"Rub Against Me and I'll Expose You"

A loyal supporter of "Breaking the Code" sent me a link to this article this morning. I find the last line a particularly telling (and somewhat disturbing) indication of where things stand when it comes to street (or subway) harassment:

"'Maybe the campaign is good because it makes women think about it ahead of time,' added Midgley's mother, Lynn Greiner."

Funny Feminists and Infuriating Footnotes

While searching in vain for the missing citation I need for a quote* in my very-nearly-finished article on girl watching, I came across Gloria Steinem’s classic “If Men Could Menstruate.” I’ve read it many, many times before, but it gave me a chuckle this morning. So I wanted to share.







*Yes, yes, I know this is silly. I am generally quite anal about such things – I keep all my papers and notes filed by where they came from so that I won’t have unattributed sources, I lecture my students about the need to be absolutely fanatical about keeping track of where their material comes from, I even tell them the story of the quotation I finally had to take out of my book in the very last draft because I could not find from where I had pulled it. And if you can’t cite it, you can’t use it.

To that end, anyone know a reference to secondary issues – or really the snowballing of issues – at the height of second wave radical feminism being referred to as “yeah, that too” issues? I thought it was in Ruth Rosen’s The World Split Open or Susan Brownmiller’s In Our Time, but I’m coming up with nothing so far…

Done.

Standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by
Standing on the corner, underneath the springtime sky
Brother you can't go to jail for what you're thinking
Or for the "oooh" look in your eye
You're only standing on the corner, watching all the girls
Watching all the girls, watching all the girls go by.

(Frank Loesser, “Standing on the Corner,” from the musical “The Most Happy Fella,” 1956)


Well, I think the girl watching article is finally done. Of course, I haven't submitted it anywhere before, so there are certainly more rounds of revisions to be made based on readers' reports. For the moment, however, I declare it done.



And just to be sure that I let it go, I even sent it on its way tonight.

Bye-bye, little article, see you in 4-6 months. Be strong.

This is What a Feminist Looks Like

Super-slick feminism for all. We're many colors and ages. Many of us are famous. We're bold, funny, and pretty. We like sex. We like boys. Don't be afraid. Oh my, did I mention it's slick?

Here is the Feminist Majority Foundations' new video.



Watcha think? Don't you want to be a feminist too?

Bathroom 'Integration'

Supervisor Feinstein Integrates Men's Restroom in San Francisco

The men's restroom in San Francisco's City Hal for male members of the S.F. County Board of Supervisors was liberated last month by Supervisor Dianne Feistein. After receiving no response to past complaints that she and Supervisor Dorothy Beoldingen were forced to use a ladies' restroom about 100 feet from the Board of Supervisors' chambers, Supervisor Feinstein entered an unmarked restroom a few feet from the chambers which has been reserved for men. "Its a liberated restroom now," she said. "We have equal rights there."1



I found this little tidbit on Feinstein in a giant stack of notes that I haven't been through in a couple of years. In light of the recent bathroom liberation movement by non-gender conforming activists, I am wondering if Feinstein's efforts led to a "unisex" bathroom or if her intent/the outcome was to produce a new "women's" bathroom.


There are many other cases of women since the 1970s demanding "women-only" restrooms in businesses and public buildings as they moved in greater numbers into jobs that had previously had few women.



But the legacy of sex discrimination is still fairly easy to see. At the Library of Congress, men's restrooms are located around the corner from the main reading room while women's rooms are only located on the floors above and below it. Pictured in this post is the looooong hallway between the stairs from the reading room and the women's restroom. When I interviewed at a certain second-tier state school in the south in the mid-1990s, men's bathrooms existed on each of the four floors of the building wing housing the History department, but there was only one women's room and it was a couple of floors up from the department. The female faculty were lobbying for "women's" restrooms on every floor...







That seems to have been the trend. Second wave feminists realized that the physical structure of offices and public places restricted women's presence in those places and consequently advocated for changes, such as the addition of restrooms. Almost all of the evidence that I have found so far indicates that the new additions were gender-specific spaces -- counter to the gender neutral policies these feminists otherwise advocated and exactly what is being challenged now.2





1 Capital Alert, vol 2 13(8 Sept 1972), 4; in Herstory I Update, Reel 2 [3]).
2 The one exception to this is a brief attempt on the part of Ti-Grace Atkinson at a NOW national board meeting in New York in May 1968 to de-gender bathrooms in the Biltmore Hotel. At least according to the minutes of that meeting, she never got any backing for this idea from other board members. National Organization for Women Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Wrong Bathroom

I've been playing in the world of bathrooms again. I am struck this afternoon by how the trans/intersex activist community (here is one example) has been able to get this movement for gender-nuetral bathrooms to take off while older, mainstream, feminist-first feminists have ignored it, reinforced it by arguing for more bathrooms for women (potty parity movement -- expect more posts on that in the future), or defended gendered bathrooms.

Anyway, here is a little video I came across that I thought I would share.

Wrong Bathroom

Unbinding the Gender Binary

A good part of the reason that I study public space is that I am fascinated by the 'house of cards' nature of it. Public space is ambiguous because the people there generally have no history with each other, their encounters are fleeting, and there are not the structuring power relationships of work, school, family, neighbors, etc. to maintain order and enforce consequences. Societies then try to create ways to ameliorate the anxiety of public space through etiquette, laws, and even the built environment that reinforce social order through social groupings. We feel better if we know where people fit and we rely heavily on appearances, mannerisms, location, and actions to figure this out. What are they wearing? What are they carrying? Where are they? How are they getting around? Which bathroom did they use?

The problem is, of course, that someone's appearance, mannerisms, and actions do not always tell you where they fit. Sometimes they actively contradict. What do people think when they see someone who presents as one gender but uses a public restroom designated for a different gender? And that right there is the problem with the way in which we have divided up and labeled public space in vain attempts to make public space a little more predictable and orderly.

I find it interesting that the early mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s focused so diligently on removing the physical signs of Jim Crow, but feminists have not done the same for the signs of gender segregation. To be fair, second wave feminists did very successfully challenge policies excluding women from bars and restaurants (and the signs the reinforced those policies), but they never tackled sex-segregated bathrooms.

And sex segregated bathrooms do matter. There are signs all over American public space that reinforce a gender binary: there are two genders, you must choose one and act accordingly, these two genders are different enough to merit this separation, and even though we have removed other types of similar divisions this one continues to stand. When a group of my colleagues read a draft of the article I've written on feminist challenges to women's exclusion from some public accommodations, one of them (someone who teaches African American history) looked at me and said, "but I don't get it, what is the problem, women are different from men, just look at how we have different bathrooms." Sex-segregated bathrooms reinforce the idea that men and women are inherently different and must be treated as such, that biology trumps socialization, that women have more in common with women and men have more in common with men, just by virtue of their bodies.

It has been the transgender, transsexual, intersexed, gender queer activists who have taken up the cause that cissexual women have not. Safety was originally stated as the reasoning for this: transgendered people were not safe using public restrooms that did not match their presentation (most frequently cited for trans men using the women's room) or their biology (perceived as most dangerous for trans women using the men's room). The issue seems to have evolved beyond the safety arguments in recent years, however, and the discussion is now much more focused on how build public accommodations that do not rest on a gender binary that is no longer so binary.

Bathrooms are a hot topic in many public buildings, especially on college campuses. I've seen it even make its way onto my small commuter campus where, at the behest of activists from the Ann Arbor campus, one single occupancy bathroom in the computing building has been changed from a "men's" room to a "unisex" bathroom -- with some rather problematic labelling and singage indicating its new function. What is "unisex" anyway? Wouldn't "omni-sex" be a better label? Or why focus on sex at all (that's easy, because we are trained from early on to match our own personal plumbing up with the plumbing of the bathroom we choose to use)? Why is the fact that this is a public bathroom indicated with the traditional visual representation of a man and a woman? Wouldn't a sign with a toilet on it be a better indication of the room's function? We could have two toilets to indicate that it could accommodate multiple people or one for the single-holers.