Homeless Republican Dude on a Bike

Last night I stopped off at a Mexican restaurant in Allen Park, a few miles south of campus. In the parking lot, as I was saying goodbye to the friend I had met there, a guy on a bike paused on the sidewalk nearby and did one of those "excuse me, sir (to my friend), can I ask you for 85 cents?"

Friend gave him a couple of bucks, but instead of leaving, the guy got all chatty. He told us about how his family had lost their house and now they were going to have to move back to Detroit with all the "niggers and crack heads." Then he switched gears and started analyzing us. "Are you married?" "That's a pretty lady you got there." "What is she... a teacher, a professor, a doctor?" (note how the guy did not approach or speak to me directly, rather he focused on my male companion and seemed to expect all answers to come through him)

We laughed and said yes ('cuz I kinda am all three). He asked again what "she" did and I answered him. Then he wanted to know where. Well, here I paused. Good girl common sense screamed "don't tell him where you work!" and so I paused and then less-than-artfully fudged with an "up the road" kind of answer.

He interpreted my hesitancy as fear connected to race, not gender. He teased me for being uncomfortable talking to a black face. Well, then my tongue really tied itself up in knots as I considered what I must look like to him. Huh. I look like a little privileged white chick (I was still in my teaching clothes). Oh wait. I am a privileged white chick. But, but, but... But what? "I'm uncomfortable because you're a man, not because you're black!" Gack.

Anyway, him declaring himself a Republican loosened my tongue again soon enough and I returned to my normal opinionated self, able to overcome my good girl training that taught me to never ever ever speak to a male stranger on the street. I have my suspicions that his political views were designed to show us for the bleeding heart white liberals we are, but it was a funny/sad moment to hear him declare his faith in McCain creating a job for him. And then he rolled away. And I told him to ride safely.

Reflection

Writing about teaching is an odd thing to me. I did it once a while back -- a co-authored piece with a good friend and colleague -- and it was nice because I was leaving the campus where we had taught together and it was our last project together, a way to process the three classes we had shared on Wednesday evenings in winter terms. This time, I did it on my own as a way to process a course that was very much unlike any others I had taught. And thanks to the popularity of civic engagement in higher education these days, an on-line journal dedicated to such topics was happy to publish it.

Squandered Opportunities

He is back. I suppose he never really went away, I have just been doing my best to ignore him.

The self-appointed defender of "men's rights" against the tryanny of "feminazis", is now suing Columbia University for offering Women's Studies courses.

Sure, why not. He's sued everybody else from his ex-wife, to his neighbors, to night club owners.

What truly irks me about this guy is that, I essentially think he is (legally and ethically) right when it comes to his suit over the allegedly discriminatory practice of 'Ladies Night' -- that decades-old and for some reason still-holding-on practice of letting women into clubs for free or a reduced cover charge. He and I certainly diverge on why this practice is wrong (he doesn't like that it costs men more, I don't like that it treats women as a commodity to attract "paying customers" akin to a good sound system or drink specials), but, damn, he filed the suit that feminists should have filed years ago. It should have followed on the heels of feminist-sponsored suits and legislation to remove gender segregation from bars and restaurants in the 1970s, but it didn't.

When I interviewed Karen DeCrow a few years ago (former NOW president and leading feminist lawyer pushing for gender equality in public space... including both ending restrictions against unescorted women in bars and adding baby changing stations to men's restrooms in public buildings), I asked her about Ladies Night. She agreed it was discriminatory toward men and only furthered second-class status for women. She said she would absolutely file suit on it, if a male plaintiff approached her. I remember her having hopes for a nice young college man from nearby Syracuse University... she had talked to a few about it even... but the men feared that they would look ridiculous for making a fuss. So nothing happened... except that opponents of feminism, namely a person who seems to have no grasp about the ways in which feminism is about non-discrimination and equality for many (not just women) and not about empowering women through disempowering men, have taken control of the issue for their own anti-feminist crusade.

Miss Nude Michigan

I've been writing like mad on the porn project lately -- a look at neighborhood and feminist organizing to move adult businesses out of neighborhoods in South Minneapolis. They wanted to free up the corners of the commercial strips abutting their neighborhoods so that when local folk -- particularly women -- walked by they would not be harassed, grabbed, or mistaken for prostitutes.

I was thinking about this a bit in terms of my own city when I took the kids to the Crossroads Summer Festival on Friday. O and I rounded the corner onto Washington Street from Pearl Street and there on Deja Vu's marquee was "Congratulations Miss Nude Michigan!" Firstly, I was amused. Go ahead. Think of how to explain to a 6 or 9 year old why someone would crown a Miss Nude Michigan and why a theater would celebrate it. Silly humans, we are.

Anyway, this juxtaposition of the city's free on-going summer music festival and a strip club has got me to wondering. Why doesn't anyone make a fuss (especially considering how hard some people -- like those in S. Minneapolis in the 1980s -- worked to get rid of just these types of businesses)? Is this the part of the city that downtown business owners (who fund the festival) want to show off?

There are several things going on here, no doubt. The street is in the center of downtown, but just off the main drag, so it can be closed every Friday without creating traffic issues. The drug and prostitution trade of the city are not located there (go around the corner and up the block to the bus station for that). The owners work very hard to promote their club in conjunction with a piano bar and sports bar, all of which make up, according to their radio commercials, the city's "entertainment district." Also, from what my scouts tell me (rather than link to them, I'll let them chime in in the comments section, if so inclined), this club is pretty mild, friendly, and clean compared to what we might have. Finally, some local residents take pride in our seedier side as something that sets us apart from the "snooty" college town to our west.

For all of that, what is sticking my mind as I compare my city today to South Minneapolis "back then" is the trajectory of the larger area. Even though my city's downtown has plenty of open storefronts, a hodge-podge of old (hair salons, liquor stores) and new (coffee shop, art gallery) businesses, and a healthy drug and prostitution trade going on nearby, the attitude of the business owners and the city's powerbase is that we are headed in the right direction. That kind of boosterish optimism allows us to "embrace" the "diversity" of (legal) offerings downtown.

South Minneapolis, in the 1970s and 1980s, did not have much optimism. There had begun a marked downward slide at the tail end of the 1960s and the perception a decade later was that the neighborhoods were on the verge of being overrun with poverty, pimps, and drug dealers. In that kind of atmosphere, the adult bookstores and theaters served as useful targets of their frustration. They had a permanent location, they were subject to building codes, zoning laws, and licensing requirements, and the staff was far more likely to call the police on you if you protested than pull a gun.

Somewhere in all this are connections between perceptions of women's safety in public space, tolerance for controversial pursuits in public places, and economic trends. Okay, time to pull that article out and get back to work.

Boys Who Read Are Soooo...

I work on public space (as a topic) and I very often, as I did today, work in public space -- which is both distracting and delightful...



Today, for example, I was plunked down in the new coffee shop in the undergraduate library on the main campus (library and coffee? Oh yes, more please). I had sort of dismissed the young guy next to me -- sort of frat boy like -- but then his friend spotted him and they started chatting... and damn if he didn't know an awful lot about how the world works. When he started spouting off about rational economics and tossing out statistics on consumption patterns, he got a whole lot more interesting.



No worries, he was all of 20 (maybe) and rattling on about the exact path his life would take (1 1/2 years to graduation, 1 1/2 years in grad school, 3 years to marriage... blah, blah, blah) so I didn't go over into the world of improper thoughts or anything, but he told his friend he liked to read, and, yes, it did him good.

Where I hit a wall

I had one of those funny moments recently where two people from different backgrounds realize that they have very different meanings for the same word. In this case, the word was "structuralist."

Friend was speaking of the importance of physical structures, the role of the built environment in shaping experiences and actions. I, of course, was thinking that friend was kickin' it old-school, eschewing post-modernism's post-structuralism in favor of lit crit/sociology/anthropology-style structuralism: a hard line stance that individual will/agency is an illusion in the face of societal structures and practices, which ensure the continued existence of unequal and discriminatory power relations. "I am a structuralist," declared friend -- and it gave me quite the case of the giggles to imagine, for just a brief moment, what he might have been (but ultimately was not) saying.

This is in my brain this morning because I'm back reading secondary lit on the feminist pornography wars of the 1980s and I'm realizing that the same inflexibility that turns me off to structuralism is at the core of many anti-porn feminists' arguments about the harm of porn. As one described this piece of the ideology:

"Subordination is so deeply embedded in the system that any individual action is tainted by the subordinating elements of the whole society." (Downs, The New Politics of Pornography, p. 39)

Whatever my scholarly brain might think of these kinds of arguments, the rest of me hits the override switch. If I truly believed this, I would never get out of bed again since any action I might take would only serve to further my own subordination. Don't get me wrong, I believe in the power of institutions to perpetuate hierarchy and forestall change, I'm just saying that I need to believe, just 'cuz I do, that it isn't completely hopeless and however constrained they are, at least some of the day-to-day choices I make matter.

I'm Pro-Urinal

After two encounters in two days with grimy toilets seats left up in single occupancy, gender neutral public restrooms, I've finally got an answer to the question "would women use single occupancy toilets that had urinals?"



Yes. Er, at least I would. Okay, I would have before, but now I actively and enthusiastically endorse the idea.



With urinals, men who like to pee standing up will have an appropriate receptacle and neither men nor women who use the restroom will have to touch the seat to move it up or down.



Thinking about this, I now recall that many modern port-o-johns are designed in this way and probably just for this reason. Excellent. Let's move that idea inside.



As long as the restrooms are clearly marked by function -- and I'd prefer no reference to gender at all -- and they are designed to serve a wide range of people (this means ADA compatible and equipped with baby changing stations), I think women will get used to -- and even come to welcome -- the presence of urinals. Yes, there is the moment of hesitation when one who has been conditioned to view urinals as a marker of male space opens a bathroom door and sees one. I'm fairly sure that way back in the 1980s when courts first decreed that changing tables needed to be placed in men's restrooms as well as women's, there were a few men who had a moment's panic thinking they had entered the "wrong" room. But men got past it and women will too. Let's just make it so there are no "wrong rooms" and we can all relax.