3:30 P.M. I have such a nervous stomach. I am always nervous on poster nights, but this torrential downpour is making me crazy. I fear volunteers are already jumping ship and making other plans. I’ve got to try and eat something.
My goal in using posters is to make a public statement that is familiar: stylish, big, and on the streets with the other images. Our second poster was of a brightly colored circus cage (like on a box of animal crackers) with fashion models trapped inside. The banner read, “Please Don’t Feed the Models.” The cage was a perfect symbol of the ways women are kept—and keep themselves—in check, not only by the beauty rituals that hold us captive (not leaving the house without makeup, not going to the beach with hairy legs), but also by the constant pressure to remain within verbal, physical, and sexual confines. I scrawled the idea on a napkin one night, gave it to my graphic artists, and two weeks later pasted the big posters all over the city in honor of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.
7:00 P.M. We decide to go ahead despite the rain. Twenty-three people show up. We divide into nine teams, each with paste, rollers, and a map with a specific section of the city circled. It is still drizzling as we set out.
Postering is thrilling. It’s rebellious, and you envision yourself skulking in the streets looking shiftily back and forth like a spy. It’s a rare event that brings kidlike excitement to a bunch of cynical city dwellers, and the combination of doing something that’s illegal and that you feel strongly about is too compelling to resist. It makes you feel powerful and righteous; it makes you think you can effect real change in the world.
On the downside, I have been tracked down and screamed at by construction managers, causing my stomach to knot. I am a hyperresponsible person, the classic “good girl.” Yet I do what I think is right in my gut even if I might get in trouble or piss someone off. We don’t set out to anger construction managers or create more work for them, but guerilla tactics are a perfect way to reach people on the same visual level that billboards do. And they get media attention. The week I posted my Obsession spoof I appeared on five television newscasts and countless newspaper and radio programs. Since our first postering, About-Face has received support from thousands around the world. Phone messages, letters, and e-mails come from parents, teachers, school nurses, grandmothers, and teenage girls themselves. They say, “Thank goodness someone is taking this on.” They say, “How can we help?”
9:00 P.M. The teams come back with paste in their hair and on their clothes, and with stories to tell: “We totally plastered this site near the park.” “People were stopping and asking about the posters, so we gave them some.” “We ran out of paste and bought flour to make more.”
We collect the goopy rollers, rags, and cans, load up the cars, hug, and say “See you next time.” My volunteers are ordinary, law-abiding, polite types who go home gushing with bravado. They, like me, are transformed by the experience.
The day after a postering, many of the 400+ posters will be torn down by annoyed construction workers. But some will stay up for months. While they won’t be as noticed as a Calvin Klein billboard, they will still produce a reaction. Some folks will miss the point, others will totally get it, and some—like you?—may even be inspired to perpetrate an urban assault of your own. After that, you may find yourself on a cross-town bus, passing a poster hung on a plywood wall. A sense of pride will well up in you. You’ll smile smugly and turn to the stranger next to you: “I did that,” you’ll brag. And you should; instead of being complacent, you took a stand.
kathy bruin (www.about-face.org), who lives in San Francisco, wonders if she can keep her day job if she gets arrested. To make your own wheat paste, mix three tablespoons of flour with a small amount of cold water. Add one cup of hot water. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens. Cool and enjoy. A version of this essay first appeared in Bitch magazine.
Next are two girls-in-pants stories: one kinda quiet, one kinda not. Interestingly enough, they happened at the same time but in different places. Girl telepathy? –Rivka
Civil Disobedience: A Primary School Primer
debra koiodny
Girls were not allowed to wear pants in my elementary school. This was PS 104, a public school, so no uniform was involved. The rationale was pure gender stereotyping; pants were simply considered inappropriate attire for girls in the late 1960s.
One freezing winter day when I was eight and in the third grade, I decided that common sense should prevail over this rule. I don’t think I struggled long with this decision, but I’m sure I conferred with my mother. After checking the outdoor thermometer and seeing its bitter cold reading, she was with me. So I pulled on a pair of pants, grabbed my brown-bag lunch, and headed out, braced for both the weather and the angry lecture I expected to get at school.
As usual, I walked around the corner and three houses down to pick up my friend Mindy so we could walk together. When she opened the front door, Mindy saw my pants. She was wearing a skirt. As soon as we got outside, she changed her mind. We went back in and she put on pants. The two of us went to school that day warm, comfortable, and betrousered. Our teacher didn’t say a word. Nobody told us not to do it again. I took that as a positive sign, and I didn’t wear a skirt again for three years.
I guess I was an elementary-school role model, because soon after that day, other girls started wearing pants, too. The clothing barrier had been broken forever at PS 104. I didn’t get an award at assembly for this—in fact, no one ever mentioned it—but in my heart I felt like a champion.
debra kolodny grew from a barrier-breaking baby feminist into a barrier-breaking adult feminist. A social-justice lefty who leads services at her chavura (Jewish community), she wears whatever makes her comfortable, pants or skirt, usually purple or fuchsia (since you asked). Find Debra’s book, Blessed Bi Spirit: Bisexual People of Faith (Continuum-International Press), at www.geocities.com/rosefirerising/blest
Nine Days to Change the World
terri m. muehe
DAY 1, SUNDAY: THE IDEA
“I’m tired of freezing my ass off every morning waiting for the school bus,” my friend Roberta said as we lay on her bed eating Fritos out of the bag.
“It’s such a dumb rule,” Eda scowled.
I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, we should do something about it.”
Eda, Roberta, and I were best friends in the seventh grade at Junior High West, a 2,400-student school in a suburb outside of Boston. It was early winter, in the late 1960s, and microminis—very, very short skirts—were “in.” Pantyhose hadn’t made it to the mass market yet, so we actually had to wear stockings and garter belts, which I hated. The garters/short skirt combination made it difficult to even move without revealing too much. However, at the time, every school in the country had a dress code. Skirts were the only option for girls, even during the coldest winter months.
“Hey, wait. I have an idea,” I said, grabbing the last handful of Fritos. “Tomorrow, just for one day, let’s wear pants to school to protest.”
I may have been a little shrimp—I weighed only sixty-nine pounds—but I had a strong social conscience. It was during the height of what they called “the Vietnamese conflict,” and I regularly skipped school to go to all kinds of protests: Stop the War, Ban the Bomb, End World Hunger, Fight for Women’s Lib. Though only eleven and twelve years old, all of my friends were politically active. We had politics before we had our periods.
DAY 2, MONDAY: PLANTING THE SEED
Eda, Roberta, and I hid our pants in our book bags so our mothers wouldn’t see them, then we changed in the girls’ room before the first bell. We were excited. The stir began as soon we left the bathroom. A buzz just started. You have to understand, today it would be like someone walking buck-naked down the hallway. We weren’t in pants long—fifteen minutes tops—before the homeroom teacher sent us to the principal’s office.
“Do you want me to call your parents?” Principal Harry was a typical authority-figur
e-macho-schmuck. He tried to bully us. “This is the school rule… blah, blah, blah.”
We had expected this. We knew we’d be forced to change; being rebels, we just wanted to see how long it would take. Even after we were back in our miniskirts, word spread. It was the subject of conversation during all three lunch periods. Some girls even talked about bringing pants the next day: “Right on. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.”
DAY 3, TUESDAY: PICKING UP SPEED
Sure enough, we got to school and it was like a dressing room changing party in the girls’ lavatory. Soon there were several dozen of us wearing pants. “Any girls wearing pants.
“Any girls wearing pants, please put skirts on immediately or you will be sent home. Your parents will be called… blah, blah, blah,” the principal said over the loudspeaker during homeroom. A foolish move on his part: Anyone who hadn’t yet heard about the revolt sure did then.
As instructed, we filed out of homeroom, and had a second party in the girls’ bathroom.
DAY 4, WEDNESDAY: STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
Probably two hundred girls crammed into the bathrooms to change that morning. Some even came to school wearing pants (it was winter, after all). I don’t remember being forced back into skirts that third day of the rebellion. This is great, I thought. Maybe something can really change here.
DAY 5, THURSDAY: CAN’T STOP A MOVING TRAIN
Who knows how many girls wore pants that day; at least several hundred.
I’m not sure who came up with the idea—me, Eda, or Roberta—but at lunchtime we started spreading the word down the long tables that we were going to stage a walkout the next day and hold a sit-down strike in the parking lot!” Psst. The dress code has got to go. Pass it on.”
Word spread quickly. Some kids just liked the idea of getting out of classes for an hour, but a core group of us looked at this from a purely political point of view. Equal rights for girls were important to us. Only this time we wouldn’t have to skip school to attend the protest.
What we didn’t know was that news of our plan had spread to Harry—and beyond.
DAY 6, FRIDAY: RESISTANCE
We arrived to find stern-looking adults stationed up and down the corridors at regular intervals on each of the four floors of our school. (Today, over thirty years later, I can’t recall exactly who those adults were. Perhaps teachers. Maybe parents. My usually crystal-clear memory wants to say it was the cops. Could it have been?) “Oh my god,” I whispered to Roberta. “They’re taking us seriously.” I was completely shocked, but, like others, undeterred.
The set time for the walkout neared. It was a cold day, cold enough that we could not just leave without getting our coats … from our lockers … where the authoritative adults were posted. We prepared to move toward those lockers when suddenly Curmudgeon Harry’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker: “Anyone caught leaving school will be suspended.” (Not that that would have stopped Eda and me.) “This will not happen,” he continued, “you are not going to walk out … blah, blah, blah.” Then he added, “We will be holding both PTA and school board meetings over the weekend to reexamine the issue of the school dress code.”
Eda, Roberta, and I smiled at one another across the classroom. We’d done it.
The walkout never happened. It didn’t need to.
DAY 7, SATURDAY: THE POWER OF THE PRESS
It made the papers. A junior high school filled with more than two thousand eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-olds about to hold a walkout? How could it not?
DAY 8, SUNDAY: CAPITULATION
I was in the papers again. This time the article said the school board had met and the dress code rule mandating girls wear skirts had been officially abolished.
DAY 9, MONDAY: VICTORY
We showed up Monday and that was it. The entire school was in pants. We had taken a stand and made a change.
FOREVER AFTER
Shortly after our town’s “skirts-only” rule was abolished, the Greater Boston School District dismantled theirs. Then New York City did, too. Then Los Angeles. I don’t know if our actions, and people reading about them in the newspapers, caused this, or if other people were taking similar steps simultaneously, but in the absence of anyone’s telling me otherwise, I feel okay saying we’d wanted to make a change for a day and we made a change for a country. All before our first periods.
terri m. muehe ([email protected]) is an artist and an advocate serving on the Board of Directors of a New Hampshire coalition of AIDS Service Organizations. To this day, she hates stockings and pantyhose. And although she does own skirts and dresses, she only wears them “under protest.”
Women’s Rights Are Human Rights
rana husseini
When a murder occurs in Jordan, they do not give out the victim’s name or address. So when I walked through a poor and crowded suburb outside our capital, Amman, navigating sandy, hilly, unpaved roads, I was not exactly sure where I’d end up. Figuring everyone knew everyone’s business in this neighborhood, I stopped an older man on the street.
“I heard there was a crime here. A sixteen-year-old girl was killed by her oldest brother. Can you tell me the address?”
“Right there.” He pointed behind me to a barbershop.
“Do you know why she was killed?” I asked.
“Because her other brother had raped her.”
“You must be joking.”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” He nodded his head, offering no look of shock to match mine.
“There must be something wrong.”
“No, that’s what happened.”
It was an old barbershop with two chairs. The barber sat on one; two men stood nearby. I walked in, angry but cautious, and without delay asked about the girl.
“Who told you? How do you know about this?” the men responded in a how-dare-you-ask tone.
“It was in the newspaper. Just a few lines,” I answered.
When they said they were her uncles, I sat down, told them I was a reporter, and launched in: “Why was she killed?”
“She was not a good girl,” one uncle snapped, as if that would justify a killing.
But I knew the truth from the man in the street. Now I wanted it from them. I pushed with more questions. Finally, one decided there was no reason to hide the truth: “Her brother raped her.”
That was all I needed to hear. “So why did you kill her? Why did you punish the victim? Why didn’t you punish the brother?”
To those outside our culture my questions may have seemed presumptuous. But by then I understood enough about so-called “honor crimes” to know that though the uncles hadn’t actually slit her throat (her oldest brother had done that), they had plotted the execution. That is how it is usually done: by family decision. Now, much to their repugnance, a woman was asking about this crime of honor.
The uncles looked at each other, haughtily amused by my questions. One asked the other, “Do you think we killed the wrong person?”
“No, no, relax; we killed the right one.”
These are words I will never forget: words that still make my blood burn.
“She seduced her brother. She tarnished the family’s honor and deserved to die. That is why we killed her.”
“Why would she seduce her brother when there are dozens of men on the street?” I openly argued with them.
Fed up with me, and turning more aggressive, they shot back: “Why are you here, why do you care? Why aren’t you dressed in the traditional robe? Why aren’t you married? Oh, you studied in the United States?” These accusations, fired like bullets, translated to one thing: Like their niece, I was not a good girl.
Indeed I had worn nontraditional clothes—jeans and sneakers—on this murder investigation, just in case something went wrong and I had to take off fast. I figured now was a good time to leave. Anyway, I already had my story.
In 1994, when I was twenty-six and investigating this girl’s death for my ne
wspaper, the Jordan Times, I never imagined her sad story would instigate my becoming a national voice for the mostly poor victims of so-called honor killings. What is a crime of honor? It is when a male takes the life of his female relative because, in the family’s opinion, she has tarnished their reputation by supposedly getting involved in “immoral behaviors.”
Though honor killings are a violation of human rights and a violation of all major faiths, including Jordan’s predominant Islamic religion, many Arab people ignore the killings and pretend they do not exist. Or they justify the act, as one killer did with me: “This is our culture. If I did not do it, I would shame my family. Blood cleanses honor.”
Sometime after that disturbing incident at the barbershop, I went to the courthouse to investigate further. I sifted through legal paperwork and testimonies to understand the case’s circumstances, the victim, and the suspect. Then I rushed to my newspaper with all these facts circulating in my mind. Trying to be objective and at the same time exposing the brutality and unjust sentencing, I wrote my second-ever news report on honor killings.
That Takes Ovaries! Page 18