The Old School Lunch

On Global TV National, a Canadian station, there was a news special report on bullying in schools. It was an interesting piece by a young woman who was interviewed years ago because she was bullied and now she was going back to her school and seeing if the laws put into effect to make bullying illegal and the press attention has made any difference. She went back to her school and found a girl just like her and it was one of the most depressing things i’ve seen in a while.

But the thing that really pissed the shit out of me was the way that the report–by this woman who I don’t think is a professional reporter–(and bullying reporting and conversations in general) fail to distinguish between bullying and sexual harassment and sexual assault in schools. Let me say that again: there is a huge fucking difference between a kid of one gender bullying another kid of the same gender for being overweight, for being a “nerd” and a boy constantly grabbing a girl’s ass at school, lifting up her skirt and calling her a “whore” (all of which happened to this girl. When she told her teacher, principle, everyone said “boys will be boys”). These should never ever be seen as the same thing. Doing any of the latter is not “bullying” or some shit. It’s sexual harassment and sexual assault, plain and simple. When your school and law enforcement fails do to anything when that happens and reacts to it as “bullying” what does that tell young women today? It tells them that the place they’re supposed to feel safe in, the place where they’re supposed to go to learn and socialize is also a place where their bodies are no longer theirs. It also teaches girls and women that this is what they should expect if school is any representation of society and teachers and principals or any examples of leadership and discipline. What the fuck.

Bank pushes Mumbai’s prostitutes to save

By RAMOLA TALWAR BADAM, Associated Press Writer Fri Oct 26, 6:14 PM ET
MUMBAI, India - In the heart of Mumbai’s red light district, several prostitutes sit on brown plastic chairs in a narrow room waiting to do something many have never been able to do before: deposit their savings in a bank.

The small bank is the initiative of the women and aims to help them break the vicious cycle of poverty and exploitation that keeps them indebted to brothel owners.
Bank pushes Mumbai’s prostitutes to save
The simple act of squirreling away some money was previously out of reach for many customers of the Sangini Women’s Cooperative Bank. Prostitutes are often shunned by regular banks or lack residence documents or birth certificates officially required to open an account in India.

Now, for the last three months, they have been able to enter the bank daily to deposit an average of 10 to 20 rupees (25 to 50 cents) and dream of things they will do as their savings grow.

“We may not have house papers, but we also dream,” said Indra Jai, 40, who was lured from a southern village 20 years ago with promises of a job in Mumbai and then forced into prostitution. “We should get respect; our money is also good.”

Jai said she dreams of buying a small house and a tailor shop in her village and paying for her 19-year-old son’s college education.

The government estimates there are 3 million prostitutes in India, many of whom start as children lured by traffickers. Others are teenagers sold by impoverished family members to brothel owners.

They spend up to five years working for free in dingy, airless rooms to repay the brothel owner’s investment. To survive they often turn to moneylenders charging exorbitant interest rates and drive themselves further into debt and dependance.

Thoughts of breaking the cycle drive the bank’s more than 900 customers.

“If we fall ill who will look after us? We must save when we are still earning,” said Jai, a founding member of the bank.

The bank — three narrow rooms that also house a cooperative store — is filled with women, some queuing up in front of a teller, others shopping for soap, food, grains and condoms.

Mumbai’s prostitutes began a women’s cooperative group two years ago with support from PSI, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. The bank and store were launched with $40,000 in funding from PSI.

“We thought it would take a year to get 100 customers, but we opened more than 100 accounts on day one,” said Shilpa Merchant, PSI’s Mumbai director.

Guided by PSI, the bank invests daily deposits totaling 25,000 rupees ($625) in fixed savings schemes with state-run banks earning 9.5 percent interest per year.

The women say entering the bank every day helps them hold onto their dreams.

“Sometimes I think my life is a waste,” said Gulabja Sheikh, 35, who was sold at 15 by her parents. “But now I have my house to work for.”

Article link here.

I wanted to emphasize in particular the part where the article says that in India, banks shun prostitutes from opening bank accounts on top of denying them because of lack of “proper identification” and such. This sounds like another “it happens over there but never in the U.S.” sort of thing but this happens all the time here. As some of you may know, my old job was working at what was basically a bank/mail/information/referral center for homeless and low-income men and women. These are people who, when they get whatever sort of money they get whether that’s federal assistance, job paychecks, handouts or whatnot, they aren’t able to open up an account at the local Bank of America. Some of these people have a driver’s license. Many do not. Most have a basic plastic ID card printed from one of the local shelters. When you are in this position and you have a check you have to cash, your alternative, if you don’t have a non-profit bank like the one I worked at, is to go to the local check-cashing Money Tree or Money Mart and have them take anywhere from a 10-20% fee from your check. If you’re struggling from paycheck to paycheck (to put it mildly) and they’re taking 20 dollars of your 100, you’re going to feel that. Now, we took a fee from checks as well (2%) but that was pretty minimal compared to, again, upwards of 20%. The point is simple. If you are poor in America, if you’re of extremely low-income or chronically homeless and don’t have a State license form of identification, your birth certificate or banks wont open an account because you have a bad record for writing bad checks, you won’t be able to open an account plain and simple. You will be forced to go to Money Mart or go the Nancy Botwin route and just make everything a cash transaction (which means obviously carrying and finding places to store cash, sounds real safe if you’re living on the streets, right?) unless, again, you’re able to find some organization that does it for an extremely small fee. It costs money to be poor in America.

It burns my toast when people say:

Now, I don’t have a problem with gay people, I love gay people…I got friends that are gay but I just don’t want them to walk up on me and start hitting on me or something!

People joke about this and say this with all sorts of casual feeling but the basic idea is that to them, being gay is still centrally based on being obsessed about gay-sex. That gay people are these nymphomaniacs who don’t live normal lives because of their orientation.

Not even to mention the suggestion violence of “well if you do that, i’m going to have to stop being so gay-friendly and i’m going to just beat your ass.”

Is the phrase that creator, writer and executor producer of David Eick used when describing the new show Bionic Woman. I just watched the first three episodes on NBC’s website (i’ve just about had my fill of Charles Schwab and Navy commercials but compared to paying 2 bucks a pop on iTunes…) and immediately I do like the show and i’ll watch the next episodes but it just made me think when he said it like that.

It reminded me of when Kate Beckinsale, after Underworld was released, said that if anything, she just thought it’d be cool to have a movie out there where a female lead was kicking ass and she, of course, was right. The movie isn’t as simple as that because she (spoiler alert) doesn’t do all the ass-kicking herself and whatnot but the point is she’s the main character. With Bionic Woman, Eick really seems to want to portray this as the “everywoman” sort of struggle which always conveniently goes into how “emotional” and “vulnerable” the character also is at the same time of being strong. It’s almost as if we’re still on these sort of tentative training wheels when it comes to female power and representations of strong women. We’d like to think that we’re OK with seeing the Beckinsales and Michelle Ryans, but we only see them after we throw a kitchen sink’s worth of “emotional grounding” in there which of course is good for the story but just interesting to see because you never see that to that extent with other lead male characters of similar situations.

She dates three baseball players in a row and she’s known as the woman who dates athletes. Derek Jeter dates “starlets” again and again and he’s just known as the playboy.

Wow. Has anyone ever accidentally (or not) gotten a call or message left from a collection agency? The type of person you have to be to work there, I can’t imagine. You have to be able to completely turn on a switch to become a complete asshole to leave messages like:

“Mr. Marquis Holmes this is Stephanie Holmes from the firm Legal Mediation Practice. Mr. Holmes we’ve got a debt to collect Mr. Holmes and you’ve got until today to call back, we better hear from you TODAY Mr. Holmes, what’re you gonna do now, huh?”

I really, really hate when people say “you better…” or “I better be able to…” Probably the only thing I hate more than that is to see people at restaurants get a food server’s attention by doing the index-finger-curl/point/come-here. This happened the other day. The waitress was so shocked that she stopped right in her tracks when she saw it. The old fart, frustrated that she wasn’t running to him like a golden retriever, sunk his head lower and started curling his finger faster with the “yea, you dumbass, come here” look and the waitress by them slowly started to move over to him and by then I thought she was going to shiv the bastard right in the back. Turns out that he was getting her attention because his wife had a question and she couldn’t bother to do it herself (or he insisted on doing it). They had a big party with them and it was someone’s birthday. By then the waitress had badmouthed them to the rest of the staff so as the family is expecting the restaurant staff to come out singing happy birthday, the waitress ends up plopping down an ugly birthday cake slice with an unlit candle and walks away.

For the past two Saturdays i’ve gone to the same Chinese buffet with a friend. It’s not that bad and it’s 15 bucks. Big fan of the seafood but not of the kids who run around without supervision making a general mess of the place while their parents sit and eat…

My friend works for Cingular and he was telling me that Sprint/Nextel recently reviewed thousands of their customer service records, looked at thousands more of their customers in their database and terminated the contracts of 1000+ customers for basically being shitty, verbally abusive customers and wasting Sprint’s time by constantly calling to complain with issues of little substance. “A first in the customer service industry” my friend calls it…

Heroes is surprisingly good. I was pretty skeptical but i’m hooked probably even more so than Lost. It’s nice to hear an Asian language on TV being spoken at the actual pace the actors would naturally speak it unlike Lost where everyone is speaking Korean 5x slower to make it less obvious that Daniel Dae isn’t a native speaker…

And Weeds is pretty good. Though they really put it on thick the first few episodes with the whole “Oriental whore bitch from Thailand” bit. At least Nancy corrects her…

Saw But I’m A Cheerleader after I heard the writer/director talk about it in This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Both are pretty awesome, the latter moreso than anything i’ve seen in a long time. In my hyperbole I may have called Jack Valenti a “nazi” when talking about the documentary to a friend. His response: (gasp) “I believe the man was there was president Kennedy was shot!”…

The two co-workers I am probably most buddy-buddy with at work both told me recently that when they first saw me, they both thought, “What a nerd, i’m not going to talk to that guy at all” and “that guy doesn’t look cool, i’m not going get to know him.” Oh, it’s like that?…

A female co-worker was talking to us at the lunchroom about how she couldn’t decide what to wear at the upcoming auction that she is basically running. She has an outfit that is she looks better in but she doesn’t want old farts who are donating money to hit on her or to stare at her all night. As she was talking about this dress conflict, she stopped herself and apologized to me saying that she felt bad that I as the only man in the room at the time had to endure this conversation because, of course, I just naturally wouldn’t be able to understand any of it. “No, I get what you’re saying. There’s a different between what you’d wear as a guest coming to donate money and socialize and there’s what you’d wear if you’re board member or something and then there’s what you’d wear if you’re working at the function up on stage, etc.”…

The 10th issue (and the 3rd Anniversary Issue!) of Shameless was released and it has a column by your 3rd favorite blogger who abruptly quit blogging then came back to blog but doesn’t really blog that much. Big shoutout to Editor Megan for giving me this tremendous opportunity, for all of her thoughtful advice and words of encouragement, big shoutout to Founder Nicole for putting my name in the running to even be a columnist, big shoutout to Renée because I wouldn’t have known about Shameless otherwise, and a big shoutout to the Shameless community for just simply getting it.

[tell me he’s not being serious]

You know, on a whim, I searched “Lundy Bancroft” on YouTube because I had recently listened to a radio/podcast interview of him. I bought his book about a year or so ago and if paying about $2 bucks to download a 30 minute radio interview with someone is any indication, I liked what he had to say and I liked his delivery. He is what the movement to end men’s violence against women exactly needs: men in various fields who are willing to do the actual work. In his case, he works with abusive men who enroll in court appointed domestic violence classes. Now, imagine my surprise when I stumble across this video of two people having a sort of not-quite-a-regular-conversation somewhat-interview about Why Does He Do That? and the guy “CharlieChan007″ (anyone who pays any sort of homage to James Bond with a username arouses my suspicion, but anyways..) proceeds to try and tear apart the book and take shot after shot at Bancroft for what he perceives to be blatant ignorance for not acknoledging that women are abusive to other women in lesbian relationship and to a lesser extent that women can be abusive to other men. I wouldn’t watch the entire thing, he goes on and on (and on and on) about how Bancroft doesn’t do this and he tries to slam him for…wait for it…using “He” in the title of Why Does He Do That? Now this right here is a good example of just how ridiculous this entire video (and person’s) criticism is. His point is simple: Bancroft isn’t acknowledging that there is abuse in gay relationships and he isn’t saying that women can be abusive. He must be only saying that men can be abusive and thus Bancroft is a sexist and tunnel visioned asshole who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Which is fine if you want to think that way, after all, you titled the damn video “Toni and John talk about gender abuse” but if you actually read the damn book and if you actually take a look at the real world statistics of violence against women, make that men’s violence against women, Bancroft isn’t going to waste his book* and his efforts pandering to you and the fraction of a fraction of the US audience who shits themselves when every single population isn’t specfically addressed. I hate how there are men like this who are so afraid to sound as if they’re going to somehow be homophobic as if they’re going to offend the GLBTQ community if they don’t rise up in arms every single time there’s any instance of male-female relations. I honestly believe men like this are actually a heavy burden on the movement because they do nothing to actually call out (i’ll say it three times now) men’s violence against women. He won’t say it because he’s afraid by saying it, it somehow makes him homophobic because he’s not acknowledging the fraction of the gay population that is in an abusive relationship. Did anyone hear him in this entire video talk about any of the real issues that Bancroft brings up in the book?

*By “waste his book” I mean making it seem like “gender violence” was somehow even across the board. You know it, I know it, Lundy knows it, our friend Charlie doesn’t know it: men commit the vast majority of domestic violence against women and devoting a large part of the conversation to men’s domestic violence against women is just a natural extension of that.