It's not about the orgasms: on the importance of sex positivity

(Trigger warning: brief discussion of rape culture)

Occasionally, I run into people who ask me why I feel compelled to talk publicly about sex all the time. (Often, these people are my older relatives.) Partly, it’s that I’m a very open person. My close friends all know that there’s basically no such thing as “too much information” with me, and anyone I’ve talked to for more than ten minutes has probably heard some ridiculous story involving some kind of young person shenanigans. But my openness about sex goes way beyond my lack of personal boundaries. I talk about sex because I’m a huge fan of sex positivity as a force for social good.

Sex positivity, for me, is all about destigmatizing sex. It’s rooted in the belief that sex is something natural, and that however you’re choosing to be sexual (monogamous or not, regardless of your gender or your partner’s gender, with as many or as few people as you’d like) is perfectly fine. As long as what you’re doing is between consenting adults, you’re good. And if you’re asexual or choose to abstain from sex for personal, moral, religious or any other set of reasons, that’s perfectly fine too (as long as you don’t try to legislate compliance with your particular breed of morality).

A lot of people have talked a lot about the benefits of sex-positivity when you’re actually having sex with people. I’ve found in my own experience that feeling comfortable with your sexual desires leads to better communication and way more fun in bed. My friend has an awesome list of sex tips based on our experience  together that reflect this idea pretty well if you’re not sold yet. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now, because the importance of sex positivity goes way beyond having good sex.

Being sex positive is a deeply political act with hugely important consequences. In a culture which stigmatizes sexual activity, female pleasure, non-heterosexual orientations, trans* people, bodies which don’t conform to beauty ideals or gender expectations and a whole host of other things, having mutually fulfilling sex with another person sometimes feels like a revolutionary act. In this context, sex positivity hasn’t just given me lots of good orgasms. It’s also the reason I’ve been able to have healthy, successful relationships, love and respect myself and my body, remain STI-free and help friends out in tricky situations. I don’t say this as a “Look at me, I’m doing everything so well!” I say it because I think it’s important to recognize what people are attacking when they try to make moral arguments about sex, and how much sex negativity spills over into mental and physical health.

By teaching that desire is normal and fine and that women can be sexual, sex positivity moves away from the conquest model of sex. Popular culture often promotes the idea that sex is a conquest—men are pursuing women, women are being coy and shy and demure. Women are expected to fend off male advances; men are expected to be aggressive and know that women often say no when they mean something else. Unsurprisingly, this cultural construct directly leads to sexual assault (and also ignores non-binary identities and non-heterosexual relationships). If men are taught that no doesn’t mean no, and if women are taught that they should give in to men, problems are going to ensue. This is something that the anti-sex crowd doesn’t like to acknowledge, but promoting the idea that sex=bad also contributes directly to rape culture. If all sex is bad or immoral, then non-consensual acts just become another form of immoral conduct. There are religious traditions where all sex outside of marriage is considered immoral—doesn’t matter if it was consensual or not.

Sex positivity, in contrast, promotes what I would call a communication model of sex. Because I was taught that my body and my desires were okay, I’ve always felt comfortable articulating what I want and need in sexual situations. When I had partners who wanted to go further than I did, I was able to bring it up with them. On the rare occasion that someone hasn’t respected my boundaries, I’ve been able to articulate that clearly and unambiguously, and it’s generally resulted in an immediate apology. When I wanted to be sexual with people, I felt confident enough in my own desires to talk about it with them (instead of adhering to Cosmo’s advice to just slap some handcuffs on your guy in bed without any conversation). When I’ve had partners propose things in bed that seemed weird to me, I knew enough to talk it out with them instead of saying, “OMG WHAT YOU LIKE THAT GROSS!” Not surprisingly, my long-term relationships have benefitted from this communication. I’ve been able to enjoy good sex in an environment where I felt comfortable saying something if things weren’t working out.

This confidence also translates into physical health realm. Not being ashamed of sex means I haven’t been ashamed to seek out medical care when I need it. (I’ve also been privileged enough to have access to high-quality, affordable medical care for my whole life.) I’ve gotten comprehensive STI testing every year and felt comfortable seeking out medical care for things like yeast infections. I’ve asked questions about birth control and abortions, been able to choose methods of preventing pregnancy that were right for me, and checked in regularly with my gynecologist and sexual partners about those methods. The fact that I am able to do that is thanks to decades of fighting for reproductive healthcare. The fact that I feel comfortable doing it has a lot to do with the way I was raised to think about sex.

As a spillover benefit, the fact that I’m vocal about these issues means that friends seek me out for advice. I’ve given advice to friends dealing with everything from broken condoms to pain during intercourse. I’ve helped multiple people get emergency contraception when they needed it. And I know that I’ve been helped immensely by the presence of other sex positive people in my life. I’ve sought out advice from my friends for all kinds of things like this, and I’m better off and healthier for it.

I have a decent number of friends who are uncomfortable with sex—some of them think it’s something wrong, others just think it should be private and not openly discussed. And while I respect those opinions, I think a public conversation about sex is essential, especially as long as we live in a culture which stigmatizes the act itself and those who enjoy it. Talking openly about sex isn’t about bragging, and it isn’t about having amazing orgasms. It’s about health, both physical and mental. It’s about preventing unwanted pregnancies. It’s about promoting body positivity and fighting rape culture. It’s about declaring—unambiguously, clearly, proudly—that this is my body, and I’m going to enjoy all of the things it can do.

The power of stories

Campus is relatively deserted now, and watching all my senior friends walk across the stage at graduation has gotten me thinking about what I’ve learned here at Whitman over the past semester. This semester in particular, my classes and extracurriculars all interacted in a complimentary way. Weirdly, the big idea I’ve gotten out of this hasn’t been some academic theory or new conceptual framework for viewing the world. It’s a really simple thought—that the stories we tell are fundamentally important for understanding, constructing and changing society.

Right now, you’re thinking, Yeah Rachel, duh. I know, it’s not the most original thing in the world. But over the past four months, I’ve explored the idea of narrative and story from enough angles that I think there’s a deeper edge to my understanding.

I only had three real classes this semester—Political Ecology, Environmental Communication and The Nature Essay. Aside from school, most of my free time was spent writing for the Pioneer, telling stories about campus life. This combination created a lot of tension in my head, possibly due to the different expectations each of these classes came with:

Political Ecology: It’s easy to get seduced by good writing, so be careful of that and learn to deconstruct the author’s assumptions.

Nature Essay: We’re going to learn to seduce readers with our writing.

Environmental Communication: We’re going to analyze stories to see what they’re really saying and how we can use rhetorical practice to get our message across when talking about the environment.

The Pioneer: Write stories. Don’t be biased.

I definitely had a few nights where political ecology me got in the way of writing my nature essays, because I was freaking out about accurate representations of everything and the political implications of the words I was using. But all in all, that synthesis has been a really good thing. It’s such a healthy challenge to be critically interrogating language that perpetuates systematic oppression while also trying to write lyrically for a general audience—people who have never heard of things like hegemonic masculinity or gender dysphoria. It’s pushed me to become a far better writer, because I have to constantly think about the subtle implications of the way I’m portraying “reality.”

Stories, to be sure, can be insidious. When something is presented as fictional, it’s easy to not question the social norms it’s reinforcing. And when something is presented as “reality” or “objective journalism,” it’s easy to not look for the biases that shape everything anybody writes. News always involves choices—about which stories to print and not to print, about who to talk to, about how to present the issue in question. And it doesn’t take too many articles like the recent New York Times piece sexualizing and dehumanizing a trans woman who died in a fire to see the ways in which the stories we tell both reflect and shape our societal norms about how people should be treated.

With examples like that, it’s easy to get depressed about writing. But fundamentally, episodes like this reinforce the idea that there is power in the written word. For me, that’s a hopeful and inspiring place to be. I’ve seen this firsthand interacting with friends in the wake of my trip to the U.S.-Mexico border. You can argue facts and logic about immigration policy all day, and you’ll probably get people to agree with you. But it’s in the stories—the human, the personal, the stuff that hits close to home—where people actually listen. I’ve spouted immigration stats to friends who didn’t care much, and then seen their eyes open when I recount a story or show them the essay I wrote after that trip was over. People get it so much more quickly when there’s a narrative. Ditto with my articles about rape on the Whitman campus. I guarantee that the dialogue we’ve had on campus about sexual assault didn’t happen because of the statistics about how many reported sexual assaults occur every year. They happened because some incredible women were brave enough to share their stories with me, and those stories connected with people in a way that numbers can’t.

I’ve struggled a lot with the idea of being a writer. With the world so screwed up in so many ways, trying to make a living stringing words together seems silly and self-indulgent. And it is, to an extent. Writing won’t be enough to solve the world’s problems, and I don’t want it to be my whole life. But if I’ve learned anything this semester, it’s that those stories aren’t meaningless. In the written word, there is both the power to define and shape reality, and the responsibility to do it fairly, accurately. In writing, I see the seeds of radicalism, of building something better. It’s not enough, but it’s definitely a place to start.

Building a border wall

My alarm on Monday went off at 3:40 a.m. After a cursory attempt to get dressed and put my contacts in, I walked out the door fifteen minutes later with a mug of green tea. My heart was racing as I walked to the library. Starting at four, a group began to assemble on the front steps. All told, there were about ten of us. We carried wooden pallets and metal stakes from cars, busted out the hammers and nails, and got to work. Our task was simple: to build a border wall.

After two hours of work, we’d driven stakes into the grass, put the pallets on top, and stapled cardboard to the whole thing. Our wall stretched from the library to the tennis courts, blocking off a funnel pathway for students walking to and from class.

We spray-painted the side facing the library with graffiti in a variety of languages—German, Arabic, Spanish, English—and made references to the U.S.-Mexico border, the Berlin Wall and the Israeli occupation.  This side was the “occupied” side of the border, the side that traditionally has graffiti on it. I added my favorite piece of graffiti from the U.S.-Mexico border wall, though it’s since been painted over: Las parades vueltas de lado son puentes. Walls turned on their sides are bridges.

The other side was blank, except for a large proclamation: International Border. Please have documents ready.

It wasn’t a serious impediment to travel—people could easily go around the library or through the tennis courts—but it was big enough that people had to stop and look at it, think about how they could navigate around.

I won’t speak for the other members of the group, but I was motivated to participate in this project because of my experiences on the U.S.-Mexico border over spring break. Spending a week in the Arizona borderlands made it abundantly clear to me just how much is broken about our immigration policies, their enforcement, and the very notion of a border in the first place.

The wait to get a legal visa for Mexican nationals is currently about twenty years if you already have a close relative living in the U.S., and the U.S. government has yet to recognize the drug-related violence in Mexico as a legitimate conflict, which means people threatened with death can’t apply to get asylum. U.S. policies, including free-trade agreements like NAFTA, the continued criminalization of drugs and the unwillingness to stop weapons from being smuggled into Mexico, account for many of the problems pushing people north—realities that our immigration laws largely refuse to consider.

Border fence from Arizona, near Nogales.

The U.S. enforces its immigration laws through a physical border in the Southwest, which pushes migrants into the desert, where many die of dehydration and other injuries in the attempt to cross into the United States. Still, to focus only on that physical border fence would be disingenuous. The U.S.-Mexico border has worked its way into communities across the country, and the line separating us from them is redrawn constantly in day-to-day interactions between citizens, migrants, law enforcement, government officials and the mixed-status families affected by immigration policy.

In short, U.S. border and immigration policies have combined to make movement a privilege, something accorded based on citizenship and skin color. As a U.S. citizen, I can enter 90 countries around the world with no visa, including virtually every Latin American nation. If I want to walk into Nogales for a day of shopping, I’m free to do so. Driving through the American Southwest, I can sail through Border Patrol checkpoints without having to show ID—my whiteness is enough to tell the uniformed men that I “belong” in this country.

Border Patrol checkpoint near Tucson, AZ

Perhaps most insidiously, these things are simply part of my life. Part of having these privileges is not having to think about them. When I flash my passport coming back to the U.S. from Mexico, I don’t have to consider that the blind luck of being born in the States has given me the ability to move freely from country to country. I don’t have to think about the fact that there are people moving through the desert around me who might die in the attempt to simply make it into my country, even without any guarantee of legal status in the future. My family will never be split by deportation, unable to reunite on either side of the border because it’s too risky.

For me, this is the value in building a border wall on campus. Whitman students as a group are largely privileged. Virtually all of us are U.S. citizens, and international students are generally here with documentation and visas. There are fewer than a dozen undocumented students on campus. For most of us, movement is not a privilege we have to think about. Most of us will never encounter a border that we are not legally allowed to cross. Most of us will never have to consider the possibility of being deported.

When we first put the wall up, students reacted to it. It made crossing the path impossible, so people were forced to interact with it. Some students were frustrated by the boundary. I overheard several comments such as, “I don’t get the point of this,” “This is ridiculous, it’s in a public space,” and “It’s not fair; they’re blocking the path.” A lot of people stopped to read the graffiti. But every single person, no matter their thoughts on the project, had to think about it. At the very least, they had to consider their own movement—how can I get around this wall?

I was tired after our 4a.m. construction call, so after breakfast with the construction team, I went back to sleep from 8 to 10:30. After my nap, I went back to look at the wall. Apparently, we’d frustrated some people enough that they felt compelled to knock down two pallets in the middle of the wall. It was a small gap, but it changed the wall completely. With the hole there, students no longer had to think about their movement. Some still stopped to look at the graffiti, but far more walked by talking with friends or texting.

If there’s one lesson I got out of this, it’s that reconceiving the ability to move as privilege is a challenge. I think it’s important for people to recognize the things they take for granted, and important to push people to think about what those things are. I had a ton of fun building the wall, and I hope that we were able to get at least a few Whitties thinking about all the borders in the world, visible and invisible, that have much more serious implications than just being a minute late to class.

Some shit I'm angry about

1) The absurd number of feminists, and people in general, who refuse to consider trans women to be women. The fact that the Michigan Womyn's Festival STILL has  a "womyn born womyn" only entry policy. Having a vagina is not what makes you a woman. THIS IS NOT COMPLICATED.

2) White, cis feminists who refuse to acknowledge how disproportionately violence affects trans women and women of color. While I might be at higher risk for rape or domestic violence because of my gender, the likelihood that I will be on receiving end of violence goes way down because I'm white and cisgender. This is also true for pay gaps and just about every other feminist issue you can think of. Saying that is not in any way diminishing the seriousness of feminist concerns. It's just true. Feminism that isn't deliberately, consciously intersectional and self-critical at all times is BULLSHIT. Anyone who feels otherwise should do some serious self-reflection/just be a better person.

3) The fact that so many people conflate the two meanings of privilege and refuse to understand what people mean when they discuss privilege. "Privileged" can mean lucky in a single-instance sense, like when you feel privileged to be somebody's friend or privileged to be nominated for an award. Systematic, institutionalized privilege is a different thing, and it's a very real thing. I benefit from white privilege, as do all white people, regardless of their level of education, gender, income, sexuality, etc. I can walk down the street at night in a hoodie with a reasonable expectation that I won't be shot or harassed by the police. If I ever am a victim of violence or sexual assault, I have a reasonable expectation that the police will believe me and take my complaints seriously. The fact that I might be oppressed because of patriarchy doesn't make my white privilege any less of a thing. Bringing up the individual circumstances of your life that are less-than-optimal when someone is discussing systematic oppression is a form of derailing. Stop, listen, shut up. It's not that complicated.

4) The large number of people who are willing to get on their moral high horse about being vegan or vegetarian who are unwilling to a) get anywhere near as riled up about the horrible treatment of the PEOPLE in our food system, notably migrant farm workers or b) critically examine the way PETA's ads normalize violence against women and exoticize women of color. How do you care more about a cow being slaughtered than about people being held in slavery on Florida's tomato plantations? I do not mean metaphorical slavery or wage slavery, I mean literal, no-pay, threats-of-violence, held-against-their-will SLAVERY. I mean, I get the sympathy for cows and stuff. I'm not condoning factory farming, and I want to smash corporate industrial food systems and slaughterhouses. But seriously, people, PRIORITIES.

5) The border. Just seriously. Why is that even a thing? Why do we need a WALL to separate us from Mexico? And more to the point, all the people who say, "Well, they should just come here LEGALLY like MY (white) ANCESTORS DID." Like bro, seriously. It's a 20 year wait for a visa if you're a Mexican national with a close relative already living in the U.S. Twenty years. And also WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TO JUDGE SOMEONE ELSE'S MOTIVATIONS FOR COMING TO THIS COUNTRY? Like, what gives you the right to go to like 90 countries with nothing more than a passport while we build a wall to keep the brown people out? Nothing. Don't say U.S. citizenship, because that is a social construction. There is nothing inherent in you as a person that makes you any more deserving. Nothing.

There are a lot more I could say, but those especially. If you're a friend who's unclear about any of these points, please ask me. I don't mind trying to help out with information; I do mind people who are wilfully ignorant.

Reflections on a career in journalism (stage one)

For those of you who don’t know, I’ll be taking over the reins of my beloved college newspaper, the Whitman Pioneer for the 2012-13 school year. I’ve just finished hiring all of my editors, managers, and general people-in-charge-of-running-stuff. So this editor-in-chief title is starting to feel real, and it’s put me in a bit of a reflective mood.

I joined the staff of the Pio freshman year with no real journalistic experience. I say real because in 5^th grade, I was the founder, editor and main writer for my class newspaper, the Outer Mongolian Press. I put out a weekly paper, though to call it that might be a stretch. The entire thing was written in Papyrus. Articles were just stacked on top of each other—no columns. I didn’t even bother to justify it. If that counts, though, then this was my first news article ever:

Rooms 108 and109 are about two-thirds done with our famous 5^th Grade Research Project. We just finished writing a rough draft from our outlines and are working on title pages and citations. Some of our fabulous topics are Women’s Suffrage, the Oklahoma Land Rush, the Trail of Tears, and Irish Immigration. These projects are due on April 4, and are going to be excellent according to Ms. Zoog and Ms. Jones. Until then, good luck on your projects.

Seventy-eight words of pure glory, and in true professional journalist style, my project topic was one of the ones listed (the Trail of Tears, incidentally). I remember distinctly when Carl, who was in room 108, started a rival newspaper for his class. He’d used Publisher to make something that looked like an actual newsletter, and he asked me to team up with him. I refused him, because I knew that while his paper looked way better, mine had far better content. And more people read mine, in spite of the Papyrus.

Middle school made me take a break from my publishing career, though I did maintain an angsty Livejournal. I actually applied to be staff on my high school’s paper, the Garfield Messenger, and was rejected. I was trying to be a photojournalist back then, so I’d applied for both that and writer. They turned me down for both, which I still attribute to the extreme cliqueness of high school (I was on the Executive Committee for our outdoor program, and we didn’t mix much with the Messenger staff).

Instead, I wrote a few columns for the Watchdog, a political opinion magazine/newsletter type thing that a few classmates started. My only serious one took on the accelerated program I was in from 2^nd through 8^th grade (it was called APP). Though the program ended in high school, the (largely white upper and middle class) students in it got automatic placement at Garfield, a magnet school which also served a neighborhood population in a largely black area. The result was an essentially segregated school, made worse by the fact that the school district had decided to cut yellow bus service for all students except those in my program. I wrote:

If the district is going to allow APP students to come from all corners of the city to attend Garfield, they need to make sure that neighborhood students who live near Garfield are not being left behind in their own school. While APP students may be scattered all over the city, we knowingly chose to go to a school far away from our houses, and we shouldn’t be given special treatment because of that. Even for routes where there is extra room, the district could have allocated it in many other ways to be fairer to non-APP students living far from Garfield. They could have sent out a notification to all Garfield students letting them know about buses and allowing students to sign up if they were interested. They could have given first priority to students on free/reduced lunch, or students living furthest from school, or students with the longest Metro routes to school. They could have asked upperclassmen with access to cars to opt-out of buses and make space for people who can’t drive. Regardless of the way they go about it, the district needs to make sure that transportation is assigned on the basis of who needs it most (students furthest from school), not on the basis of enrollment in an academic program.

There is one more solution. The district could reinstate yellow bus service for Garfield. They’re not saving any money by giving us Metro passes—according to Stephanie Bower, head of the APP parent advisory committee, it’s just as expensive as yellow buses would be. If the district doesn’t want to do this—if they’re serious about “creating a generation of public transit users”—they need to make sure the policy applies to all students equally. If my non-APP friends living three blocks away from me don’t get a bus to school, I shouldn’t either. If my friend chooses to go to Garfield even though she lives three blocks from Roosevelt, she can deal with getting on the overcrowded 48 every day after school. If the school district can’t provide a yellow bus for every student at Garfield, then the APP students need to find another way to get to school, just like everyone else.

I got a lot of reactions to that piece, and it generated a pretty heated Facebook discussion about privilege in the APP program.

Senior year of high school, I also took part in a photography class at Northwest Photo Center. I’d taken four quarters of classes with Youth in Focus, a program which provided free instruction and supplies to urban youth. After exhausting all of their offerings—beginning, intermediate and advanced black and white, plus advanced digital—they paid for me to take a real class with adults.

Our final assignment was to produce a portfolio of work organized around a theme. Around this time, the Seattle School District was closing a bunch of schools to cut costs. Almost all of them were in the south of the city and predominantly served people of color. I decided that my project would be photojournalism—covering the meetings where these decisions were being made, as well as some of the culture that would be affected. I spent a good portion of my time after school hanging out at protests and school board meetings with my trusty Nikon D80. And while I’m no expert photographer, I'm proud of some of the scenes I was able to capture.

Freshman year at Whitman, I went to the activities fair with a purpose in mind. I’ve never been the type to make friends quickly, and I knew that my non-drinking, non-partying self needed to find an activity to get overinvolved in or risk social isolation. So it was my nagging insecurities about being too nerdy that propelled me into journalism for real. The Pio staff people looked nice, and I figured since we got paid to write, I could give it a try.

I just pulled up my application for my original news reporter position, and I’m kind of proud of my 18-year old self. I didn’t have the first clue what I was doing, but when they asked me why I wanted to write for the Pio, I said:

I think news reporting is one of the most important aspects of society—it allows people to stay informed and engaged in their communities and the wider world. I love to write and share my opinions, as well as being attention to things people might not otherwise think about.

My first assignment ever was to cover a transit board hearing about potential service cuts to the bus system in Walla Walla. I biked three miles to the meeting and felt like an undercover agent. I got quotes and interviewed people, and all I could think was, "All I have to do to get these people to talk to me is say I'm a reporter!" I didn't feel like one, but I wrote my first article, and it was put on the front page. I almost quit after my first semester since the job was taking over my life and my editor utterly failed as regular communication, but a very drunk copy editor yelled at me in the kitchen of some upperclassmen's house at our end of the semester party. "Rachel, you can't quit! Your articles are so easy to edit!" So I stayed.

Since then, I've done things I never would have imagined. I've interviewed Dan Savage one-on-one (while I had vaccine-induced typhoid), attended a farmworker rights march in Pasco, ridden in the back of the mayor's car to go see election results printed off at the county elections office and had the executive editor of the Seattle Times call my story on campus rape "hard-hitting." I've spent a month as a reporter for a rural Ecuadorian newspaper and sat in on a live Skype chat with Bill McKibben and a bunch of interns at The Nation in New York City. I've used the skills I've learned as a journalist to write better papers, ask better questions on field trips and learn more about most of the issues I care about.

Next year is going to be a challenge for me. In my heart, I'm a reporter. I want to be cracking skulls, following leads and exposing corruption. But I know I have it in me to lead, to take pride when people on my team are able to write those stories and put them on the page in a way that makes it impossible for people to ignore. I have the rest of my life to speak truth to power and bring the U.S. government to its knees. For the next year, my job is to make the Pio the best damn paper it can be.

Wondering what evil looks like? I don't know, but ALEC is pretty close.

Wondering why Florida has a “License to Kill” law that contributed to the death of Trayvon Martin? Or where tough-on-immigration laws like Arizona’s SB 1070 come from? There is this thing you should know about. It’s called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and it’s the closest thing to pure evil that I’ve been able to identify in national U.S. politics.

Okay, that might be an exaggeration. But not a big one. ALEC is a place for industry and special interest groups to come together with legislators and draft model legislation. Corporations pay large sums of money to become members, and legislators who have a cause they’re working on (say, cracking down on immigration) can team up with corporate lobbyists to draft a piece of legislation. This is what happened with Arizona’s SB 1070, the bill that allowed law enforcement to stop anyone who they thought looked “illegal” and demand proof of legal residency in the United States. That bill was based on a model piece of legislation drafted by the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Committee at a time when both the National Rifle Association and the Corrections Corporation of America were members of the committee. Corrections Corp has since dropped their ALEC membership, but I’m sure they’re making out nicely with all the new immigration detainees that Arizona’s largely privatized prison system has to take care of.

I could list dozens of examples like this, but the wonderful folks at the Center for Media and Democracy have set up an ALEC Exposed Wiki, so I don’t have to. Check it out. Read up on the way ALEC works at the Nation. See what Paul Krugman thinks. This is a hugely important shadowy underground anti-democratic machine of evil. At the very least, you should know what they’re up to.

Coming out

This post has been a long time coming, but there’s something I’ve finally decided I need to say.

I’m not straight.

I’ve known this for at least a few months, and probably really the better part of a year, but I was afraid to say it. I was afraid because I wasn’t positive, and I felt like declaring that you’re not straight isn’t something you can take back. Heterosexuality is the default; as soon as you step outside the safe realm of straightness, you can’t walk back across the line so easily.

And also, I was afraid because I felt like I hadn’t earned it. Many of my LGBTQ friends went through long processes of self-discovery. Some spent years trying to hide their identities or convince themselves that they weren’t “other.” Most had to deal with dating people of the same gender in high school and were subject to scrutiny from peers and parents. Many of them had supportive families and friends, but there was still a level of self-awareness and struggle that I didn’t feel I could compare to.

I’ve always dated guys, keeping my crushes on female friends under wraps until after we’d all graduated from high school. Over the years, I’ve fallen in love with women about as often as I’ve had a boyfriend, but something about my desire seemed fundamentally different. There wasn’t anything sexual about it; it was all about admiration and devotion. My crushes on women tapered off as I got my first serious boyfriends in high school, and I laid the thought of same-sex attraction to rest.

But after two years of long-distance college relationship, I found myself single again. Faced with the prospect of dating and hooking up, I started thinking vaguely about women again. I told myself that in the right state of mind (slightly intoxicated, somewhat horny), I could see myself hooking up with someone who wasn’t a guy. But this was all theoretical, until I actually tried it a few months ago. And I liked it. A lot.

Since then, I’ve opened myself up to the idea of desiring women, of not discriminating based on gender when I’m attracted to someone. And lo and behold, that voice in the back of my head telling me to reconsider has only gotten stronger.

Still, I didn’t want to label myself. How could I say I was queer when I hadn’t actually slept with or dated anyone who wasn’t male? On the other hand, denying this part of myself seemed like lying, not to mention furthering the invisibility of the substantial non-straight contingent of people in the world. I lamented this to my friends, many of whom are LGBTQ. After agonizing over my options for a few minutes, one of my best friends, who’s also gay, interrupted me.

“Rachel, our tent is small enough as it is. You’re an awesome person, and we’d love to have the company.”

I began to speak openly about my experiences with women. Because I go to a liberal arts college in Washington State, no one really batted an eye. I thought about coming out, but it seemed contrived. I wasn’t sure how to label myself—bisexual reinforces the idea of a gender binary, and queer seemed inaccurate given my limited experience. It’s the closest thing I have, but I ultimately decided that even coming out as “not-straight” was worth doing. So here we are.

I have benefitted from and will continue to benefit from straight privilege. Most of the relationships in my life will likely be with men, because I’m more on that side of the spectrum and because it’s what I’m used to. I have the option of folding myself back into the niche that society wants to carve out for me, and to do so wouldn’t be impossibly difficult. I could forget about this whole queer thing.

But I don’t want to. I know many LGBTQ activists have staked claims on the fact that their sexuality wasn’t a choice, and that science has suggested some portion of our orientations might be coded in our genes. I’m declaring the opposite. I’m choosing to be this way, because it makes me happy. I don’t know where I’ll end up, what experiences the world has in store for me. But I know that I’ll live better for keeping that door open.

Six stories from the borderlands

One short week, spent sleeping nestled between mesquite bushes and barrel cactus, driving nearly impassable dirt roads by day, and here I am back in Tucson. I have ideas and issues and ideology to wrestle with, and if you’re at all interested in immigration or politics more generally, you’ll have a lot of reading to do in the next few weeks. But for now, while I’m still here, I wanted to share a few short stories from the Arizona borderlands.

1) I meet a man in Nogales. Not a man, I suppose—he’s more or less my age, though substantially taller. Sarah introduces me to him, saying that he’s from a town near my college. We talk for a minute—I’m always excited to meet people who have heard of Walla Walla, Washington. I ask him a few questions about where he grew up, and we part ways.

Later, Sarah tells me that he grew up near me, but was deported last year—caught in a traffic stop. He has no legal way of getting home, no means of re-entering the U.S. I cringe at the thought that in a few days, I’ll step onto a plane and be back home in a matter of hours. There’s a bitter taste in my mouth for the rest of the afternoon.

2) I find myself cooking dinner with a group of anarchists. It’s much like cooking dinner with any group of young people. We have the radio cranked to play the latest in terrible pop music, and we relax into the ease of self-deprecation while waiting for the onions to brown. Any time our limited camp kitchen resources create a challenge, someone feels compelled to blame hierarchical systems of oppression.

“You guys, the patriarchy is burning the quesedillas again.”

Someone else chimes in. “Fucking patriarchy ruins everything.”

We all laugh, and someone suggests adding noodles to the soup. I’m not a huge fan, so I cross my forearms in front of my chest—a block. It’s used in consensus circles to indicate irreconcilable disagreement with something being proposed. Here, though, we’ve resigned ourselves to the irony of having a trip run by leaders (or “facilitators”) who don’t believe in hierarchy. The noodles go into the soup. I have a bite, and find to my surprise that it’s not so bad after all.

3) Walking, I notice suddenly that the signs are all in Spanish. I turn to my right.

“Sarah, are we in Mexico?”

She nods.

I’ve walked into Nogales without being asked to stop, show my passport, prove my citizenship or answer questions about my intentions.

On the way back stateside, standing in line, I snap pictures of the trucks lined up and waiting to enter. A Customs and Border Patrol agent snaps at me, telling me to stop. I apologize, saying I didn’t know. I assume this is the end of it, but I reach the front of the line. The man waves me forward and takes my passport.

“What were you taking pictures of?” he demands.

“Signs, the trucks…nothing much.”

I shrug, hoping my casualness will deflect his concerns about homeland security, but it doesn’t work. He motions for me to show him. I turn the screen on.

“You’re not allowed to take pictures of the port,” he tells me, shaking his head. I wonder what I look like to him, greasy hair pulled back into a knot, Chacos covered in Mexican dust. I pause, waiting for him to say something, but he doesn’t. I ask if I need to delete the photo, and he says yes.

The first one is of a sign—no agricultural products may enter the country. He doesn’t check for agricultural products in my backpack, but he makes sure I hit the delete button twice. The next photo shows two trucks under a sign that says “open” in green lights. I hit delete. We continue this for twenty images until I reach one of the border wall, framed by construction work.

“The wall is okay,” he tells me grudgingly. I put my camera away, ask if he needs anything else, and walk back into my country.

It didn’t occur to me until after I’d crossed that I could have refused. It didn’t occur to me until later that night how low the stakes are for me when I choose to cross a border.

4) The two Border Patrol agents are joking with each other, but I can barely hear them over the rattling of chains. To my left are forty or so detainees—people picked up near the border in the last few days. They’re here in court to plead guilty en masse to criminal offenses—entering the U.S. not through an authorized port, re-entering the U.S. after being deported. Six at a time, they go up to the microphone and the judge questions them.

“Are you a citizen of Mexico?”

Sí.

“Were you found in Arivaca, Arizona on the 22^nd of March of this year?”

Sí.

“Were you previously denied admission, excluded, deported and removed from the United States on April 2 . . .”

Sí.

And together, as a group: Culpable. Culpable. Culpable.

“All guilty,” says the translator to the judge.

Those six file out, and another six are up. Some of them were previously deported earlier this year. I can’t imagine making the journey through the desert twice in a lifetime, much less twice in one year. Those who have never been deported before will be back on a bus to Mexico this afternoon. How many of them will try again? How many of them will end up back here?

5) Heading back into town, we pass through a Border Patrol checkpoint. They’re stationed strategically throughout the Southwest to pick up migrants who have survived the desert. We roll down the window, and he sticks his head in the car.

“Everyone a U.S. citizen?”

Marcel, our driver, says no, he’s German, and starts to hand the man his passport. The agent glances at the cover, doesn’t open it, and hands it back.

“I’ve seen all I need to see,” he says to our four white faces. “You folks have a nice weekend.”

6) We’re out on water drops, delayed a few hours because I noticed the car needed gas right before we’d reached the remote washes where we put supplies out. It’s our second stop on the route, and each of us carries a gallon of water in each hand. On the caps, we’ve drawn hearts. The sides say Suerte or Buen viaje in black marker.

We follow the migrant trail, but when we get there, we find almost a dozen full jugs of water. The Samaritans have been here recently. I tell myself it’s a good thing that the water isn’t being taken, hoping that it means people don’t need it, not that they aren’t finding it. We rearrange the jugs, placing them directly on the trail, since the coyotes don’t always let people stop to grab supplies when the groups move at night. On the side of one, in pink marker, is a wish: Hasta un mundo sin fronteras.

Until a world without borders.

Selling out to investment banks

Most of the students I know at Whitman want to go save the world. We’re a liberal arts college made up of idealists, future Peace Corps volunteers and academics. I’ve always sort of pictured Whitman as a place to train the next generation of college-educated small organic farmers, but there’s something to be said for health insurance and being able to pay off student loans. I’ve spent the last week in New York City talking to Whitman College alums working in tons of different careers—law, media, finance—and it’s been fascinating to see how people explain their career choices to us, and to see so many Whitties living and working in a city that’s about as different from Walla Walla as you could reasonably get.

One of our first appointments was with an alum who does private baking for Merrill Lynch. He deals exclusively with clients who have at least $25 million in assets. He came to the U.S. and to Whitman as an immigrant on a full scholarship, so he’s been incredibly happy to be so successful in his professional life.

We asked him what he thought about his job. He leaned back in his chair, arm angled against his side, and thought for a minute.

“We don’t really produce anything. We’re capital allocators,” he told us. “I struggled with it for a few years—what am I really accomplishing here? Making rich people richer?”

Ultimately, he goes back to the fact that he has a dynamic, rewarding career. He also said that the wealth earned by the rich often goes back to philanthropy efforts, so in a sense, he’s making the world a better place by allowing more charity to take place. Still, I got the sense that he struggles to reconcile his beliefs with his work.

“I do love my profession, but if I didn’t have to do it, I wouldn’t do it,” he told us. He said he had to do it to pay the bills, which there are a lot of.

Our Goldman Sachs guy was much less apologetic. He’s a vice president in merchant banking—not the division that was responsible for the collapse of capitalism, as he told us several times. He said he loves the challenges he faces at work and the culture at Goldman. He downplayed our concerns about the long hours, acknowledging that sometimes he has to stay late (until 2 or 3 a.m.), but he’s usually out of the office by 8 or 9 at night. I thought about that for a while. I’ve always told myself that I would never get a job where 60 hour work weeks are the norm and 18-hour days are sometimes a necessity, but I don’t think that’s really true. I can’t imagine loving banking enough to do it for most of my waking hours, but I would spend that time on writing or reporting in a heartbeat.

I asked him if there are any social or environmental responsibility guidelines that Goldman uses to screen potential investments. He said that the firm takes those things very seriously, and that they wouldn’t invest in a company causing serious environmental damage. I asked him to what extent that’s really true.

“You’d invest in Exxon-Mobil or Apple or Nike, right?”

He paused for a second, then acknowledged that yes, they would. But he added that there had been investment deals which had been stopped because of environmental concerns. The cynic in me says that any efforts to avoid environmental damages stem purely from a profit motive. If your company is dumping toxic waste everywhere and is eventually forced to pay for clean-up, the value of your assets goes down. I don’t fault him for this, really. I was trying to get at something I struggle with a lot. I understand that investing allocates capital in a supposedly “efficient” way and allows for business creation, economic growth and jobs, but I think there’s a fundamental tension between profit-motivated investing and environmental/social responsibility. A conservative or moderate (and really, most liberals I know as well) would say that the problem is externalities, and that if we figure out a way to make environmental liabilities show up on a P&L, we’ll make that investment machine a vehicle for environmental good. But I’m not convinced it’s a reconcilable problem.

The point of the trip is to network with alums and get a sense of what careers are out there in the world. We’re able to ask them questions about their work, ostensibly to figure out if we might be interested in working in a similar position. Since most of us are bleeding heart liberals with no desire to be in investment banking, we asked them their thoughts on the Occupy movement instead.

Both of our guys said they absolutely supported the movement’s goal of reducing income inequality. I found this interesting, since the original Occupy contingent wasn’t really about that at all. The 99% rhetoric is so ingrained in our national consciousness now that it’s easy to forget Occupy’s birth was with the Adbusters folks—a contingent of anti-capitalist anarchists who wanted to criticize the most obvious and extreme example of soulless capitalism: investment banking. Income inequality is a symptom of what they see as a much larger problem, but they’re not really into reform, because the whole system is rotten.

Our Merrill Lynch guy was more strident in his support of the protests, talking about the importance of equal opportunity and how much he believes in the American Dream, even though he knows it’s gotten harder to move up since he did it. Still, he thinks Occupy hasn’t accomplished much.

“It has high hopes. I don’t think it accomplished anything,” he said. “I think it sort of failed to do what it was going to do, which was create a more urgent environment for our country to rally around. . .”

He also said that he thought the movement was too fragmented and disjointed to do much that was practical. Our Goldman guy echoed this sentiment, saying that he agreed with the goal of more equal income distribution, but thought the movement was too theatrical in ways that detracted from the point.

Most interestingly for me, Merrill Lynch guy said that he absolutely considers himself to be part of the 99%. I’ve thought about this a lot as well—can you affiliate with others across class lines effectively? Whether or not he’s technically part of the wealthiest 1% of Americans, I have no doubt that his life is much more closely aligned with that crowd than it is with the single mother working two minimum wage jobs to try to put food on the table for her kids. Still, I’d rather have a fabulously rich guy who cares about those below him than one who’s indifferent. He said most of his colleagues aren’t like this, and that politics isn’t something you discuss at the office. We asked him if he would ever consider bringing it up, but he said it wouldn’t be possible.

These meetings reminded me how easy it is to become complacent, how easy it is to convince yourself that the work you’re doing is enough. I’m not criticizing these guys’ individual career choices, though they’re not choices I would make. But talking to them reminded me that whatever I end up doing with my life—journalism, activism, food policy—I need to keep the end goal in mind. Another Whittie we met with—a lawyer at a global firm that represents banks, sovereign nations and a bunch of other important actors—said that he didn’t think the work he was doing was actively making the world worse, but that there’s a huge difference between that and actively improving things. There are a ton of things I want to do with my life, but while I navigate that, I need to make sure that I’m true to the values that got me there in the first place. I’m sure I’ll become less radical as I age and settle down (though I’m still hoping not), but I want to check in with myself about why I’m doing the work I’m doing regularly. Because if whatever it is isn’t working to fix something that’s wrong with the world, I’m in the wrong profession.

Vegan month: the official verdict

My vegan challenge has been over for a few weeks now, but the usual chaos of school and being a reporter have prevented me from writing something about it. My apologies. Without further ado, here’s what I learned from a month of eating only plants. (Ok, plus a few food additive chemicals. No one’s perfect.)

The most surprising part of vegan month was that it was pretty damn easy. I’ve always heard vegans say that giving up eggs and dairy isn’t a huge deal, and I’d never really believed them. My twelve years of vegetarianism have largely been spent convincing die-hard meat eaters that it’s not that hard to go without. Still, something about the pervasiveness of dairy and eggs in our food had me convinced that going vegan is a challenge on an entirely different scale. Once I got in the swing of it, though, it wasn’t that hard. You do have to be more vigilant about what you eat, but I found that doing so is actually a pretty rewarding and healthful process.

One of the awesome things about being vegan was that it got me reading food labels in the grocery store. There were many times I picked up something to read the ingredients and double-check that it was vegan. Often, the item in question wouldn’t have any animal products, but would be full of oils, chemical additives or something else that made me pause and think. There were a lot of junk foods I ended up not buying, not because I couldn’t eat them, but because a closer look made me realize that I didn’t actually want to.

Another health benefit came from the challenge of finding vegan junk food. While it’s not that hard—potato chips and French fries are totally allowable—vegans are definitely pushed away from many of our worst offenders, like ice cream. I’ve noticed that gatherings with excessive amounts of junk food are a hallmark of both American culture and college life. Meetings, newspaper production nights and the like are often accompanied by a smorgasbord of pizzas, cookies, brownies and other sorts of sweet, fatty deliciousness. Most people eat a ton in these situations because they’re stressed and the food tastes good. Most people who pig out on junk food have eaten plenty of calories for the day—the junk food is a completely empty addition to the diet that isn’t nutritionally or calorically necessary. Because I couldn’t join in the pigging out, I ended up steering clear of a lot of excess food that I otherwise would have eaten. For me, this was the biggest benefit. I wish I could say that vegan month made me better about this, but since I’ve stopped being vegan, I’ve more or less returned to my usual cookie-inhaling ways.

Of course, not everything was perfect. My largest source of frustration with being vegan was that I became one of those people: obnoxious hipsters who go to the local sandwich place and stare pensively at the menu board for ten minutes before asking, “Do you guys have anything vegan?” I did this once and immediately hated myself so much that I swore off any further dining out, making an exception for Walla Walla’s relatively new vegan café, the Garden. I attended potluck brunches with friends and forgot to eat beforehand, an omission which left me lightheaded as I tried to walk home after a meal of orange juice and cantaloupe slices. I found myself turning down pastries offered to me by a visiting alum and realizing that there’s no way to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t, I’m vegan” without sounding pretentious. This, of course, is about cultural associations with veganism rather than the diet itself. But the further you remove yourself from what society considers “normal” eating, the more you open your choices up to scrutiny.

The fear of being judged as a pretentious hipster and the difficulty in finding places which served vegan food made me more proactive about cooking meals. I planned days in advance, making giant pots of soup on Sunday nights and planning to eat leftovers all week. I solidified my repertoire of a few solid dishes—lentil soup, red lentil curry and chili. (I did manage to adhere almost perfectly to my no-soy-based-fake-meats-or-dairy rule, though I snuck a bite of two of my vegan housemate’s tofu stir-fry one time.) I essentially cemented my understanding of “food” as “home-cooked meal”, which was a welcome transition after spending a semester abroad and having little control over what I ate.

It’s a little hard for me to pin down the concrete effects being vegan had on my body. I got a cold midway through the month—nothing unusual in the winter—but took over a week to recover, which is a long time for me. However, I can’t attribute this to being vegan. It could just as easily have been a particularly nasty virus, the fact that I was overworked and stressed, a lack of vitamin C in my diet or some combination of factors. I definitely lost weight during this month, but a lot of that could have just been me shedding the fat that grew out of the insane quantities of rice consumed in Ecuador. Chester (the temperamental adolescent dragon who lives in my stomach) was also noticeably happier during vegan month than he had been in a while, though I think a lot of that was just transitioning back to the U.S. Though since I’ve started paying attention more to what sets him off, I’m starting to think I may be mildly lactose intolerant.

I  didn’t feel tired or lacking in energy during vegan month, though I did find myself craving food more, especially sweets. I’ve heard that this is pretty common, and that not feeling “full” leads vegans to snack a lot. I think this could have been managed perfectly fine if I’d decided to do this for longer and invest the time in monitoring my nutrients, but since it was only a month, I figured I wouldn’t kill myself if I just played it by ear.

Ultimately, I’m really glad I decided to try being vegan. I came in thinking I’d be miserable, and I found out that veganism is pretty damn legit. My usual rants about individual choice being an ineffective weapon for change still apply, but I think veganism actually can have health benefits, in the sense that it reduces junk food and fat consumption. This is something that could also be accomplished with good self-control, incidentally, but I personally find it harder to stick to rules I made up (don’t eat junk food) as opposed to rules that are part of a larger thing (be vegan). I’ve noticed a few permanent changes in my eating habits since then. I’ve stopped eating so much cheese, and my consumption of animal-product based meals has definitely declined. I’ve renewed my appreciation for lentils and beans as protein sources, and stopped making yogurt my default breakfast. I’m definitely eating less dairy overall and being more conscientious about what I do eat.

My next food challenge is going to be a month without processed foods or added sugar. I’m waiting until the summer, when I have the full bounty of summer harvest at my disposal, and my goal is going to be to eat almost entirely local stuff I buy at the Walla Walla Farmer’s Market. I think that my biggest health problem is my addiction to junk food, and while vegan month flirted with addressing it, real food month will hit it head on. I’m excited to report back.