seriously. One woman hangs out her window banging on a pot, everyone thinks she’s a wacko. Twenty do it, and people know something’s afoot.
These stories are about women and girls taking direct action with the support of a group. Estrogen-powered activism. When a legion of girls believes in a cause, an individual’s personal beliefs and sense of power are affirmed; her conviction that Of course I will have an impact grows. Optimism and hope can make—or lack of it can break—a movement. Working with others can also heighten understanding of the situation, offering both a reality check (sometimes difficult to obtain working alone) and an awareness of how the act fits into the larger scheme of things.
As these stories illustrate, collective activism can be born out of the incredible bravery of a single female. Her independent rebellion gives rise to a larger one. So, in a sense, the division between the preceding chapter and this one is porous. They both show that when it comes to the end result—social change—the line between individual and collective activism blurs. Individual protests will have an impact on the larger society. And the general zeitgeist will influence individuals who are unaware a movement is stirring, yet who independently decide to take a stand regarding some personal belief.
In these stories we see the varied roles a girl agitator can play within a group. The ringleaders relay how their one match starts a bigger fire. Others are early participants, adding dry twigs to make the flame grow. Some sign on later, blowing oxygen and bringing the fire to a roaring blaze.
Whatever role a woman plays in an effort to provoke change, it is important. Whether she immediately succeeds is less so—because she can always try again! And with so many other riot-girls involved, who’d want to miss the party?
Love Thy Neighbor with Avengeance
jessica brown
I am a member of the Washington, D.C., Lesbian Avengers, a nonviolent, direct-action group of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women organizing for dyke survival and visibility. For anyone not familiar with the Lesbian Avengers, we were founded in 1992 in New York City as a space for queer women to be active outside traditional male-dominated (and by extension, often sexist) political groups. By direct action we mean the mobilization of bodies in the streets: marching and picketing versus letter writing or lobbying. Our actions usually combine civil disobedience with equal parts street theater. We don’t apply for permits because we don’t ask permission. We take our shirts off at demonstrations because our bodies are not obscene. We offer women a much-needed opportunity to kick that “nice girls don’t” socialization in the ass.
Still, we aren’t without our soft, romantic side either. To illustrate this, let me tell you about an action we did one Valentine’s Day at the Family Research Council (FRC). The FRC is a conservative Christian organization based in D.C. They lobby the federal government for a return to legally imposed “family values.” In other words, a rollback of most of the legislative and social gains made by gays, lesbians, and straight women in the last thirty years. Just before our action, FRC had also announced that it would raise money to put a series of advertisements on television claiming that homosexuality is a dangerous disease, and that gays and lesbians can be “healed” by becoming born-again Christians.
Is it any wonder that we wanted to send them a little love?
On Friday, February 12, a small group of Avengers walked into the FRC building’s main lobby. About half of us were dressed like cupids. We were wearing pink gauze wings, little white tutus, and combat boots. We were, for the most part, bare breasted. Considering it was February, this was something of a chore, but we had never seen a fully clothed cupid, and we are nothing if not sticklers for authenticity. Besides, the FRC believes that modesty, chastity, and a graceful submission to her lawfully wedded husband are the chief virtues of a woman, and, well, we don’t. We also brought with us a bouquet of flowers and a large red valentine heart that read:
DEAR FRC,
LOVE IS A HUMAN RIGHT.
XXOO,
THE LESBIAN AVENGERS
For a second after we burst through the double doors, the crowd in the lobby stood frozen, blinking in shock. Then the women, Republican ladies in pumps and large bulletproof hair-dos, scattered, most of them making a break for the exits. Suddenly, the men were all rushing forward, demanding in loud voices that we leave immediately.
I addressed one: “Hello,” I said pleasantly. “We’re from the Washington, D.C., Lesbian Avengers.”
“You have to leave,” he informed me.
“Okay,” I said. “But see, we have this Valentine for Mr. Donovan.” At the time, Donovan was FRC’s executive vice president; their previous director, Gary Bauer, had recently left FRC because he decided to run for U.S. president in 2000. “Is Mr. Donovan here?” I asked.
“If you don’t leave right now I’m calling the police,” he screamed.
“Right,” I said. “But see, I made this Valentine …”
While I was chatting with the man, some of the Avengers attempted to make friends with the other people in the lobby. Kim, a member of our group, walked up to one of the remaining women and tried to hand her some flowers. The woman refused with a nervous smile and a shake of her head. Kim persisted. “Look,” she said, “they’re just flowers. For you. Take them.”
The woman may have thought this was a trick. Perhaps she believed we had found a way to infect tulips with some insidious virus liable to leave her with bizarre urges to let her leg hair grow or vote Democrat. Maybe she just thought she was being asked out on a date, but for whatever reason she staunchly refused her present.
“Here. I’ll just put them here.” Kim bent down to leave the flowers on the floor, a foot in front of the frozen woman, then backed away very slowly.
The FRC menfolk, security and staff members, were not willing to call the police and wait the extra ten minutes for the authorities to remove us. We were a cancer that had to be excised immediately. The men grabbed us and started pushing us toward the front doors. We took that as our cue to leave. We turned to one another and had a quick kiss-in in the lobby before being shoved out onto the sidewalk. One of the staff members followed us outside to engage in dialogue: He pronounced us “sick,” took our big red valentine heart and broke it over his knee, three or four times. When the pieces became too small to crack apart with his hands, he threw them down on the ground and started stomping on them, grinding the foamboard pieces into the concrete with his shoes.
Some people you just can’t reach, I guess. Still, we felt better having made the effort. We continued our kiss-in on the sidewalk for a while, and then went home.
jessica brown, lesbo extraordinaire from Madison, Wisconsin, usually doesn’t require a costume to fight homophobia, but on special occasions it’s fun to dress up (or down, as the case may be).
High-School Gauntlet
rachel
In my high school there is a patio area where everyone hangs out in between classes and during lunch. The school is small, so you can see everyone from the benches at the end of the patio. That is where the most popular boys in the school used to sit. Every day, as each girl passed, these boys stared at her and rated her different body parts from one to ten. The girls dreaded walking out of the lunchroom. This practice had been going on for years and I’m pretty sure that’s why our school had one of the highest eating-disorder rates in the state.
I was friendly with these boys. I knew them all, and actually I was always glad
about that because even though they still rated me, at least they never publicly humiliated me by yelling out the numbers. Until one day.
“Six.”
“What? No way. That’s Rachel. Eight.”
“Ha! Seven for the bottom, five and a half for the top.”
I felt so degraded and worthless I spent the rest of the lunch period hiding in the bathroom.
But something else happened that day, too. The girls at my school, girls who were usually so competitive with and cruel to one another, started talking. It began in the bathroom, when I rallied us together by suggesting we take action against these boys.
The next day at lunch a bunch of us girls got to the “boys’ bench” before they did. We sat and waited until they approached, and when they did we called out their ratings as they walked by. We had it all planned out: When they came up to us to talk, we lifted their shirts and grabbed at them just the way they did to us every day. Then we handed each a letter I’d written and gotten 158 girls to sign. It said they needed to stop their behavior right away and that we were not going to stand for it any more.
It sounds amazing, but from then on it all stopped. Instead of taking their intimidating places on the bench, the boys mingled in the lunchroom. If any of the guys made any angry or sexual comments toward us about what we had done, they were immediately silenced by their friends.
It feels great knowing I did something good for girls, especially something that will help those who have yet to enter the frightening halls of high school.
rachel is a high-school junior who loves the idea of a book that celebrates women.
Synagogue Revolt
loolwa khazzoom
Loolwa’s note: When most of us think of “Jews,” we think of Ashkenazim—Jews from northern Europe. Jews, in fact, are an international people, with numerous ethnic groups. One such group is Mizrahim—Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa. As a result of European racism and its internalization, Mizrahim have lost much of their heritage over the past fifty years. Even in Israel, a Middle Eastern country that until recently had a majority population of Mizrahim, Ashkenazi racism has nearly destroyed Mizrahi identity.
I was fourteen when I led the revolt. For each of the previous nine years, my family had made pilgrimage from San Francisco to Los Angeles for the Jewish High Holy Days to attend the only Iraqi synagogue this side of New York. This was the third year the new, young, Moroccan rabbi was there, leading services alongside our beloved Iraqi cantor and scholar. I walked into the synagogue with apprehension.
Everyone in my family hated the new rabbi. He may have been Mizrahi, but like many who have internalized the dominant culture, he acted Ashkenazi. “What is he doing in an Iraqi synagogue anyhow?” my parents would mutter. “He’s no Iraqi.”
For the past two years, the young rabbi and two Israeli congregants—all with booming voices—had taken over the singing, drowning out classic Mizrahi songs and replacing them with Ashkenazi-Israeli songs. Both years, everyone had submitted to the takeover, in typical fashion of the passive Iraqi Jew, by either joining in with these traitors to our culture or simply not resisting. I ached inside, watching the sad faces on old Iraqi men as they quietly gave up singing, removed their prayer shawls, and headed home.
Both years, I felt helpless. Trapped in the back of the synagogue, I hung over the top of the four-foot wall separating the women from the men, and sang Mizrahi songs at the top of my lungs. But my young voice alone was no match for the traitors’ powerful pipes. I felt desperate and powerless.
My eyes always faced forward into the men’s section, where the action happened and the power lay. I belong up there, I thought to myself every time I attended synagogue. They should have me up there leading. I knew all the prayers, largely by heart. I sang in the traditional Iraqi way, with the distinct Iraqi pronunciation of each word. In the United States, where I was raised, it was unusual for adults to preserve the Mizrahi traditions, and unheard of for youth to know them. But none of my knowledge or dedication mattered to the community, because I was “just” a girl.
In many ways, our religion did not take women seriously. And in many ways, women returned the favor. “The ladies” showed up only on the big holidays and at the tail end of Sabbath services (if at all), and they talked incessantly after arriving. I constantly had to strain my eyes and ears to focus on the services. When I sang, my voice seldom blended with the voices from behind, for the women’s section usually was devoid of prayer. As such, it just never seemed the place to turn for preserving our traditions.
This year, I sucked in my breath in anticipation. The congregation started off by singing a few Mizrahi songs, but within minutes we were bowled over by Ashkenazi-Israeli songs belted out once again by the new rabbi and his two cohorts.
I absolutely had to stop the insanity, and I knew from the last two years that I could not do it alone. For the first time in my life, I stopped facing forward and turned to look behind me.
I was stunned. I suddenly realized the latent potential that had been there all along. I jumped out of my seat and began marching up and down the aisle of the crowded section, clapping and singing at the top of my lungs, rousing all the women into rowdy Mizrahi song: “Simhoona, simhoona besimhath hatorah…”
I chose songs that were easy to follow, with repetitive phrases, and all the women jumped right in, expressions snapping from boredom into glee. As the women’s section began drowning out the Ashkenazi songs, the passive men woke up and joined in with us. Pretty soon, we had taken over the whole synagogue with Mizrahi songs.
The young rabbi started getting agitated. He wanted control. I marched up from the women’s section, crossed into the men’s, climbed the steps onto the teba—the rabbi’s platform—and yelled at him, “There are at least ten Ashkenazi synagogues down this street alone. If you want to sing Ashkenazi songs, then go to one of those synagogues. But don’t you dare try to bring those songs in here. This is an Iraqi synagogue, and it’s the only one we have!” With that, I marched back down the steps and into the women’s section.
All hell broke loose. Everyone started yelling at one another. I had brought to the surface tensions that had been growing over the past few years: What direction would the synagogue go in? Would it “adapt” (assimilate) to the “modern” (Ashkenazi) ways, or would it stay pure? There was a definite split in the congregation.
In my experience, Iraqi Jews cannot stand unpleasantness, and they will bend over backward to avoid it. This situation was no exception. After arguments ensued, the young rabbi and his two cohorts began gathering people into the room off to the side of the sanctuary, and people just followed. The three traitors got everyone into the side room to dance around with the Torah, the Hebrew bible—which is strictly forbidden by Iraqi practice—while singing Ashkenazi-Israeli songs like “Hava Nagila.”
The resisters went home.
I remember seeing one of my favorite old men dancing around with the crowd, gathering people together, trying to make everyone forget they had just fought. I was shocked to see him actively participating in the erasure of our tradition.
Walking with my family through the hullabaloo, I had a sinking feeling. People were dancing, but it felt like death. As we neared the exit, I knew the resisters had lost and my family probably would not return. We pushed open the door and walked out as a boy younger than I shouted, “And don’t come back!” Slam. He shut the door. I started to cry.
Eight years later, I moved to Los Angeles. I avoided that synagogue, not looking forward to how congregants, especially the rabbi, would respond to me. When I finally visited, I realized I had given far too much credit to their consciousness. Unable to fathom that a girl could be the source of such commotion, the few men who mentioned the situation seemed to think my father was the one who had raised the ruckus, not me.
Offended yet relieved, I did not bother correcting them.
loolwa khazzoom (www.loolwa.com) graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Troublem
akers “R” Us. She is the author of Consequence: Beyond Resisting Rape (Pearl in a Million Press), editor of Behind the Veil of Silence: Middle Eastern and North African Jewish Women Speak Out, and coordinator of the Jewish Multicultural Curriculum Project. Since yelling at the rabbi, she went on to create the first-ever egalitarian Mizrahi services. This essay was first published in Generation J–www.generationj.com.
Diary of an Urban Guerilla
kathy bruin
8:00 A.M. We’re postering the city tonight and it’s raining buckets. The forecast says seventy-mile-per-hour winds and “one hundred percent chance of rain in all areas all day.” Great.
I have long been frustrated with the way women are depicted in our culture—the emphasis is always on looks over brains or talent. My frustration heightened in 1995 when I overheard a mother offering her preteen daughter a cookie. The girl took it, saying, “Sure; I can start my diet tomorrow.” I was surprised. “It’s starting so young,” I thought, making the link between the depiction of females in the media and the stories I’d read about girls’ self-esteem plummeting around age twelve. Images of women in popular culture (led by advertising, entertainment, and “beauty” industries) affect girls’ perceptions of themselves and encourage eating disorders. Every year billions of dollars are spent on advertising; every day we see hundreds of glossy images. This barrage is effective. It is virtually impossible to keep from internalizing these industries’ beauty standards, and difficult to offer criticism or alternative images that can have a real impact—unless you have the money to buy your own billboards. Or an inclination to become an Urban Guerilla.
Not long after the cookie incident, I became obsessed with Obsession. Calvin Klein’s perfume ads had been around for years, but an especially annoying new one sent me over the edge. On municipal buses and huge billboards towering over the city, Kate Moss reclined nude, her bones so accentuated and her face so sunken, she looked as if she was starving. Why isn’t anybody mad about this? I wondered. I sure was. I wanted to do something, something louder than writing Calvin Klein a letter. I knew others also had to be sick of seeing models photographed to look as scrawny, weak, and vulnerable as possible. I wanted to do something big enough so that others might be motivated to do something as well. At first I envisioned myself scrambling up the scaffolding to deface the billboards. But instead, I chased after buses for weeks until I got a good photo of the ad. Then I scanned it into a computer and changed the text to read: “Emaciation Stinks—Stop Starvation Imagery.” I made posters and conned friends and family into helping me plaster the city. About-Face, a San Francisco group dedicated to combating negative images of women, was born.
That Takes Ovaries! Page 17