FUND-RAISER, TOO!
In keeping with the philosophy that it is important to give back to our communities, I encourage each (bigger, public) open mike organizer to make her event a fund-raiser, and to split the proceeds between two causes: one local, one international. We females are scattered far and wide; by dividing up our resources locally and internationally, we cover all bases.
Some of the money collected can go to covering costs (though it is hoped that sponsors or in-kind donations will take care of that), and, if necessary, to paying the organizer something. But regardless of costs, most of the proceeds should go to the beneficiaries of the fund-raiser.
It is my suggestion and hope that a portion of the money raised go to a local girls’ program—whichever one you like in your community. (If you need an idea, consider your nearest chapter of Girls Inc. (www.girlsinc.org), one of the nation’s preeminent girls’ organizations. They help girls with everything from self-defense to economic empowerment to preventing adolescent pregnancy.) If you search high and low but cannot find a local girls’ group that seems right for an Ovaries! fundraiser, pick a women’s group.
So the open mike you want to organize meets
the above “bigger, public” definition?
And now you are wondering,
“What are these Certain Things I’ll have to do?
Thing 1. On the website, register your intention to organize an open mike. (This is simple. Don’t let having to do it be a hindrance.)
Thing 2. The complete, not just summarized, Guidelines for Organizing an Open Mike are found on the website. When you register, you agree to follow the complete guidelines. As you read them, you will see they are fairly flexible. You can alter and adapt them to your specific community’s needs.
Thing 3. Wait to hear back from the website before beginning to organize.
There are good reasons for Things 1-3. I need to coordinate and keep track of what is going on around the country. We wouldn’t want two open mikes in the same city on the same week, now would we? Also, if you want, we can electronically list your upcoming event for all to see–and attend. Besides, contact with the website means you’ll have someone who cares as much as you do about the event. And someone to whom you can brag when it goes swimmingly.
It is my further hope that another portion of the money your event raises will be dedicated to stopping two of the most appalling international human rights abuses perpetrated against women and girls—sexual enslavement and, separately, female genital mutilation (FGM) (for info on these two horrific violations of girls’ rights and sexual freedom). To this end, That Takes Ovaries! established a relationship with Equality Now (www.equalitynow.org), a New York-based international women’s organization that, among other things, works with grassroots groups around the globe to eradicate FGM as well as the sex trafficking of girls. Some of the writers in this book have already generously donated their contributor’s honorarium to Equality Now. Imagine if every open mike distributed information and made a donation, too. We could make a real difference in the crucial goal of educating the public and ending both sexual slavery and FGM. And we would be sending a strong message that women in the so-called First World, a world of privilege, care about all women around the globe. (Note: If there is another international women’s cause you’d prefer to donate to, that is also an option. Donating to Equality Now is strongly encouraged but not required.)
For those of you who have never organized for a cause or never before seen yourselves as social change activists—Welcome! Please use this event to get your feet (and knees and tush) wet. There is nothing like the high that comes from making a difference.
Multi-Culti is Good
Have your event reflect the diversity around you. Invite, leaflet, and advertise in a variety of cultural communities. Be imaginative. Reach out to Asian resource centers, Black sororities, disability rights groups, battered women’s shelters, gay/straight alliances, girls’ associations, Latino advocacy centers, Native American youth groups, LGBT listservs, senior citizen programs, and the like. Encourage women and girls from various backgrounds to take the lead as organizers, publicists, emcees. Diversity makes us stronger. Coalitions make us more effective.
PRE-EVENT ORGANIZING CHECKLIST
Register your intention to organize a (bigger, public) That Takes Ovaries! Open Mike. Wait until you hear back before proceeding further.
Prepare yourself for a bunch of fun and a good bit of work: Depending on how big you want it to be, the event could take one to three months to pull off.
Find a coorganizer or loyal servants, umm, assistants, who will help.
Find a free/absurdly cheap, wheelchair accessible, close-to-public- transit site. Try a bookstore, coffee shop, university campus, poetry reading spot, club, auditorium, beauty parlor waiting room, bowling alley parking lot, whatever. (Or piggyback onto another organization’s already scheduled conference. Its organizers might love an audience participatory activity. And this way your site and crowd are already secured. Yippee!)
Invite local girls’ and women’s organizations to join the fun by having them coorganize, sponsor, publicize, and/or attend the event.
Consider inviting local celebrities and leaders. They will bring their fans, and can read from the book, tell their own personal stories, or emcee. Which gets us to…
Secure a Mistress of Ceremonies (emcee). She should be vibrant and bold (like the book!), and, most important, able to make crowds comfortable enough to share personal stories aloud. Maybe she is you?
If you are not already holding the open mike at a bookstore, invite the owner or manager of one to attend your event to sell the book. This helps promote the paperback—thank you!—and further legitimizes your open mike by linking it to the book. (P.S. Don’t forget to support your local independent bookstores.)
Schedule an up-to-two-hour agenda. Choose activities from the At the Event Itself options (summarized below; full version found on the website).
PRE-EVENT PUBLICITY CHECKLIST
Get a nifty Ovaries! publicity packet off the website.
Make an eye-catching (hot pink?) hardcopy flyer about the event, and an e-mail flyer, too.
E-mail and snailmail flyers to all potentially interested individuals and groups, like local women’s centers, YWCA, N.O.W., Girls Inc., and Girl Scouts chapters.
Pass out flyers at poetry slams, clubs, knitting conventions, pro-choice demos, and any public gathering of one or more people. Post on windows and community bulletin boards in libraries, bookstores, coffee shops, beauty salons, gynecologists’ offices—anywhere you’d find women chillin’.
Get the open mike listed in the calendar section of local publications.
If you want more publicity, like your fifteen seconds of fame, contact local TV stations and city newspapers’ entertainment/around town/style reporters and book reviewers. Their interests will be piqued by a That Takes Ovaries! Open Mike. It’s playful and depthful, and it has just enough “edge” to draw them in.
AT THE EVENT ITSELF
Activities you can use at your event are listed in the Open Mike Guidelines on the website. Pick the ones you think would work best with the community you are inviting. A bare-bones open mike consists of only three components: first, the Introduction, when the Mistress of Ceremonies reads aloud the book’s preface (aka “Rivka’s Note to All Readers”) and discusses the importance of women and girls publicly sharing their brazen, outrageous, audacious, courageous acts; second, Modeling the Storytelling Style, when someone role-models the types of stories we hope to hear at the event (i.e. true, short, and, of course, gutsy), perhaps by reading aloud examples from the book; and last, the actual Open Mike Time, when women and girls who came with a story already prepared share them with the whole room, thereby motivating others to spontaneously share stories, too. With just those three components, you will have a great event!
However, other activities can also be found on the website, such as Celebrity Readings, wh
en well-known, crowd-drawing locals tell stories from their own lives or read from the book; the Golden Ovaries Award Ceremony, when community-based women and girls who have acted boldly are honored and then tell their specific act of brazenness to the audience; the Greater Audience Involvement exercise, when all who attend have a chance to share their stories in a small group setting, and then later, if they want, with the whole room. The exercise is a fun way to help bring shy people out and build their self-esteem.
No matter how you proceed with your open mike, the clapping, cheering, supportive yelps and congratulatory pats on the back at the end of every story will encourage each woman and girl to keep being gutsy, keep taking risks in her day-to-day life. And when the electrified crowd finally dances its way out the door, you can be sure they’ll know that being Women With Ovaries enhances their own lives and serves as a fine example to others of what a woman can be.
Female Genital mutilation, Sex
Trafficking, and That Takes
Ovaries! Fund-raisers
It is my hope that the That Takes Ovaries! Open Mikes that you organize (especially the bigger, public ones) will be fund-raisers, with a percentage of the money raised going to local girls’ groups and a percentage going to the organization Equality Now for their work to stop female genital mutilation (FGM) and the equally horrible but separate atrocity of sexual enslavement. (For general info on fund-raising)
FGM is one of the most atrocious human rights abuses perpetrated against girls around the globe. To date, 130 million females from Africa to Europe and the United States have been mutilated and suffer permanent disabilities from the barbaric act. An unknown number die each year during and after the procedure. Equality Now works with community-based leaders and grassroots groups worldwide to promote a better understanding of FGM and effective strategies for its eradication
This is how Fauziya Kassindja, who managed to escape FGM, describes it in her story in That Takes Ovaries!:
A harmful traditional practice among some African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures, female genital mutilation (FGM) is performed on about two million infants, girls, and women each year. That’s more than five thousand a day. Depending on the local custom, you will either “only” have your clitoris cut off, or you will lose the whole thing, including labia minora and majora. If it is the latter, you are sewn up, leaving a small hole, hardly big enough to allow pee and menstrual blood to squeeze out. Then, with each baby you birth, you are recut and resewn anew. The rationale behind FGM is complex: It is tradition; it is thought to protect virginity and prevent promiscuity; uncircumcised females are considered dirty; girls must be cut as a requirement for marriage; and circumsised girls and women are deemed more sexually desirable.
The practice of FGM subjects women to a number of long-term physical and psychological problems. Often carried out without anesthesia and with unsterilized razors or knives, it is a sometimes deadly practice. My other aunt died from it, as do many girls every year, either from hemorrhaging or infection.
I wanted nothing to do with either the [forced] marriage or the so-called circumcision, so with the help of my sister, and my mother from afar, I fled that very day.
Fauziya left her home, her family, her country to escape the brutality of FGM. Today, in part because of her work publicizing the horrors of FGM, Fauziya’s homeland of Togo, West Africa, has outlawed the practice. But it still goes on legally and illegally around the world. Equality Now is one of the leading organizations working to stop it.
They also work to end global sex trafficking of girls and women. Ruchira Gupta describes sexual slavery in India in her story in That Takes Ovaries!:
I came to learn that the sale of girls is no secret; it is all done in the open, like any business. There is the local procurer, an uncle or fellow villager, who buys the girl from her parents for twenty to thirty dollars. He’ll collect three or four females, aged seven to thirty, bring them to a bigger town, collect another dozen girls from other rural areas, put them all in a truck, smuggle them over the Nepal-India border (where he’ll pay off the border police), then sell them to the next middleman up the chain, in India. The new men take the girls to small boardinghouses. There they rape the girls, beat them, subjugate their spirits completely until they do whatever these men want. The men sometimes use ice to break in the premenstrual girls. Then the girls are taken to Bombay and sold to brothel madams for three thousand rupees apiece, about forty to fifty dollars.
Back in Bombay, I heard how the half-grown children are bonded sex slaves for the first five years, unpaid and forced to “service” twenty-five to thirty men a day: raped twenty-five to thirty times a day! “Clients” stub out cigarettes on their young breasts and shove bottles up their vaginas. They are kept in five-by-seven-foot rooms each crammed with about four miniature beds. The rooms have no walking space, just beds and curtains separating them. Windows are barred, entrances locked and guarded. A severe beating follows any attempt to flee. After five years, they are allowed to keep half their meager earnings. By then the madams have made sure that the girls have become addicted to drugs and alcohol and have had a baby, so they won’t run. The girls, now with distorted, almost caricatured bodies, get trapped by disease and debt—they have to pay for water, bedding, and food. By age forty they are usually dead from AIDS.
I learned that this horror goes on around the globe, from Africa to Albania. Each year 4 million girls are sold by their impoverished parents, tricked with false promises of good jobs, or outright kidnapped. They are brought to big cities in their own country or sent abroad to rich Western nations. Fifty thousand are shipped to the United States each year.
Both Ruchira’s and Fauziya’s descriptions help to explain why That Takes Ovaries! established a relationship with Equality Now and why I strongly suggest you send them a percentage of the money raised at any Ovaries! Open Mikes.
Equality Now
P.O. Box 20646
Columbus Circle Station
New York, NY 10023
Phone: (212) 586-0906
Fax: (212) 586-1611
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.equalitynow.org
acknowledgments
!Mega-muchas gracias!
To three heroines:
HARRIET TUBMAN, who, despite the threat of lynching, escaped—and then went back again and again to guide fellow Africans from the horrors of slavery via the Underground Railroad.
WONDER WOMAN, who gave girls starved for positive images of our own a way to envision ourselves as wielders of great physical power and agents of world change.
BELLA ABZUG, a smart, tenacious, loud, and proud fighter—champion!—of women’s social, political, and economic rights. My first feminist role model (after my parents, of course).
It should be made part of our common knowledge, told to every newborn upon making it out the canal: “Welcome to the world, baby! Oh, and FYI, the Earth is round, mufflers are made to rot just after the warranty runs out, and it’s a ton and a half of work to compile an anthology.” That way would-be writers will know in advance and can thus choose to channel their overachiever energies in other arenas, like, say, anything else. Complaints aside, I loved working on this book. And it couldn’t have happened without these folks:
The Decades-Long Inner Circle: A big thanks to these people, my “core group,” for E•V•E•R•Y•T•H•I•N•G—from seemingly unconditional love to dollops of emotional (and financial!) support, for teaching me how to act decisively, courageously, compassionately. To Mom & Dad: I love you. I am so lucky and grateful to have you. All the gutsy things I ever do in my life come from having watched you do it first. To my sister: In our quest to save the world, we split it fifty-fifty—she got the natural earth, I got its human inhabitants. I’ve fallen short, but she’s doing an amazing job. Thanks for encouragement and for modeling how to be an effective leader. To my auntie for her warmth, affection, generosity, and our shared struggles. To my uncle for caring a
bout family. To the indispensable trio: Patsy, Jevera, and Mireya (my angel on Earth, thank you for standing by me for so long).
Lucky me, I’ve had a posse of wonderful writing assistants—all energetic, colorful, caring, and smart. Without their help editing, writing, and typing, That Takes Ovaries! would have remained a mere book proposal. In order of appearance these Supergirls are: Jessica Turco, the let’s-face-it-she’s-invaluable Julia Magnusson, Alisa Moskowitz, Janna Weinstein, Shauna Rogan, Sarah Tyler.
A special “Oy, am I glad you exist,” to Ellen Samuels, who skillfully edited some of these stories, and gives this writer a fab friendship based on support and perennially useful advice. Warm hugs to Richard Hoffman and England’s Crown Jewels, Joan and Louie Solomon, for helping me recognize I had a career in writing. For the combo of friendship, editing, and sharp thinking: B*o*b*b*i, Hanne Blank, Marie Celestin, Hannah Doress, Jan Gardner, the irrepressible Loolwa Khazzoom, Tommye-K Mayer, Peggy Munson, Elizabeth O’Neill, Martha Ramsey, Susan and Mimi Parker, Katie Wheeler, and the dedicated and generous Gail Dines, the one person besides my editor who graciously commented on near every story and intro in the manuscript. For being my buddies and assisting with many computing and artistic tasks: Will Ballard, Lee Mandell, Vicki Van Sant. To friends who make my life more depthful and playful: Ami & Holli, John Grebe, essential-to-my-health John Herd, Peter (“the cape’s at the cleaners”) Kane, tenacious Judy Krugerwoman, David Levy, Joan Livingston, Rosie and Theresa McMahan, Eva y Roberto, Susan Mortimer, geekboy-on-wheels Michael Muehe, Jean Perrin, One Angry Girl Jill Portugal, Frezzia y Yessenia y Gabriel, Eli Rosenblatt, Mistress of Hedonism Meg Rosser, Jan Sunoo, the guys at Superior, Jose Luis Sandoz, Adam T-Zak, Cecelia Wambach.
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