| | | The latest installment of our cartoon series, Lena Dunham's greatest vanity and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | August 22, 2017 | Letter No. 100 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
I sometimes feel like I should wear a T-shirt that says "Ask me about my adult acne!," because I will talk to anyone, anywhere about it. I will share every remedy I have ever tried (spironolactone and CeraVe are my current fixes), and I will listen attentively to every awkward blemish-based horror story that you can muster. I basically did not have zits until my late 20s, and in the way of youth, I took my clear skin for granted. Then, when I was 29, the cystic, painful bumps started to appear. Then I got pregnant, and zits colonized every open inch of my face. I didn't glow. I throbbed.
It's under control these days, but when it was really bad, I loved talking about it even more than I do now. Partially because it's a bonding experience — having zits and wrinkles at the same time is a universal complaint. But mostly because I wanted everyone to know that I didn't think I was fooling them: I was anxious about them seeing and judging my acne, and so I wanted to get out in front of it.
—All of this is to say that I related super-deeply — cystically, you might say — to our own Lena Dunham's essay about realizing her skin is her one real vanity, and what it felt like to have a nasty flare-up of rosacea. Also in this issue:
—In light of the recent act of racial terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia, we are re-running Francey Russell's piece from June 2016 about the movement for lynching memorials. The United States has never adequately faced its history of genocide, and memorializing victims of slavery and lynching would be a step toward acknowledgment.
—We have the return of our comic Lesbian Cattle Dogs, who are somberly burying an edible friend.
—Antonia Crane has a really warm, touching piece about telling her mom that she was working as a stripper.
—And finally, the Humane Society's Michelle Cho alerts us to the PAWS Act, which is currently before Congress. Did you know that a lot of domestic-violence victims have to leave their pets behind? The PAWS Act could help them keep those animals close.
Much love to you Lennys this week — with the constant horror of the news cycle, we're gonna need it. I hope the rest of your August is filled with serums, oils, and clear-ass skin.
Xo Jess Grose, Lenny editor in chief | | | | | | | | | | | | My Perfect Fucking Skin | | | | By Lena Dunham | | |
I really thought I never cared what I looked like. It's not that I don't have fun with style, with hair color, with fashion and frippery: I've embraced a spontaneous bleached bowl cut or an even more spontaneous array of meaningless tattoos. But the basics of bodily self-consciousness — being hyper-critical about my undulating belly, my wide ass, my off-white buck teeth, my whatever being too whatever — have mostly passed me by. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of horrifying qualities (codependency, pendulum moods, a propensity to call everyone "sweetie baby"), but in this one area, I've been granted some golden pass.
I held onto this preposterously high self-esteem even though, when I was a teenager, a solid effort was made to take this confidence right from me and cut me down to (sample) size, From the anonymous phone call junior year ("You're fat and you deserve to die") to the litany of images of perky teen princesses with a minimum of belly fat and a maximum of boob, the exact inverse of my proportions, it often felt like the world's message was: "You are too messy, too much, spilling into space that isn't yours. How dare you leave the house without trying harder?" In response I just went further, wearing miniskirts as crop tops and pearls as tiaras and ceasing entirely to brush my hair.
When my career started, it was like high school on terrible speed, each tweet (and even some cogent reviews of Girls by respectable critics) taking pains to point out the ways in which my body wasn't TV-ready. But despite the vitriol and regularly fluctuating 30 pounds, I enjoyed a bright, beaming sense of self-love. Some of it came from the women who told me what I was doing mattered to them, women I'll always feel grateful and connected to. But more of it came from looking in the mirror and being like "Damn, son." As a member of a public couple, I laughed when I read comments like "He's a rock star. Doesn't he know he could date a model?" Because they didn't know my secret: I AM a model. As Jenni so elegantly puts it, I am Rihanna to myself.
But chronic illness — endometriosis, along with an accompanying autoimmune disease that gives me chronic joint pain and fatigue — has made my body far less predictable to me, and in far more frightening ways than whether I'll wake up able to fit into my high-waisted jeans. And a few weeks ago, a course of steroids to treat a massive flare of joint pain and instability led to rosacea's appearing overnight, making me look like a scary Victorian doll, two perfect pink circles painted on her porcelain face. "It's actually pretty cute," my mom said. "Very '90s editorial fashion!"
Then, after a long, sweaty night shoot in which I was covered in strange makeup, I washed my face to reveal that the rosacea had become hundreds of tiny pimple-blisters that covered me from forehead to neck. The sound that came from that hair and makeup trailer was similar to when the bitch in the Craft starts losing her hair in the locker room. Terror, rage, and piteous sadness. My face burned, but not as badly as my pride.
Now, let's back up a moment. I had pimples as a teenager. A bunch of 'em, enough that I used Proactiv (probably once a week) and slathered my face in Wet n Wild concealer. After my first camera test for Girls, a producer gently pointed out we'd need to do some visual effects work to cover an angry red zit. I hadn't even noticed. For my 24th birthday, Jenni introduced me to Terri Lawton, a woman we call "the face witch" because of her incredible ability to discern and cure all skin ailments, and most emotional ones too. She promptly handled my acne, and I got compliments left and right on my pure, blemish-free skin. I appreciated it, but at the time, I hadn't been particularly shaken by my other reality.
But I got used to having good skin over the years. Showing up to photo shoots and being told, "You barely need any makeup at all!" Having other women ask my secret (maybe she's born with it, maybe it's Terri Lawton.) Gradually I got lazy about my products, but my skin remained dreamy, even through hormone fluctuations, new medications, and daily, sweaty on-set makeup wear. Sometimes I forgot to wash my face, and I still glowed. It started to feel like a superpower.
Until I found myself 31 and hysterical, in the dermatologist's chair as she extracted infected areas, applied an antibiotic cream, and explained that rosacea is another chronic condition: once the cat's out of the bag, there's no guarantee she's headed back in. The acne on my shoulders and back was also steroid induced, she explained. (I hadn't even noticed the bacne yet. FML.)
I took the news hard, requiring massive text support. I sent Jenni pictures from every angle. I wept in a Lyft clutching my bag of face wash and anti-reddening cream. I told everyone who encountered me over the next few days what had happened, even as Jack swore up and down it was only noticeable if I aggressively pointed at each red-ringed bump. I screamed from the bathroom. "And to think, I just cut off all my fucking hair!"
There are lots of ways I could explain my reaction: Every time chronic illness presents a new and surprising side effect, it's a reminder of what your body won't give you — ease. The word rosacea is also terrible to say. Plus, my face felt like someone had given it a nice, slow sandpaper massage by candlelight.
But I had to conclude it was none of these: I had finally found my vanity. Seven years of being treated in the public eye like a punch line about female imperfection may not have felt like it was wearing me down, but it had actually forced me to rely emotionally on my one area of fully conventional beauty: my perfect fucking skin. They could tag me in a picture of a beached whale. They could call me a bag of cottage cheese. But they couldn't take away the fact that I was able to eat seven slices of pizza, a wine spritzer, and three quarters of a chocolate cake and still look like my face was kissed by sweet, sweet angels when I woke up. I wasn't just mourning my easy skin-care routine or my "No filter? No problem" lifestyle. I was mourning a life raft that had kept me, silly as it was, bobbing above the fray.
I have no idea yet what will happen on this "rosacea journey." My handbag is full of creams and potions, my tummy full of antibiotics and probiotics. I'm going to be swatch-testing foundations and concealers on the regs like an old-time diva (and I'll probably throw in a satin house turban for good measure). But I have been forced to finally mourn the long, slow hit on my self-image. I thought my adolescent attitude, the take-no-prisoners approach to my own look and form, could carry me through the onslaught of critical attention. I thought I could intellectualize it away. But I can't.
What scares me most is that female celebrities with access to skin witches are not the primary targets of this kind of relentless hatred. We've got the resources to deal in every possible way. But there are millions of teenagers applying the entirety of their time, resources, and wit to attacking classmates in painfully inventive ways. I'm starting to believe that speaking this pain aloud isn't just good for my own healing: it allows any young woman who might be watching to understand that nobody is immune from feeling bad about hateful attention.
If it took spelling my pain across my face to admit it, then so be it. I'm oddly grateful. "I don't give a shit" only translates into isolation; it prevents the people who love you from reaching out their hand to remind you of what's real. In the few days after the initial breakout, this cloying kids' song played over and over in my head: "I love myself / I think I'm grand / At the movies, I hold my hand / Ask myself out on a date / When I get there, I'm always late / I'm a nut, tee-hee / I'm a nut, tee-hee / I'm a nut, I'm a nut, I'm a nut …"
I love myself. I think I'm grand. I hear the voices of the Internet when I get dressed. I have a bunch of blister-pimples. All are true. All are fine. None are forever. I promise you.
Lena Dunham can't believe you have to wash your face twice a day. Insane! | | | | | | | | | | | | On the Movement for Lynching Memorials | | | | By Francey Russell | | |
We're republishing Francey Russell's piece about the move to commemorate victims of slavery and lynching in light of the recent white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. There has been unfortunately little progress made in reckoning with America's racist past of late: just as activist Bree Newsome was arrested for removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina's state capitol in the wake of the murderous rampage of Dylann Roof in Charleston in 2015, this month Takiyah Thompson was arrested for tearing down a Confederate monument in Durham, North Carolina. As such, memorializing victims of racial hatred is becoming more important by the day. As Francey puts it, "When done well, memorials can function as the basic units for a counter-narrative, for a new way into the world." To donate to the Equal Justice Initiative, which is working to memorialize victims of lynching, click here.
In his eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine individuals killed in the Charleston massacre last year, President Obama affirmed that taking down the Confederate flag on South Carolina's state capitol "would be one step in an honest accounting of America's history. A modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds." The next day, Black activist Bree Newsome scaled the statehouse flagpole to remove the flag herself. By the time she made it to the top, the pole was flanked by cops, who arrested her upon her descent. She was charged with defacing a monument. Newsome later explained her action, saying: "Every day that flag is up there is an endorsement of hate." A month later, the South Carolina House voted to remove the flag, but the charges against Newsome were not dropped.
Confederate-flag enthusiasts claim it is simply a way of honoring the valor of Confederate soldiers, an expression of Southern pride. But in Columbia, as elsewhere in the South, the capitol's flag was not actually a holdover from the end of the Civil War. South Carolina's governor erected the flag in 1962 to protest desegregation and the civil-rights movement. In effect, the Confederate flag was strategically planted as an endorsement of institutional racism precisely when such institutions were being threatened.
"It wouldn't be crazy not to want to go to Alabama, or Mississippi, or Georgia, or America," says Bryan Stevenson, lawyer, professor, and founder of the Equal Justice Institute (EJI), a legal nonprofit based in Montgomery. "I've lived in Alabama for 30 years, and I still feel anxiety and doubt and insecurity living in that state. I am very worried about being victimized and injured and attacked and menaced because I am Black." Stevenson is deeply invested in thinking about how the United States remembers and symbolizes its history of racism. He is one of the country's most active advocates for the construction of memorials to victims of slavery and lynching.
In February of 2015, the EJI published "Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror." The report documents the history of "racial terror lynching" in a dozen Southern states between 1877 and 1950, and notes that "no prominent memorial or monument commemorates the thousands of African Americans who were lynched in America." In a response to the report, the New York Times editorial board argued that America's history of lynching must be integrated into the national conversation about America's past and present. The board endorsed the EJI's call to construct memorials for the victims of racial lynching as an essential part of the work of acknowledgment.
This past December, in Brighton, Alabama, the EJI raised a memorial for William Miller. A white mob lynched Mr. Miller in 1908. He was a coal miner and a union organizer blamed for the bombing of his boss's home (the explosion was in fact set off by whites trying to undermine unionization). The memorial sits near City Hall, recognizing one of the many mostly forgotten and unrecognized victims of lynching and testifying to an American practice and legacy.
At present, there are about a dozen such lynching memorials across the country which were built independently of the EJI. But the EJI's aim is to organize a coordinated national effort to ensure not only that all victims are remembered, but also that America as a whole comes to understand its history. The memorials are meant to function as a partial remedy to what Stevenson calls the "complete absence of awareness and understanding — just total ignorance — about the legacies of slavery." The Brighton memorial to William Miller is the EJI's first official lynching marker, and there are six others currently in the works. To do justice to every person who was lynched, the EJI will have to erect nearly 4,000 more.
Memorialization is an American tradition. In her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, American-studies professor Erika Doss describes the memorial mania phenomenon as: "an obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly public contexts." There are national memorials to the first and second World Wars, and to Vietnam and Korean War veterans. There is a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, and there is the Emancipation Memorial: built in 1876, funded entirely by freed slaves, with its design overseen entirely by white people, the bronze sculpture shows Lincoln standing and gazing down at a Black man crouching at his feet. There is also the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, which commemorates the Confederate soldiers who died fighting in the Civil War.
But there is no national memorial to slavery, and there is no national memorial for victims of lynching. This is truly staggering, and yet there is little collective sense of outrage. It is certainly not part of the national conversation.
"America [is] a post-genocidal nation that has never owned up to this fact or to the narrative of racial difference that we created," says Stevenson. "We were never motivated to address the narrative created through slavery, because we were never ashamed." Shame does not come easy for anyone or any nation. But, Stevenson thinks, "we've done a very poor job in this country confronting our failures. The American psyche is built on success and triumph. We've come to associate apology or acknowledgment of failure with disloyalty." While the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the country never directly addressed or apologized for the narrative of racial difference that supported it.
The EJI is currently working with town and city councils to build its markers, all of which would be simple, relatively small, and specific to each individual victim. The memorials are small bronze plaques, with the victim's story written in raised gold. Rather than placing such memorials in a special, marked-off area — like the National Mall — these memorials would be integrated into our everyday world. "With the memorials," says Stevenson, "our objective is really to create a different landscape, where every community that experienced a lynching has to own up to that."
In response to increasing public attention on the police treatment and killings of Black people, scholars, academics, and journalists have argued that police brutality needs to be understood through the lens of lynching. In a recent interview in The New Yorker, poet Claudia Rankine said of the spectacle of Mike Brown's death: "The sort of execution-style shooting takes it to this whole other place that starts approaching the language of lynching, and public lynching, and bodies in the street that people are walking around." In a similar vein, philosopher Judith Butler wrote about our "racially saturated field of visibility" in her analysis of the footage of the beating of Rodney King.
For Rankine and Butler, lynching and racism need to be conceived not just as acts or ideas, but as a way of seeing the world and a language for making sense of it. This language is part of what make it possible for trained police officers to see 18-year-old Mike Brown as a "demon," or to make the split-second judgment that 12-year-old Tamir Rice was a threat grave enough to require shooting bullets into his small, child's torso. They make it possible for a grand jury to see no reason to bring such killings to trial.
Consider some of the common reasons given for a lynching at the turn of the century and through the 1960's, social transgressions so minor and unpredictable as to be practically unavoidable: being obnoxious, acting suspiciously, arguing with or insulting a white man, living with a white woman, race troubles, unpopularity, demanding respect. Consider some of the circumstances that led to someone getting killed in recent years: selling loose cigarettes, broken taillight, shoplifting cigarillos, knocking on a door seeking help with car trouble, mental-health crisis, playing with a toy in the park.
For Stevenson, video footage of police killings is crucial for cultivating white people's capacity to see the police as a force of racial oppression forged by postbellum policy. But he also sees a risk. As he points out, "we've accommodated ourselves to seeing violence on screens without being burdened by it."
Just as the killings can be understood as a new form of lynching, so too can the interest in watching be seen as a new version of the documenting and distributing of images of lynching at the beginning of the 20th century. Lynchings have always been spectacles. In response to news stations that played and replayed the police shooting of Walter Scott, professor Britney Cooper wrote in Salon, "Black folks are being treated to an endless replay of this murder on cable news. There is no collective sense that being inundated with video and imagery of these racialized murders of Black men by the police might traumatize and re-traumatize Black people who have yet another body to add to a pile of bodies. Black death has become a cultural spectacle."
By insisting that we remember the history of lynching and let it inform our sense of the present, lynching memorials and other practices of remembrance would cultivate the much-needed collective experience of being burdened by these images. But without such sense of burden and historical understanding, images of racialized murders will not disrupt but will instead simply circulate.
Stevenson often compares America's discomfort with the memory of its mistakes to other countries' efforts to bear witness to their brutal histories. He sees South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as one model for collective reckoning with the moral failures of the past; he sees Germany's commitment to memorialization as another. "In Germany, swastikas are illegal. There are memorials everywhere. You are almost required to encounter the legacy of the Holocaust."
Memorials intervene in the world. They interrupt movement. They reroute our thoughts and bulldoze our feelings. They change what we remember, what we celebrate, how and what we see. Of course, they can also be seen as cheap gestures facilitating collective self-congratulation and the cessation of real social change. But as Bree Newsome recognized, flags and memorials are not merely symbolic or ornamental; they are fully symbolic, the shared symbols by which we make sense of the past and the present. The Confederate flag functions as one such symbol, and a lynching memorial stands as another. When done well, memorials can function as the basic units for a counter-narrative, for a new way into the world.
Memorials transform the landscape. But the EJI is also working to preserve part of that landscape. Besides the markers, the EJI is also engaged in an archival project of collecting soil from every location where a person was lynched in the state of Alabama. The EJI and volunteers take some earth from these sites and place it in jars labeled with the names of the victims. Both the markers and the soil-collection project acknowledge that the past is buried in us. It's shaped this land, sits on the surface of the earth, and runs deep in the ground.
Memorials guarantee nothing in terms of our shared future, and they will never eradicate the tendency to careen toward forgetfulness with respect to the past. But they have the power to trouble that tendency and disrupt our habits. With these markers, the past arches up to meet us, and in the same moment we are confronted with a new understanding of the present and a new sense of ourselves. But only if we are willing, only if we shift some of the burden, and change the way we bear it.
Francey Russell writes about art and film and is a PhD candidate in philosophy. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Lesbian Cattle Dogs Bury Someone | | | | By Lydia Conklin | | |
Lydia Conklin is the 2015–2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. She has received a Pushcart Prize, and her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. | | | | | | | | | | | | Stripped Bare | | | | By Antonia Crane | | | |
When I first decided to strip in the grubby clubs in the Tenderloin, I lived in a tiny square room in a dilapidated Victorian apartment with three other roommates I'd met on Craigslist. My room had a legal-pad-sized window with a view of a drippy gutter. I slept on a borrowed mattress on a dusty hardwood floor.
It was the 1995, pre-tech, perma-fog, home-of–Queer Nation, Food Not Bombs, underground-gay-sex-clubs, needle-exchange San Francisco. I was always moments from getting evicted. Each month, I begged the landlord for one more week, until finally I came home to a note on my door from my roommates asking me to please move out.
I was 25 and scary-broke. I worked minimum wage at a clothing store where I sold my used T-shirts on my lunch break to buy a burrito next door. Most nights I sat in chilly yellow church basements holding hands with other addicts, praying for sobriety, transcendence, and rent control. I'd recently kicked meth and was startlingly alive, even though I was reeling from loss after dozens of my friends had died from AIDS.
My mom knew I'd quit doing the drugs that made me paranoid and skinny because I'd started returning her phone calls again. She also knew about my bisexuality because I'd brought my girlfriend, Austin, home one Christmas. The two of them sat close, sipped whiskey-Cokes, and giggled while Mom's cheeks turned rosy. "I always thought being bisexual would be the best of both worlds," she said. She knew I struggled financially and that I was in AA, too, but she didn't know I'd slinked away from our small town to be a sex worker. Would she be ashamed of me if I told her? Would she stop loving me?
I didn't grow up poor. Neither my dad nor my brother molested me. I was raised on Flashdance and Xanadu in a cow town with lots of pot growers and churches filled with Republicans. A creek trickled outside my bedroom and the dewy clover glistened like Mom's Avon Coco Crush lipstick. Shadows were long and quiet — echoes of endless rain.
My pretty, paralegal mom raced around getting ready for work each morning. The minute her blow-dryer stopped, I ran upstairs to watch her curl her wavy brown hair and apply sparkly bronze blush with a greasy round sponge. When I was late, she'd bark, "Pay attention" and "Hurry up." She pressed a menacing eyelash curler onto her eyelids and counted to ten under her breath, then packed frosty blue eye shadow on top with the ferocity and efficiency of a python swallowing a gerbil. I stood in her fresh Pert-shampoo steam and inhaled. In those moments together, it never occurred to either of us that I'd become a stripper.
As a kid, I slugged it out in tap and ballet classes from ages five to fifteen. Dancing onstage anywhere was simply dancing, wasn't it? The same way a lifelong swimmer seeks refuge in the water — the stage was my habitat. The stripping-as-performance-art aspect of the service industry in San Francisco made sense. I wanted my mom to be proud of me and not worry about me anymore. But every time the subject of work came up, I lied.
I didn't inherit my mom's steadfast punctuality, but my heart still races whenever I leave for work, cramming in too many tasks in too short a time, drunk on the circus of unwarranted optimism — panicked to get to my job at the university, restaurant, or strip club. I inherited her preoccupation with having a purpose. For both of us, work is never simply work.
Before she died from cancer, Mom belonged to several women's organizations. She raised money for underserved schools and bonded with other university women, and she protested corporate-development projects that robbed Northern California of its natural resources. She was pleased to be enrolled in "Black Feminist Thought" and "French Women Writers" classes at Mills College. Could a woman like her support the idea of my doing sex work? Could I?
I knew stripping had selling points other than fast money. I admired feminist artists like Karen Finley and Laurie Anderson, who used their bodies as tools for political change by pouring glitter on their breasts and reciting aggressive monologues about the concept of "dressing up." To test my theory, first, I shaved off all my hair. Then I marched into the strip clubs determined to take down the patriarchy, one lap dance at a time.
My first night stripping was no feminist manifesto. I fought off fingers in the dark like crabs crawling across my rib cage and watched the women work. A blonde with pinned eyes bumped hips with me and said, "Don't make a fuss, just get on the bus." These dancers were not conveyor-belt McStrippers with plastic baby voices. They were athletes who whipped their red braids around and danced in PVC corsets. They moved with aerodynamic strength and flashed their witchy gazes. Great stacks of gifts piled up in the dressing-room corners from their special customers. Some of them had expensive hair and Beverly Hills boobs. Others seemed to have fewer options — single mothers with little education and massive drug habits; teenage runaways with black eyes who whispered, "Do you want to play with the kitty?" Other girls studied textbooks for nursing school or real estate between stage shows. I felt silly and small and fat and cheap and then slowly became a seasoned prowling lap dancer who grew greedier and more alienated with every 4 a.m.
My occupational secret built a stone partition between Mom and me. Even when I enjoyed the fleeting affection and cash from horny strangers, my mom's love was airtight and unconditional. It smelled like her chocolate sheet cake and her horses. My customers tasted like tequila, Marlboros, and antibacterial gel. I couldn't imagine telling Mom about the VIP shower room where I peed on a man in an Armani suit for a few hundred bucks then gasped while a freckled redhead named "Faith" danced barefoot to Jimmie Vaughan's "Dengue Woman."
I learned the power of the pole and the art of making myself small in large and crusty laps. I was making ten bucks a song, then $40, then $60, then $120 for a hand job behind a black curtain. I splurged on organic peanut butter and platform Mary Janes. I moved out of that shitty apartment, then into another one, where I lived alone and bought a motorcycle. And somewhere in the furious hustle, I missed my mom desperately, even when I buzzed with the thought of Holy fuck, I should do this always.
When we talked, Mom asked, "Honey, what are you doing to get by?"
"I get by," I said. Then, two years into my stripping career, she told me she was coming to visit.
I thought about the Lusty Lady, where I danced nude behind one-way glass. I decided to bring her there.
The Lusty Lady peep show was owned and operated by women. My coworkers were poised and educated, fire-breathing, stilt-walking single mothers, artsy women with confidence and cats. They had savings accounts and skateboards. The Lusty Lady kept us on a schedule. We paid taxes and took five-minute breaks every hour. One day, during my shift, my coworker Sizzlean noticed a blinking red light and discovered that customers were filming us without our knowledge or consent. She asked our show director to take out the one-way glass and ban video cameras. Management refused and told us if we didn't like it, we could go work somewhere else. Then I found out other things: the black girls got fewer shifts and couldn't cover a white girl's shift, and a busty girl had to have another busty girl cover her, not a flat-chested, skinnier girl.
My coworkers were not going to put up with it OR leave, so we decided to organize, even though no other strip club had ever done this before. We wanted basic rights, like the right to cover our shifts, and we wanted the one-way glass removed so customers wouldn't film us. We held secret meetings. Had a "no pink" day where we covered our pussies. Collected hundreds of signatures from local businesses. Handed out condoms. Picketed. We fought our labor war and won. I stayed clean.
I told my mom about the plight of my all-woman workforce, and she listened intently, sipping a Diet Coke. I explained stripping as plainly as possible: girls dancing shoulder to shoulder together on a stage. "How long have you been stripping?" she asked.
I told her the truth. She nodded.
We walked into the Lusty Lady lobby like any daughter would take her mother into the office to meet her boss and her coworkers. We squeezed into a corner booth and watched the bodies dancing onstage. I pointed and mouthed "my mom" to Star and Decadence. They grinned and waved. I never showed Mom the Private Pleasures booth, where I gave dildo shows for Enema Man and Speculum Man and the gang of Christmas Clowns (there are details even an open-minded mother doesn't need to know), but I showed Mom that a place normally associated with desecration and exploitation was a place of sisterhood, strength, and self-esteem.
Her daughter was not some broken stripper lost and trapped; she was a member of SEIU Local 790: The Exotic Dancers Union. We daughters were strippers who had support from our city and our community. I was proud. Mom flashed her Dentyne smile and said, "It's silly. And it looks like fun."
Antonia Crane is the author of the memoir Spent (Rare Bird Lit/Barnacle Books, 2014). She is a writer, performer, and instructor in Los Angeles. | | | | | | | | | | | | Victims of Domestic Violence Include Pets | | | | By Michelle Cho | | |
In early July, a three-month-old puppy was found inside a Las Vegas airport restroom with a handwritten note from the dog's owner. The note read:
"Hi! I'm Chewy! My owner was in an abusive relationship and couldn't afford me to get on the flight. She didn't want to leave me with all her heart but she has NO other option. My ex-boyfriend kicked my dog when we were fighting and he has a big knot on his head. He probably needs a vet. I love Chewy sooo much — please love and take care of him."
Chewy and his owner's distressing story is sadly not unique, which is why I want you to know about the Pet and Women Safety (PAWS) Act (H.R. 909/S.322) currently before Congress. If passed, the PAWS Act will enable more shelters to provide emergency assistance to help victims of domestic violence and their pets. Currently, only 3 percent of domestic-violence shelters nationwide accommodate pets — a significant barrier for victims who need safety but don't want to leave their pets behind and in harm's way. Many victims delay their departure from dangerous situations or return to their abuser out of fear for their pet. The PAWS Act will not only expand protections to prohibit interstate stalking and harassment to victims and their pets, the act also authorizes restitution for veterinary expenses and establishes a much-needed national policy on this issue to encourage states to broaden their legal protections for pets in abusive households.
Unfortunately, domestic violence and animal cruelty often go hand in hand. For example, a Campbellton, Florida, man, charged with aggravated assault and domestic violence toward his live-in girlfriend, shot the family's dog twice and beat her with a rifle and later with an ax, until she was dead. In Amsterdam, New York, a man slit the throat of his girlfriend's cat and threw the cat out a window; two days later, he attempted to strangle his girlfriend. Another woman was threatened while she was forced to watch her cat tied to a tree and killed with fireworks by her abuser.
Studies show that up to 84 percent of women entering domestic-violence shelters reported that their partners had threatened, injured, or killed the family pet. For abusers, harming or threatening to harm a beloved dog or cat is a way of exerting control and intimidation, trading on the victim's love for their pet and using that love as a lever to prevent an escape from an abusive and sometimes life-threatening situation.
A brave survivor spoke to the Humane Society of the United States' All Animals magazine, describing her frightening ordeal. For more than a decade, Alongi endured beatings and humiliation at the hands of her husband. A lack of resources prevented her from leaving, and she feared losing custody of her four children. "I was just so scared, I couldn't move," she says. The only rays of sunshine were her kids and a skinny calico cat they'd brought home one day. "She is so spoiled," Alongi says. "Every little twenty cents you give to them, they only think about getting something for Ginger." When Alongi's husband turned his rage on their daughter, she knew she had to leave. She called domestic-violence shelters around Michigan, where they lived, but found "they had no room for the five of us, let alone our cat."
The provisions in the PAWS Act could have helped Alongi, who left Ginger the cat behind when she and her children fled Michigan by bus. Her husband abandoned the house and the cat two weeks later, and a sympathetic neighbor fed Ginger through an open window for nearly two months. "She sent videos, and I could see Ginger getting smaller and smaller," Alongi says. "The children were heartbroken."
A compassionate attorney with the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project took Alongi's case and found her public housing in an apartment that allows cats. A little research led her to the Humane Society's Michigan state director, who made arrangements for Ginger to stay at the LACASA Center crisis shelter before she was reunited with Alongi and her children. These days, Ginger sleeps with whoever seems to need her most that night. At family therapy sessions, the children's moods brighten when they mention her. "I really thought we were saving Ginger when we took her in," Alongi says. "I didn't realize she would be doing this much for the children."
Domestic violence has touched every single one of us in some way. You might be a son or daughter forced to witness emotional or physical abuse by a parental figure, or a worried neighbor never knowing when to call the police when loud voices erupt next door, or maybe you're currently trapped in what seems like an impossible situation and you are desperate to get out. If this is you, please know there is help. And there is help for your pets. Please check out this directory of Safe Havens for Animals programs and safeplaceforpets.org.
No one should have to choose between leaving an abuser and protecting a beloved pet, yet far too many victims are forced to make this very choice. Although Chewy was rescued by a Good Samaritan, countless other animals aren't so lucky. That's why the Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society Legislative Fund, the National Sherriff's Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, the National District Attorney's Association, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and the National Children's Advocacy Center are endorsing the PAWS Act. But we need your help.
Will you take a minute to contact your U.S. representative and your two U.S. senators to urge them to cosponsor the PAWS Act? Calling is the most effective action you can take. Look up your elected officials and reach out. Remember, their job is to represent your interests!
After your call, please share this action form with everyone you know. Because there is strength in numbers, don't be afraid to call or email frequently. The passage of the PAWS Act will undoubtedly save lives.
Michelle Cho is a vice president at the Humane Society of the United States. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
From Lena Dunham + Jenni Konner. | | | | | | | |  |  | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment