Think We're Past Sexism? Try Keeping a Diary

Chavisa Woods documents her personal experience with sexism in this new book from Seven Stories Press . This excerpt involves the police. But what if more os us kept track of small everyday ways of being discounted, harassed, or not counted?

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When she was 5, the little boy Chavisa Woods was playing with pinched her butt. His mother, upon hearing the story, told her she probably liked it. When she was 36, a cab driver locked the doors and wouldn’t let her out until she gave him her phone number. In 100 TIMES: A MEMOIR OF SEXISM (Seven Stories Press; June 25, 2019), Woods lays out one hundred personal vignettes of the sexism, harassment, discrimination, and sexual assault she’s experienced in her life. The incidents, which range from lewd comments to attempted rape, take place when she was growing up in poor rural Southern Illinois, when she was working in St. Louis as a young adult, when she was living with her girlfriend in Brooklyn, and when she was a Shirley Jackson Award-winning author and three-time Lambda Finalist writing this book.

While Chavisa Woods chronicles these 100 stories to show how sexism and misogyny have impacted her life, something else happens simultaneously: she lays bare how these dynamics shape all women’s lives, and how relentlessly common they are. She underscores how thoroughly men feel entitled to women’s spaces and to their bodies, and how conditioned women are to endure it. It’s impossible to read 100 TIMES as a woman without cataloging one’s own “Number of Times.” As Woods writes in the book’s introduction, “It’s not that my life has been exceptionally plagued with sexism. It’s that it hasn’t.”

Excerpt:

#30

When I was twenty, still living in Saint Louis, two of my female lovers and one of my close gay male friends were all raped in the same year, two by strangers, and one by someone we knew. This didn’t happen to me, but going through this repeatedly with three unrelated people I was deeply intimate with in such a short time changed me forever.

One of my lovers was hospitalized and had to have stitches in the places where the man who assaulted her had bitten out chunks of her esh. She was a butch lesbian, and it was strange and painful seeing someone who seemed to be so strong and beautiful become so helpless. To me, she was the strongest, hottest, butchest girl in the Midwest. When she was around, I’d always felt safe. I’d never thought of her as someone who needed protecting. Every dyke wanted to be with her. She was a stud. e idea that a man could have rendered her powerless was surreal.

The man was a stranger who had pushed his way into her house as she was coming home from work. He told the police he was having an a air with her, and that her boyfriend had come home and caught them having sex, and chased him out, and that it must have been her boyfriend who beat her uncon- scious, and that she was claiming it was rape for her boyfriend’s bene t, so that he wouldn’t get mad at her.

She didn’t have a boyfriend. She’d never had a boyfriend. She was a gold-star butch. She was my lover, and probably had another girl on the side, too. But the police still believed him, somehow.

She was hospitalized for days, and the detectives on the case sympathized with her rapist. While she was in the hospital, one detective on the case even referred to him as “that poor man.” Because of this, and after several months of intense emotional discussions with a lawyer and arguments with the detectives, she decided not to go to court and press charges.
When she told me this, I thought, “we’re nothing to them.”

Queer women, that is. We don’t exist. They don’t see us.
They looked at this hot, fierce butch, and I wondered what they saw; a “larger,” plain woman with a short haircut who dressed unassumingly and for some reason needed to pathetically lie about being beaten and raped?

When she got out of the hospital she came and stayed with me, and we didn’t leave my bed for two days. It was a blue cocoon. I did my best to comfort her, but I was also young and emotional, and it was difficult in moments for me to give exactly what she needed. I was also hurting and not coping well. I did my best. I hope it is a good memory for her, because, for me, those days lying together and holding each other for hours on end are sacred.

I remember her bruises as blue, the room as blue, and the color of the air as blue. I realized, for the first time in our long relationship, that she must see me as powerful, too, if she came to me after that happened to her. I realized we were both powerful together, because we could actually see and value
each other. But that time left a blue mark on my heart also, as I realized, after everything that had happened that year, we were really nothing to the cops, nothing to so many straight men . . . nothing to the powers that order the world. Nothing.

Brooklyn-based writer Chavisa Woods is the author of the short story collection Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country (Seven Stories Press, 2017), the novel The Albino Album (Seven Stories Press, 2013); and the story collection Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind (Fly by Night Press, 2009). Woods was the recipient of the 2014 Cobalt Prize for fiction and was a finalist in 2009, 2014, and 2018 for the Lambda Literary Award for fiction. In 2018 Woods was the recipient of the Kathy Acker Award for Writing and the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette.

"You Don't Know How Hard the World Can Be."

This 2018 film about young college women in pre-Roe v Wade Chicago makes clear what life was like when abortion was strictly a criminal operation, when everyone but the woman involved made decisions and had opinions about her womb and her sexuality. The Women’s Freedom Center in Brattleboro has an annual Women’s Film Festival each spring, and you can see Ask For Jane on March 30 at 6:00 pm at the New England Youth Theater. Gloria Steinem says every American should see this film—and we think our young people especially should see this.

One woman in the film speaks to her jailed companions about their naiveté, organizing an anonymous referral system for women “in trouble,” as it used to be called. “You don’t know how hard the world can be. But you’re about to find out.”

Jail was only part of it. Shaming continues to be a widespread weapon, but only for wombs, not for the penises involved. And beneath all that shame, violence still stalks us. The Women’s Freedom Center works with women who have been sexually assaulted or are in endangered by partner violence and abuse, which often includes financial abuse. The Women’s Film Festival is an educational fundraiser for the organization. Let’s keep on helping instead of judging. I think I remember hearing that it’s the Christian thing to do.

A Peace Economy Could Save You and Our Mother Earth

Treat yourself to a Green St. Patrick’s Day! Here’s ecofeminist Vandana Shiva in conversation with Amy Goodman about her two latest books, Who Really Feeds the World, and Oneness vs. the One Percent.. What she reveals is eye-opening and scary, the threats to survival very real. When Himalayan snow no longer feeds the rivers of Asia, what will its life, its people, do? But she also inspires with proven and doable fixes for our broken natural cycles, organic carbon sequestering a green new vision we can fuel with a Green New Deal.

Beautiful Vandana Shiva has led global efforts to save life-giving seeds now threatened by GMO patents that endanger life by forgetting what corporate-owned scientists don’t know. They patent seeds with BT, a poison that A.) doesn’t work and even backfires, creating superbugs and superweeds, and B.) .enriches the 1 percent. No one knows what joining genes with toxins will do to all life that feeds on it.

Shiva fought for India’s law that says to corporations: hey, you cannot patent life. She calls the 1 percent “rent collectors” on our new digital communication, digital currency, global finances, and our means for staying alive.. They turn our intelligence into “intellectual property,” and AI. She names Bezos and Gates “life-lords,” similar to the 19th century’s landlords, who got rich without working, and whose hubris imagined their ruthlessness natural. They were only “the fittest,” a dangerous misreading of Darwin if ever there was one.

They’ve turned the global economy into “a company store,” the same way landlords controlled what renters and share-croppers earned from their labors, and what share-croppers must pay for their needs at the company-owned store. No such regular robbery could happen without the threat of violence always present. But Shiva helps us remember Ghandi, non-violence, and democracy: we are many, and they are so few.

What's a Mondragon?

It’s the largest worker-owned cooperative corporation in the world. Georgia Kelly of the Praxis Peace Institute in California has been taking Americans there for decades, but most American have never heard of it. Mondragon doesn’t advertise; it has no public relations department. Started in Franco’s Spain, this cooperative kept a low profile, but since then they’ve transformed their poverty into wealth that values people over profits, and has put education at its center. This video shares Georgia describing how they handled the 2008 crash when so many jobs were lost. How? Not the way so many American companies did. This is an hour-long, but worth a watch—including great questions from the audience.

There are still spots available in this year’s Mondragon Seminar and Tour in Spain, June 16-22, 2019. To register, go to www.praxispeace.org/mondragon for info on registration, prices and travel.