& a review of their new book Grassroots
Melody Berger
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I really wish I had read Amy and Jennifer's new book, Grassroots, A Field Guide to Feminist Activism, before I went about the business of starting up my own feminist magazine. It would have been so helpful! When I finally did get my hands on it, I dove in thinking, "Phew! Now I'll know how to be a real activist!" But, actually, what these gals point out over and over again is: there is no "right" way to be an activist. Grassroots is chock-full of stories about "ordinary people" who had positive impacts on their environments, simply by figuring out what outlets for change were accessible from their own unique positions in the universe. So, for everyone who is sitting out there thinking, "Um, the world kind of sucks right now, but I have no idea how to make it better," you may want to read this book for inspiration! (and for the killer list of radical resources in the appendix ... you'll notice that the F-WORD is now linked to most of them!)
Back in January, the three of us met up for a couple of hours at Amy's NYC apartment to talk about all manner of feministy goodness. (and I met their babies... who are super cute!)
Melody: Jennifer, I would love to hear more about your experience hosting with HAVEN, I think that's a really great cause.
Jennifer: I no longer host. Once I got pregnant I was just too crazed and sort of stopped, but they have a thriving network of hosts right now so I feel reasonably comfortable with my decision. But, HAVEN was an amazing experience for me and I think the hosts that are doing it now have amazing experiences. You know things that you do - you have a belief system and then you do things and you learn more about your belief system and it kind of deepens it or complexifies it? HAVEN was definitely a situation like that for me around abortion. It's such a nice thing, and such a wonderful thing, and I think, provides a lot of comfort, but just the indignity of having to stay on someone's coach anyway to get this medical procedure...
Amy: and a stranger....
Jennifer: A total stranger! Often the women were women of color, and always low income, or they would stay in a hotel, you know. And the people who were the hosts were usually more middle class; the hosts were often lesbians... so there was this kind of clash there as well that I thought was really interesting. And I thought that it was feminism in action in a way that I wasn't getting from just keeping up with the legal side of the debate. I think I had, in some ways, very generic ideas about who it was that gets an abortion, and why, and what their story is, and what they sound like, and what the whole process is for them...
Melody: That reminds me of something you said in an interview at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club, "we always have that one sob story about, like, 'It was 24 weeks...'"
Amy (left) and Jennifer (right) Photo Credit: Ali Price |
Amy: The other thing that we had kind of been talking about, even before HAVEN came into Jennifer's life, was that, when we talk about the pro-choice movement and pro-choice advocates, we talk about people who work at Planned Parenthood, we talk about people who start their campus organization, we talk about people who are kind of outspoken on this issue in that way. The reality is that we should be talking about patients and people who are accessing these services; and, they're actually not advocates of this, and why aren't they? I mean, the conversation Jennifer and I were having was, "how can we make clinics more like organizing spaces?" When a woman goes in there for a procedure, how can you help her to make those political connections? "Why is it that you can only go to this clinic?" "Why is it that this procedure costs this amount of money?" You know, and start making those connections in the hope that they will then start becoming stronger advocates on this issue. And you can't! I mean, with Jennifer's situation with HAVEN, like, you're not allowed to have those conversations, and it becomes very apparent that you can't have them! You don't want to be like: "so what do you think of Bush's policies?" and...
Jennifer: (leans in with the smarminess) "Are you voting?"
Amy: Exactly!
Jennifer: You can have the conversation, but you can't have it the way pro-choice advocates have it. You can't be like: "OK, and then let's translate this into votes!" And the other thing that Amy and I talk about a lot is the fact that, I don't even know what the percentages would be, but a really big chunk, let's say 40%, but I'm making that up, of people who get abortions are not pro-choice! And even more, probably, wouldn't identify themselves as pro-choice, even if they sort of believe in it.
Melody: That is just so super hypocritical.
Jennifer: Well, I think it seems hypocritical, superficially, but if you talk to the women who are patients, and to clinicians, they tend to say there are so many things that act on you in that decision. It's not just "oh, is it a good time for me to have a baby or not?" Frequently, they never thought they'd be in that position. Never ever ever. So they're dealing with this extreme disjunction between who they think they are, and then what they're doing. Often it completely clashes with what their boyfriend wants, what their parents want, what their religion wants. I don't want to overstate for how many people that's the issue, but I think that for people who are pro-life who get abortions, those are the things that are acting on them.
Amy: I have a friend who is Catholic, and she's always said to me: "You know, I can't be pro-choice because I'm Catholic" and she's always been very dependent on this religious connection, even though she doesn't go to church, and she had pre-marital sex, and, you know, she did all these other things that were anti-Catholic, technically. And, she had selective reduction. She mentioned that to me, and I know that, but she never will talk about it. And at first I thought, "God, she's just in such denial, and that's just so, almost rude of her to not make that connection!" But, I actually think it really challenged her in this way that she's trying to figure out what it does mean! You just hear so many people who say: "I would never do this, or, I could never do this..." and, what people in the pro-choice movement say constantly is: they don't know what they'll do until they're in that situation.
Melody: Exactly. I guess it's kind of hard to commit to just condoning anyone's choice.
Jennifer/Amy: Yeah.
Melody: I mean, personally, I definitely think that everyone should have the right to choose. I also reserve the right to disagree with their choices! But it's their choice, and that's fine!
Melody: The "Ask Amy" column... I was just gonna "ask Amy" (yuk yuk) if you had any fascinating stories that were just really poignant...
Amy: I mean, I feel like I have them all the time. I guess if I'm looking at them as a whole, the fascinating thing to me is how many people end up at feminist.com and "Ask Amy" by default. They don't seek feminist resources, but they google "incest" or they google "job discrimination" or they google "divorce." They kind of google these issues that they're confronting in their lives, or that their families or friends are confronting... and then they end up at feminism. And I kind of always thought that that was a metaphor for feminism, which is that: we often don't wanna see feminism, because sometimes it might mean acknowledging something that's not complete in our lives, or that we're struggling with that we're not quite ready to identify or to tackle... and to acknowledge feminism is to acknowledge the reality of that thing. So, I think there's some resistance. But, I also think that feminism is a place that many people end up at some point in their lives because there are injustices that confront every one of us on a given day.
And then there are tons of personal stories. Like, a woman who was raped got pregnant and decided to have the baby, and then reunited with the rapist when the child was 5 because it was very important for her that the daughter had a relationship with her father. Then, at about age 7, why the woman was writing me was because the daughter didn't want to go see her father anymore. The mother was very frustrated, because she thought "it's so important for her to have a relationship with her father. How can I make her go seek this relationship?" And I was like, "Did it ever dawn on you..." I mean, I literally wrote back, "Did it ever dawn on you that the man who raped you might be raping your daughter??" That sounds cruel to say, but, if a seven year old does not want to do something, there's probably a reason that she doesn't want to do it! So, sometimes I get those emails that are just kind of shocking to me. Then I get other ones that really really challenge me. I mean, that one doesn't challenge me because I think that other men and women can fulfill the role of father. I think it's an emotional relationship not a biological one. So, that one, to me, was not a confusing or conflicting question.
But I did get one from a woman who had been out of work, I think it was 8 months, and she finally got this job offer in this doctor's office. She went in after hours to have her interview with this doctor, and he said: "Great, I want to hire you, but I need to do an exam before I hire you just to make sure that you're healthy." And, she hopped on the examining table and he totally took advantage of her! Then he was like: "Ok, well, I'll see you Monday at work." So, she left and went out to the car, where her husband had actually been waiting in the parking lot, and she was just devastated. And she said: "I know this sounds terrible, but I need the job."
Melody: Oh, God.
Amy: And, I felt for the woman, though! Those are the questions that are really hard. You've been out of a job eight months, you have this job offer, finally... and not having a job is not just "not having a job." I'm sure it's taking a toll on your relationship, I'm sure it's taking a toll on your mental state. And so it's sort of like, I'm not going to fault you if you take that job, I kind of understand it. But on the other hand, I think the more privileged side of me is like, "Why would you take that job? How dare you even consider it?" And so, I think I get a lot of those questions that I realize there's not an easy answer to. Many years ago I used to get so many emails from girls saying: "I'm ugly, I'm fat, I hate my body." and I kind of towed the feminist line for a long time, which was: (saccharine voice) "Oh, that's not true! It doesn't matter what you look like! It's what's inside! You are a beautiful person!" And then I realized- first of all, when I would write that back to people they would, like, never write me back, 'cause I think they could just see through the phoniness.
Jennifer: "You're just like my mother."
Amy: Yeah, exactly! "She's just like that corny gym teacher!" And, so, "Ask Amy" has been a great experience for me because it's made me kind of fine tune some of the things I believe, and challenged me in a lot of my beliefs.
Melody: It seems that there are many well-meaning efforts by older people to help teens, but some of them don't really work because, being as they aren't teenagers, their perspective is just gonna be off!
Amy: Yeah- there's some falseness involved in it, because I think that in an attempt to save girls they end up punishing girls for not being a certain way, or they end up being just as prescriptive to how girls should be. And even if it's not "You should be a slut" it's "Oh, you should be strong." Well, then it's like, "You can only get A's, and you can't ever have sex."
Jennifer: Yeah, it's like the new ideal girl is the one that reads New Moon magazine, and doesn't care at all about fashion and is good at athletics and gets straight A's and plays oboe or something. And, it's like, well, that's just a lot of rules, you know. That's maybe just as bad as being homecoming queen and having the perfect hair.
Melody: It goes back to that whole sense of falseness that Amy was talking about. Instead of saying "this is what you should think about yourselves" we have to say: "well, what do you think about yourselves?"
Amy: Every other year "Scenarios USA" -which is an organization that works with teens- has a story competition, and the winners of the story competition get their stories turned into short films with the help of well-known filmmakers. Watching those films, which are not feature films, granted, there's just a different tone to them than when you watch movies that are made about teens by an adult perspective. And I think "Scenarios USA" just does a really good job, because, everybody else tries to resolve the issues that teens might be going through. They try to show the conclusion, whereas, teens are like "we're in flux all the time!" And the value of these "Scenarios USA" films is that there is no answer.
Jennifer: There was some controversy, actually, because their topic was safe sex or something like that, and one of the girls took an "abstinence only" perspective for her script. And there was some controversy about, well, were they going to allow that. And, it's sort of like, "no, if you're really saying you're listening to what students think, it's valuable to have that out there as a student perspective!"
Amy: Which is where some girls are, and you have to honor that!
Jennfer: Or deal with that, even if we think it's dangerous, we have to acknowledge it.
Melody: So, on Halloween I went to this party that my friends were holding at a club and they had someone there doing body-painting. And it was supposed to be like, anyone could go and have this really great artist paint stuff on your body. But, of course, what it ended up being was a bunch of slender girls getting their boobs painted. Period. Like, that was it! Afterwards I was talking to my friend who is a staunch feminist, and who helped arrange the party, and I was like: "um, excuse me, this is really really awful and not feminist at all!" It was kind of hard for me to be like "well, I totally respect their choices... but I think it's somewhat influenced by the prevalent "Girls Gone Wild" mentality in our culture!" You know, who do we want to rip off their shirts at a party? Well, we want the girls to! The artwork was beautiful, granted, it was beautiful... but it was not body painting, it was boob-painting. I would just like to open the debate to you girls, because, whoa, we've been going back on forth on this one.
Jennifer: Well, I don't think it is "feminist," but I don't think it's "anti-feminist." I think it's just, sort of, neither. In situations like that I think it behooves us just to be able to describe them accurately. We've all been to concerts where there's the drunk girls in the front row who rip their shirts off or show their boobs, going with the whole "Girls Gone Wild" kinda thing. And, I have this reaction of revulsion when they do it! Even though I'm sure I've done something like that before, and know the finer whatever of it. It's still kind of revolting, and it does this weird sort of thing where, it certainly doesn't invite rape, like what happened with the Woodstock case a couple of years ago... but it's still hard to take a really strong supportive position when that's the scenario. It sounds like your friend might be arguing that it's "beautiful" or "empowering?"
Melody: Yeah...
Jennifer: It may be beautiful, but I don't think it's empowering on some sort of universal level. But, it can just be what it is. Sometimes we don't even need to analyze things from a feminist perspective: "is it bad or is it good?" It's just sort of what it is.
Amy: Because, I've been in similar settings that are safer spaces. Like, I remember being at a party at Smith College when I was an undergraduate. And all the women at a certain point were taking off their tops and then it became this topless party and everybody was dancing...
Jennifer: That sounds like fun!
Amy: It can be fun. But then there's also a point when everyone's like, "hey, you two should kiss!" And you're like, "wait, that's not..." It's safer, and I feel like I have more agency to say no in that setting, or say yes if I want to and not feel like that then has to lead to something else. But it is equally kind of like, "what are those women getting out of it when they want to do those things?"
I used to live in this apartment building where I looked into another apartment building that was predominantly inhabited by NYU students. So I used to be really intimate with all the parties they would have out on their deck, and I can't tell you how many times I would watch, like, the three or four girls do the sexy dance... and part of what is so hard about watching that is: you know you've done it.
Jennifer: Exactly.
Amy: But, you also kind of just want to be like, "Don't! Like, why are you doing that?" 'Cause, you don't actually want to sleep with the guys, you just want to turn them on to the point where they want to sleep with you, and then you want to say "no," but why do you want that kind of power anyway? And why are you seeking it through those means?
Melody: And why is this being spun as a new kind of power? I mean, like, that's been one of the only condoned powers for women, like, forever! Um, not new!
Jennifer: Although you don't want, or, at least, I don't want to have a situation where women are made to feel more embarrassed, or more doubtful about everything that they do. So, it's sort of like: we've all been there. We've all done some sort of sexy dance or kissed our friend as some sort of performance for someone, or whatever. And, sex can be very embarrassing, all forms of it, being sexual can be. And that's why I would say that you don't have to make it about feminism, because that sort of implies that there's one liberating way to be or something. And I think in those situations, it's really not that serious, the body-painting thing. Even though I think there's a lot to be said about it, I don't think it's that serious in terms of our rights or anything.
Melody: And feminism is about making choices in the first place, so if you want to rip off your shirt or whatever, then that's fine! But, I guess the whole situation just kind of reminded me of a quote from your first book, Manifesta: "when you find yourself embracing what the patriarchy promotes, it's worth asking yourself if it's really a choice."
Amy: I think that, as much as we live in an empowered state as a result of feminism, we also still live with the burden of a patriarchal society. And so, when you talk to women, "oh, do you wear pants or do you wear skirts?" You may say, "Oh, I love skirts, I love perfume, I love girly things." But, you're still making a choice between masculine things and feminine things. And so, the choices are still limited, but that doesn't mean that you have to judge the people who indulge in those choices. We just have to always continue to open up a greater range of choices.
To learn more about Jennifer and Amy, and the other progressive speakers they represent, visit: soapboxinc.com