The Magazine – July 2011

Original photograph by mrhayaka // Flickr

Letting the sun shine in…

Summer is at last in full swing, and so are we. We begin July with our feet planted more firmly. Our schedule is coming together, and we are picking up new writers. We’re still tinkering with the site, enabling ratings on posts and comments and a front page that highlights content in a more organized fashion.

June saw a great outpouring of deeply emotive entries. We were pleased and outraged, victorious and shaken, in love and alone. The political sphere mirrored our ups and downs, with a nail-biting lead-up to New York state passing legislation to permit same-sex marriages, followed by a similar passage in Rhode Island.

We’re looking forward to more break-throughs and more soul sharing this summer. Join us!

Featured this July…

Beautiful I’ve heard you refer to me as your amazing girlfriend, and I have to admit I’m afraid of not living up to the hype.		Vogue Italia Understands Plus-Size Pay attention, New York. This is how you do it.
I need a breath of Oxygen When I look at “women’s magazines” I see one message front and center, every time: buy.		Pulling at the Strings My therapist says I need to keep a journal, a documentation of how my days go by so that I have a dependable source to look back to.
Eat Cheap Shit: A revolutionary cook Whenever I want comfort food, whenever I think about wanting comfort food, I grab Tarla Dalal’s recipes from an obscure kitchen drawer.		Preventing the Collapse Of My Mental Health I look at my point-of-view of situations in my life, and I ask myself, “Is it paranoia? Or is it real?”
Being Fired Getting fired, for whatever reason, blows. Blows chunks. The news is like a well-placed punch. It can make you reel for hours and days.		Mother’s Milk I’ve just finished watching an episode of a favorite show; and I’m… sad.

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Eat Cheap Shit, an introduction

This is the introductory post for Eat Cheap Shit, my new column about cheap food, sexuality and cooking, and families going broke. May it be the start to a long run of posts about dirt-cheap yet delicious deals.

On Tuesday, I sat with my best friend S as she finished her dinner. She asked if I wanted some, but I declined. (I was broke.)

“Why’s that?” she asked. “What did you spend it on?”

“Food,” I admitted. She snorted.

“What did you eat?”

Well, what did I eat? I ate a sumptuous lunch at Amir’s, a tiny falafel joint on 116th and Broadway. It’s a tiny place that makes you hate the weather; each time someone opens the door, the straight chill freezes everything.

Political Roundup, 5/4/11

Thirty percent of GOP still believe Obama not born in the U.S. — Because some people are just brain dead in all ways but the clinical. Although, I must be honest here — who didn’t see this coming?

Teacher tells 9th grade Muslim girl: ‘I bet you’re grieving’ for ‘uncle’ Osama — Apparently, it makes him feel like a big patriot with a big dick if he calls little girls terrorists and makes them cry.

Mike Huckabee defends comparing Holocaust to debt crisis — Because callous disregard, and anti-semitism never go out of style.

House passes sweeping GOP anti-abortion bill — Because, the war against women is more important than jobs and the economy. Even if your constituents think you’re wasting time.

GOP lawmaker: Fetuses are ‘the most persecuted minority in the world’ — After all, when it comes to defending ignorance, nonsense, and the pursuit of control over a woman’s body who cares that medical science contradicts you?

That’s it for today! I can’t say I hope you ‘enjoyed’ them, since they’re pretty depressing, so I’ll just say goodbye until tomorrow.

“I have sex”

Sometimes, all it takes is that simple admission: “I have sex.”

Our government is afraid of our sex lives. Given their way, the Right and the majority of our current Congress would deny our right to fuck.

According to our current government, sex outside marriage and procreation is a sin. Birth control is a sin. Abortion is murder. Any steps taken towards making having sex healthier and safer is a sin. And as America’s number one provider of reproductive health services, Planned Parenthood will bear the brunt of these hurtful ideological attacks. Tens of thousands of women (and men) who have relied on their reproductive health services will suffer.

If there is one thing that we’ve learned from the previous election cycle, it is that our votes matter. Our rights as individuals and citizens are being taken away. Congress has already come for our reproductive freedoms. Now they will come for our right to vote and hold municipal elections.

It’s our time to push back. It’s our time to tell others that we are sexual beings. We do have sex. We can’t punish ourselves — and we can’t punish others — by allowing our government to enact an anti-human agenda.

Charlie Sheen’s Mysogyny

 

The Disposable Woman – NYTimes.com via kwout

…is tolerated as part of a larger cultural misogyny. Anne Holmes, creator of Jezebel, has an excellent opinion piece in the New York Times called The Disposable Woman.

Holmes demonstrates how Charlie Sheen‘s record of lashing out and being abusive toward the women in his life has been tolerated, even affectionately joked about, by the media at large. Part of the problem, she argues, is the sort of women he’s been involved with.

But there’s something else at work here: the seeming imperfection of Mr. Sheen’s numerous accusers. The women are of a type, which is to say, highly unsympathetic. Some are sex workers — pornographic film stars and escorts — whose compliance with churlish conduct is assumed to be part of the deal. (For the record: It is not.)

Holmes goes on to point out how the exploitation and debasement of women has become a normal part of reality TV culture.

Honestly, there are so many great quotes and arguments in this piece, I can’t possibly pull them all.

Read it for yourself at the NYT.

Tearing at the Roots/ Dec. 2006

Image via Wikipedia

Breathe.  Stop.  Let it sink in.

My room is a mess of small clutters.  Papers, cables, boxes filled to the brim but not yet sealed; never sealed. Could I ever seal them? I’m getting whiny and should stop.

Move-out is in eight and a half hours. Dad will come by with a truck from the store and give me an encouraging hug before getting to work.  I can’t expect much from him, but I can expect something, and it’s more than Mom will offer.

The walls are bare; painted a dusty light-blue, the wall along my bed–at my back–cluttered with small cards, a poster, train tickets.  I should take these down, but I won’t, not yet, not until the very last hour.  I will carry them with me, and these walls, and this dust, and this oppressive air, and the sourness between the woman who is my mother and myself.

In Your Arms, I Am Home

For Fey’s linked post, Waiting, please go here.

Image via Wikipedia

My home is in your arms. My home, is in your arms.  I am at home when I am in your arms, and when you are away I can’t help but be homesick.

How can a person be a home?  How can a person be a home, when a home is walls, and doors, and windows and portraits, and furniture, and so much baggage?  You are my home; you are my furniture, my windows, my doors, and my portraits.  You are the baggage I carry around, waiting to be found, by you.

The heart of it is that I’ve been lonely, a long time now.  Maybe I’m hungry, or horny; I could say I’m tired.  And, sure enough, all those things would be true.  I’m listening to a song that breaks my heart, because feeling my heart break is the best I can do.  It’s the most I can manage.  It’s hard to simulate solace when there’s no one around.

A question of freedom

Flickr, via Jim Linwood

My friend S’s hit a rough patch. On our way home from the city today, we talked a little about it. Then, she asked me a startling question:

“Which would you rather have,” she asked, “personal freedom, or financial freedom?”

I asked her what she meant by that.

“I have financial freedom,” she said, “and you have a certain degree of personal freedom. You can go and do what you like during the day when your folks aren’t around to interfere.”

“I guess I do,” I said, staring out into the highway abyss.

S has financial freedom, but work eats up her time. She’s on call throughout. I don’t have those constraints. I can tell work to fuck off. And often, I do.

But I don’t have any money. I am always at my parents’ beck and call. They can trash me, my things, denigrate me in public, and use me as a whipping post. They interrupt me constantly. On weekends and the days that I are home, I feel so miserable I can’t think. I have to beg for permission to do anything.

Often, my privileges are taken away on a whim. I am subject to an insane level of scrutiny because I live at home. I earn enough to have small bursts of spending money, but not enough even to afford a small room to myself, and that is how I fund my daily activities. Anything beyond that, I can’t help myself.

So what kind of life do I prefer? Uncertainty but day-to-day contentment? Or security and general dissatisfaction?

I often thought to myself that I’d trade the small bursts of free happiness for a life of security. Now, I’m just not sure what I want. I have no idea how to answer that question.

However, it’s made me think a lot about my daily activities and how I live my life. I know I’m unusual. I fill my time with people that I like and do things I want, but I have very little material freedom.

*

Planned Parenthood is not synonymous with abortion

Image via Wikipedia

Planned Parenthood has a really descriptive name. It does exactly what the name implies. We don’t talk much about “family planning” these days, and we should.

Before modern science kicked in, conception was, for the most part, a game of roulette. Folk remedies and leather condoms weren’t nearly as effective as people wanted them to be, but they kept trying. All it took was some observation and life experience to see how inconvenient–and dangerous–the lack of control could be.

When a woman gives birth too young, she and the child suffer. (18 is the minimum recommended.) If she has children too close together, she and both children can suffer. Doctors and midwives knew these things; parents knew them. But what do you say to a couple who have had the number of children they want? Spend the rest of your lives together in separate beds? More babies happened.

Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood’s first president, was a remarkable woman who saw the effect this had on people, particularly poor people and women. She also saw this suffering as, at best, unnecessary. At worst, it was a deliberate means of keeping women in subjugation.

In 1912, after a fire destroyed the home that William designed, the Sanger family moved back to New York City, where Margaret went to work in the East Side slums of Manhattan. That same year, she also started writing a column for the New York Call entitled “What Every Girl Should Know.” Distributing a pamphlet, Family Limitation, to women, Sanger repeatedly caused scandal and risked imprisonment by acting in defiance of the Comstock Law of 1873, which outlawed as obscene the dissemination of contraceptive information and devices.

An update

Dear Subterfuge Readers,

First of all, thanks for hanging with us during the past month or so. We’ve been slow on production and then we hit a controversy that required some serious triage and re-evaluation.

We’ve taken the time off to relaunch, regroup, recruit new writers, and examine the overall outlook of our magazine. We’re proud of the work we did in the interim and know that we will continue even stronger than we left off.

Here are some of the changes we’ve made:

1. A New Home We’ve been considering this for a while, and had full intention of doing it during January, but we somehow didn’t get around to it until now. A week off helped, too.
2. A New Editing Policy We always wanted to incorporate a wide range of views into Subterfuge. We support many feminist issues, but that’s not all we do, and we don’t want to shut out anyone who is uncomfortable with the label. We also know that editing incoming work takes time, which we don’t always have.So, we’re going to try an experiment.

   We’re calling it Subterfuge Peers, a closed site where writers can put up their drafts and everyone in the community of Peers can read and offer their thoughts. Our goal is to create pieces that are not only well-written and worthy of publication, but well-rounded. If you have a question, raise it. If you know of conflicting information, post it. Writers are challenged to expand their knowledge and perhaps even change their opinions, or at least acknowledge the arguments against them.

   Anyone can apply to join the Peerage. We are most concerned with your ability to give constructive criticism, conduct conversations, and debate in an adult manner. You don’t have to be a professional editor, nor do you have to respond to everything. We’d just like your opinions.

   Anyone who wants to write for Subterfuge will be required to submit their work to the Peerage.

3. New Comments Policy Commenters should do us the courtesy of treating us like rational, thinking beings capable of making mistakes, and of admitting them. We will do the same for you. Comments that insult the poster (or another commenter) will not be responded to by Subterfuge members/writers.Note: Snark is allowed. We love snark. A little friendly snarking is always fun.

We are planning a re-launch on Monday and aim to return to a once-a-day schedule.

We thank you for being with us so far and we look forward to returning to the business of writing again.

Sincerely,
D & F
Your Subterfuge Editors