I was in New York City over the weekend and went to the Guggenheim to check out Implicit Tensions, an exhibit of Mapplethorpe photos and other photos inspired by Mapplethorpe. I looooooove Mapplethorpe. I loved him ever since that retrospective of his photos sent Jesse Helms into a tizzy in the 1980s. I knew fuck-all about art back then but I knew instinctively that the art world was not best served by buckling under to pressure brought by old, white men. Old, white men can make and encourage great art but they can also display a staggering lack of imagination and that’s no bueno for creatives.

Anyway, after looking at the Implicit Tensions exhibit, my husband and I walked around the rest of the museum. They were featuring pieces from the permanent collection curated by well-known artists I was just sort of skimming what I was seeing on the walls. Then I got to the top level and read the notes from Jenny Holzer’s section. She straight up said that women artists are underrepresented in the Guggenheim collection.

Boom.

I love that Madeleine Albright quote that says “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” The inverse is true as well: there is probably a special place in heaven for women who do help other women. Jenny Holzer did women in her industry a favor by pointing out that they don’t have a big enough seat at the Guggenheim table and probably the same is true at other major museums around the world. If you examine the issue even closer to see how well women of color are represented I suspect things get even more bleak.

I am sure there are studies on this but I’m too lazy to look them up. If I’m wrong, I apologize.

Anyway, it’s certainly not true that women of all stripes aren’t good enough artists to be part of major collections. It’s that men have dominated art for so long that many collectors and museums default to “man as artist” in their thinking.

I find this to be true in publishing as well. Not as a writer – the world of internet content is actually probably more egalitarian than traditional publishing. I find this more as a reader. A couple years ago, I set myself a goal of reading more authors of color. This is not entirely hard to do. You can find books by non-white authors without much trouble. The problem is they all tend to be Important Books that cover Important Themes and Move The Conversation In Important Ways.

While I do enjoy books like that, I also really like murder mysteries and psychological thrillers. Those genres are still pretty damn white, at least as far as the books you find on the new releases shelf at Barnes and Noble.

Are there women and people of color writing great psychological thrillers? Probably. But publishing isn’t highlighting them they way they highlight Gillian Flynn or Paula Hawkins. Readers have to go hunting for diversity in genre publishing and it’s annoying. I want to be able to discover new authors of color by strolling past a best seller display.

As intersectional feminists and consumers of art we have to establish ourselves as the market for under-represented groups in our art of choice. Buy the hell out of movies and plays and books and art and music by the kinds of people who need a boost. Money talks and we are the one with the money in this case. The more we buy, the more Big Publishing and Big Museums and Big Hollywood and Big Theatre will want to sell us.

And I think we should all do this because this is one intersectional feminist act that doesn’t require and sacrifice or suffering. You expand a market for artists and in return you get to enjoy some awesome art, music, plays, movies, or literature. Everyone wins and the patriarchy might not notice that we’re poking holes in it.

I was joking with my husband the other day that “it takes a village to raise a child” really means “it takes a village to build an effective carpool.” As logistical as parenting seems sometimes, that reminds me that all the carpools and activity coordination and birthday party plans are just a form of community organizing.

Feminists are so often screaming “Fuck the patriarchy!” or “Eat the rich!” that we get tied up in the top tier of goals. In the hierarchy of feminist needs, dismantling the patriarchy is self-actualization. (Eating the rich is a joke. Probably.) But at the heart of things, feminists are community organizers and to organize effectively, we need to have the basics covered, We all need to be establishing the lowers levels of the pyramid for ourselves and our communities as well. And that happens in carpool.

The communities we organize for our families show our kids what we believe communities should look like. In turn, they will grow up to organize their own communities that resemble the ones we gave them and, hopefully, improve upon them. That’s what generational wisdom is supposed to do: learn from the past, improve for the future.

Conservative forces who have tried to claim the mantle of traditional family/religious/moral values lament the passing of institutions like moose lodges and bridge clubs and weekly church attendance as if those are the only ways to provide a nucleus for a community. (They also always say “church,” never “mosque” or “synagogue.” But that’s a whole different rant.) In fact, those things can be wholly unnecessary, especially now that we have listservs to share information and ideas without all the bother of holding meetings where you need to show up wearing pants and act like you wouldn’t rather be reading a book in a silent room somewhere.

Every email we send to the neighborhood listserv, every text thread about moving kids from place to place for activities, ever book club meeting where no one read the book, every time we take our families to a march or protest, every time we bring dinner to a friend who just had a baby, every time we plan a canned food drive, that’s community organizing.

If you do that right, you are showing the younger generations what it looks like to join with others in common cause. It shows kids how adults work together in positive ways. It builds a sense of togetherness and responsibility for others.

And all of that is feminist as fuck.

I have a feeling I’m going to talk a lot about abortion here. I cut my feminist teeth on abortion as an issue and you would think I would have been able to move on from it but no. No, the anti-abortion forces in America haven’t moved on so no one else can move on either.

Just look at the shit that’s going down in Ohio. There’s a well-publicized bill making its way down the fallopian tubes of the state legislature there that’s taken some creative liberties with medical realities. You’ve probably heard about it. It’s the bill that demands that doctors try to re-implant ectopic pregnancies in the uterus.

When that idea first bubbled up I got super excited. I thought I had missed a reproductive technology memo that announced that science had figured out how to safely remove a pregnancy from the fallopian tubes and move it to where it can safely continue to develop, if the pregnant person so desires. I mean, how cool would that be? Ectopic pregnancies are no joke. They literally cannot result in a live birth so most of the people who have one are bitterly disappointed at the news that they won’t be going home with a baby in 40 weeks. Then there’s the fact that they’re potentially lethal – if the fetus grows too large it can cause the tube to rupture and result in internal bleeding and potentially death. So even people who don’t want to be pregnant aren’t stoked about the unwanted pregnancy being ectopic because it;’s freaking dangerous.

The good news is there are medications that can remove the pregnancy from the tubes. There’s also surgery that can remove the tube itself. Ectopic pregnancy can be treated to protect the life of the pregnant person.

What is NOT possible is detaching a pregnancy from a tube – or anywhere else it might have settled – and tenderly moving it to the uterus where it can grow to be an apple-cheeked white baby that will be loved by a 1950’s style white couple with two cars, a color tv, and a husband who takes the train into the city for a 9-5 job while the wife raises little Billy and Susie after they were rescued from her fallopian tubes.

At least that’s what I imagine anti-abortion people think will happen.

Anyway, the scenario is science fiction and codifying it into law is stupid.

There are other issues with that bill, too. It uses the term “abortion murder” a bunch of times, according to Imani Gandy, a lawyer and reproductive justice writer who read the whole 723 page bill. The people who wrote this tome really, really, want anything that leads to the end of a pregnancy to be considered murder. And they really, really, want to put everyone involved in the end of a pregnancy in jail. For a long time. They even suggest the death penalty for some instances of “abortion murder.”

So pro-life. Much life loving. Very life-y. Whoa.

Clearly, CLEARLY this is an end run at Roe v. Wade. They want to pass this patently ridiculous law to spark a lawsuit that will go to the Supreme Court where Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will deliver the one gift Republicans have been promising their followers for decades: forced birth for all.

They’re gonna get it.

We’re not going to go full Handmaid’s Tale – at least I hope not – but we are going to see the end of Roe. It is going to happen and if you care about reproductive justice you need to be ready to move when it happens. People across the country are going to find their access to all kinds of reproductive health care turned upside down when Roe falls and the states start doing things their own way. People are going to need help getting everything from an abortion to ectopic pregnancy treatment to IVF as the culture wars rage in petri dishes and fallopian tubes.

There are already boots on the ground working on the structures for post-Roe America. There’s even a book about it written by Robin Marty. Get a copy and read up on what will need to happen next. Find out who’s doing this work and support them however best you can.

This is happening and the longer we sit around crying about what might happen to Roe, the more behind we’ll be in planning for how to rebuild when it comes tumbling down. The time to create a new foundation for reproductive justice in America is now, not after Rapey McKavanaugh takes Roe away from us.

Let’s get to work.

Goddammit. I wanted to write about Kamala Harris but not like this. I had this whole essay idea about Warren and Harris and how they remind me of who I am and the women I know and how stupidly cool it is to keep seeing them in the primaries.

Well, now that’s only half true.

There are a million political dudebros out there prepared to do an autopsy of Harris’s campaign and tell us all the ways she failed but I’m here to remind you that she is the exact opposite of a failure. Think about the numbers:

There have been 52 women Senators in the history of America.

There have been 10 Black Senators in the history of America.

There have been two Black women Senators in the history of America.

One of them is Kamala Harris.

She is still a duly elected Senator who has seat on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary as well as a seat on the Select Committee on Intelligence. Also, she sits on the Budget and Homeland Security Committees.

Kamala Harris will not get elected president in 2020 but she is still one of the most powerful women in America and don’t you ever forget it. And based on the tweet I posted above? She sure as hell hasn’t forgotten it.

Now that we have established that Kamala Harris is still ideally placed to do the work of feminists in the legislature, let’s talk about the work we the grassroots of the feminist movement still have to do.

You think I’m going to say we have to dismantle the patriarchy, don’t you? Ha! Wrong*. We have to dismantle the Democratic Party’s primary system.

The primary calendar that both parties use is patently unfair. This staggered calendar turns primaries into a series of elimination rounds and cheats millions of voters out of the opportunity to vote on the complete slate of candidates. Instead, residents of Iowa and New Hampshire get the full slate of candidates and they decide who the top tier are for the rest of us.

Um, why? Why is that happening? How is that fair?

The short answer is that it’s not fair, just from a strictly numeric standpoint. Two low-population states shouldn’t be getting this much power over the 48 other states out there. But if you take the argument into the realm of demographics then WHOA FUCKIN’ NELLY this is wrong. Iowa and New Hampshire don’t look like the rest of America demographically speaking. Much less diverse, much less representative of the concerns of urban voters.

But these are the judges in what has become the audition round of American Primary Idol. It’s stupid and we need to make it stop.

There is literally no reason apart from tradition to have a staggered primary process and it’s beyond time to change it. The party should adopt a single primary date so all Democratic voters choose among all the candidates at once. Period, end of rant.

Would a system like that have saved Kamala Harris’s campaign? I don’t know. But I do know that her spending all her time at the Iowa State Fair and the diners that litter the New Hampshire landscape meant that people in 48 other states weren’t getting to meet her. And those people missed out on meeting one incredible public servant.

*We do still have the dismantle the patriarchy but dismantling the primary system is good, too.

Back in the 1980s, the AIDS activism movement had a saying: Silence = Death. Perhaps nothing exemplified that more than Reagan’s infamous silence on the issue of the disease that was wiping out a generation of gay men in America.

Or maybe that was the reason for the slogan. The most powerful man in the world was silent when he could have said the word and launched a research initiative that might have sped the path to a cure.

Goddam straight, white, old guys staying silent while the rest of us suffer.

Anyway, this is not a post about AIDS. This is a riff on what I wrote yesterday about the huddled mass of quivering lackeys in the White House who won’t stand up to their misogynist boss when he’s being wildly misogynist right in their faces. That whole thing is stuck my craw, not because it’s happening in the White House but because I know in my cold, dead heart that it’s happening everywhere.

You can find a million article about how a key aspect of allyship is how you act in spaces where those you claim to be allies to are absent. Do you stand up for the marginalized only when they are there to see it? If so, you’re not being a good enough ally. You have to remember people even when they aren’t there.

The White House staff who mumble about how uncomfortable Trump’s misogyny makes them are no different than generations of guys who guffaw heartily at rape jokes and racist jokes and tiresome old homophobic tropes even when they ostensibly know better. But laughing, even fake laughing, isn’t evidence that you know better, folks. It’s complicity with the motherfucking patriarchy.

Yes, that’s right. If you chuckle when your boss or your buddy makes a joke at some marginalized groups’ expense, you are just as bad as he is. (Or she but probably he.)

You don’t get to laugh. You don’t get to smile. Maybe you can sit stony-faced in obvious disapproval but even that might not get the message across. The correct response to any sort of language or action that demeans others is to say something.

I repeat: YOU. MUST. SAY. SOMETHING.

I know. It’s uncomfortable and it makes you less popular and maybe it will make your boss hate you but you know what? All of that is still better than being the person at the butt of those goddam jokes.

Sitting around wishing something would change has never actually changed anything. But doing something a little bit hard, a little bit out of your comfort zone, a little bit risky could change at least one stunted, reactionary mind, it could shut up one geezer with an outdated sense of what’s socially acceptable. And that small change could freshen the air for someone who needs an ally more than you need to keep the peace.

Silence = death. Don’t be silent.

Last week, I read A Warning by that anonymous White House staffer. There’s a lot in it that people who are already paying attention know: Trump is ignorant, incurious, inattentive, impulsive, childish, and cruel. Those things are all features, not bugs, and his base probably likes that about him.

I think what author really wanted us to know is that Trump likes dictators and wishes he were one. He has a real hard-on for the idea of absolute power, with huddled masses of quivering lackeys terrified not to do his bidding.

What I got from the book is that’s exactly what he has in the White House.

Look at the highlighted passage I posted up above this. The staffer talks about sitting in “uncomfortable silence” as Trump spews misogyny in meetings. He even recounts seeing female staff shaken and upset at realizing their boss doesn’t just play a male chauvinist pig on tv, he is one all day, every day.

I think the author wants to be patted on the back for being aware enough of his surroundings to recognize misogyny when he sees it but doesn’t really take PhD level observation skills. Instead, what I noticed is that his uncomfortable silence never made way for an uncomfortable conversation where he said “Sir. You can’t talk about women like that at work. And you shouldn’t talk about women like that ever. You sound like a dickhead.” And even the women around him are too scared to say anything. They all act like – wait for it – huddled masses of quivering lackeys terrified not to do his bidding. WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT HIS STUPID ASS WANTS.

Wanna know why Trump acts like a dictator? Because his own staff treats him like one.

Now, I know they’re all terrified of the man but in some ways. he’s like the patients on that show My 600Lb Life. Their families are all terrified of them and do whatever they want but, as Dr. Now always points out, what are they really going to do? They can’t leave their own beds. Their power is limited.

Trump’s main power over individual people is to make them miserable and uncomfortable. For an example, read this outstanding piece about Lisa Page. He has tweeted her into a state of constant fear. But I bet if you asked her she would tell you she would rather be afraid of Trump because she crossed him than be afraid of not crossing him and letting him go on his merry way, yanking school lunches from poor kids and charging the tax payers millions so he can golf.

Feminists have long known that power is never handed over willingly. Guys like Trump don’t just, like, stop being awful. Someone has to make them. Unfortunately, the huddled mass of quivering lackeys around him clearly aren’t going to be the ones to do it.

So, this fuckin’ guy.

I don’t know this guy. He took exception to something I wrote on Twitter (it was about abortion but that’s neither here, nor there). So this guy, this stranger, this person I have never met and likely never will meet, decided to tell me how to act.

There may have been a time in my life when I would have been cowed by a stranger calling me a bitch – or a witch, as in the case of this delicate flower who bosses strangers around but won’t swear while he does it – but that time is so long ago that I don’t have a firm grasp of it in my memory anymore. If bro-ski here thought I’d feel shame and change my ways, he was sadly mistaken. This story is really about him, and not about me and my witchy/bitchy ways at all.

I always think of an old joke when I want to define the word bitch. “What’s the difference between a slut and a bitch. A slut will sleep with anyone. A bitch will sleep with anyone but you.”

That joke is problematic af because slut shaming is the exact opposite of cool but it gets to the heart of what’s really going on when a man calls a woman a bitch: it’s not about her. It’s about him feeling like she has denied him something to which he thought he was entitled.

News for ya, boys: you’re not entitled to anything.

There is no contract that says the women around you owe you anything. Not sex, not praise, not attention, and certainly not any kind of code of behavior that you want to impose on them. If you don’t like the way women relate to you, find different women whose behavior is more to your taste.

Or look in a mirror and take stock of all the ways you are asking women for things you don’t actually deserve.

Either way, men need to get comfy-cozy with the idea that they don’t get to dictate the behavior of anyone, and most definitely not the behavior of grown-ass women they never even met before.