Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... lobal.html

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Weaponized Data: A New Front in Global Capital's Control Grid



From driftnet surveillance to data mining and link analysis, the secret state has weaponized our data, "criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial," as Cryptohippie famously warned.

No longer the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies, a highly-profitable Surveillance-Industrial Complex emerged in the 1980s with the deployment of the NSA-GCHQ ECHELON intercept system. As investigate journalist Nicky Hager revealed in CovertAction Quarterly back in 1996:

The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual's e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

With the exponential growth of fiber optic and wireless networks, the mass of data which can be "mined" for "actionable intelligence," covering everything from eavesdropping on official enemies to blanket surveillance of dissidents is now part of the landscape: no more visible to the average citizen than ornamental shrubbery surrounding a strip mall.

That process will become even more ubiquitous. As James Bamford pointed out in Wired Magazine, "the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10 to the 24th bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes--so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)"

"It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015," Bamford reported, "reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) ... Thus, the NSA's need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text."

A former top NSA official turned whistleblower, William Binney, who resigned in 2001 shortly after the agency stood-up the Bush regime's warrantless wiretapping programs (now greatly expanded under Hope and Change huckster Barack Obama), "held his thumb and forefinger close together" and told Bamford, "We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state."

Last week, Binney said on Democracy Now when queried whether there were any differences between the Bush and Obama administrations, "Actually, I think the surveillance has increased. In fact, I would suggest that they've assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens."

Add to that the Transportation Security Administration's invasion of "travel by other means," as Jennifer Abel pointed out in The Guardian, through the agency's usurpation of "jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit," and it should be clear to Americans (though it isn't) that there is no way of escaping the secret state's callous trampling of our rights.

Commenting, Salon's Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the "domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition."

"The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism."

"Accepting that bargain," Greenwald noted, "enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom--'he who does not move does not notice his chains,' observed Rosa Luxemburg--but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice."

But in a militarized Empire such as ours the only "choice" is to shut up, keep your head down--or else.

'Lower Your Shields and Surrender Your Ships'

Militarist solutions to intractable social contradictions, the oft-maligned class struggle, do not appear out of the blue. Indeed, NSA's ECHELON system, the template for STELLAR WIND and the agency's associated email and web search database known as PINWALE, were technological responses by Western elites to challenges posed by the "excess of democracy" decried by Samuel Huntington and his cohorts in The Crisis of Democracy, published by the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission.

Social critic Andrew Gavin Marshall observed that for Huntington and the right-wing ideologues who mounted an intellectual counterattack against the democratic "excesses" of the 1960s, the "massive wave of resistance, rebellion, protest, activism and direct action by entire sectors of the general population which had for decades, if not centuries, been largely oppressed and ignored by the institutional power structure of society," were "terrifying."

Fast forward to today. As the global economic crisis deepens and hundreds of millions of people worldwide reject the "austerity" boondoggles of the financial sharks who brought on the crisis through massive frauds disguised as "investment opportunities," our corporatist masters are fighting back and have turned to police state methods to prop-up their illegitimate rule.

Nor should it surprise us, as George Ciccariello-Maher pointed out in CounterPunch in the wake of last summer's London "riots," a mass response to police murder (coming soon to an "urban exclusion zone" near you!): "Irrational, uncontrollable, impermeable to logic and unpredictable in its movements, these undesirables have once again ruined the party for everyone, as they have done from Paris 1789 to Caracas 1989. In Fanon's inimitable words: 'the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be placed around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands and start burning...'"

Call it the great fear of those lording it over the slaves down on the global plantation!

Combining attributes of Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" and George Orwell's ubiquitous "Big Brother," the National Security State, as it works to stave-off its own well-deserved collapse, seeks to root out and marginalize "dangerous" individuals and ideologies thereby "inoculating" the body politic from what were euphemistically called in the halcyon days of J. Edgar's COINTELPRO operations, "subversive elements."

It matters little whether today's "usual suspects" are landless peasants, displaced workers, investigative journalists, civil libertarians or innocent citizens mistakenly caught in one dragnet or another: "threats" will be "neutralized" or more pointedly, in the evocative language employed by spooks: "Terminated with extreme prejudice."

Operating alongside tried and methods--police repression and violence--contemporary crackdowns are guided by "robust situational awareness" gleaned from the wealth of personal data stored on multiple digital devices (the spies in our pockets) and in huge databases. As Cryptohippie averred: "An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine."

"When we produced our first Electronic Police State report," the privacy professionals wrote, "the top ten nations were of two types:

1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but lacked ability.
2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.


But as they revealed in their 2010 National Rankings, "This is changing: The able have become willing and their traditional restraints have failed." The key developments driving the global panopticon forward are the following:

• The USA has negated their Constitution's fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of "wars" against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.
• The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of stopping "anti-social" activities. Their populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.
• France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.


As Marxist critic and Situationist troublemaker Guy Debord pointed out decades ago in The Society of the Spectacle, "the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content."

Mark that well.

Rejecting the orthodoxies and received wisdom of his day, Debord argued that "The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender 'lonely crowds.' With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions."

It is again worth noting that the much-vaunted "global village" which sprung to life with the widespread deployment of the internet in the 1990s, as a profit-center for the giant telecoms and a spy machine for the secret state, was, after all, a casual by-product of the Pentagon's quest for a wartime digital communications system.

But now that every facet of daily life has become a war theater, what are we to make of the electronic walled gardens offered for sale by Apple, Facebook and Google, replete with their multitude of proprietary apps which, like Bentham's "panopticon," have become prisons of our own choosing?

Ponder Debord's rigorous theorems in this light; substitute "cell phone" or "GPS" for "automobile," and "internet" for "television" and it becomes clear pretty quickly that unbeknownst to the militarist inventors of the "digital highway" they had stumbled upon the perfect means for enabling a global control grid.

As Debord averred: "If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the 'mass media' that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle's internal dynamics."

"Internal dynamics" geared only towards its own survival and reproduction come hell or high water. Endless wars on "terror," "drugs," "crime," take your pick. Prison-Industrial Complexes? Genetically-engineered plagues? Ecological collapse? Step right this way! There's an app for that and much, much more!

Indeed, "if the social needs of the age in which such technologies are developed can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact between people has become totally dependent on these means of instantaneous communication, it is because this 'communication' is essentially unilateral," that is, "the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions."

Keep in mind that Debord's seminal text was penned in 1967, long before the wet dreams of securocrats had been brought to life like Frankenstein's monster. Once a disquieting and uncanny shape looming on some far-off, dystopian horizon, the world of smart phones and dumbed-down people is, simply put, an Americanized Borg cube where "resistance" is always "futile."

The question is, in our fallen Republic does anyone even notice?

[American Dream]

http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress. ... on-martin/

Ruminations on the Murder of Trayvon Martin

Posted on April 22, 2012 by bluebossanova

When I heard about the murder of Trayvon Martin I felt numb. Murdering of Blacks especially black youth is such a regular occurrence that I can’t even feel. A dehumanizing society does that. What struck me about the murder of Trayvon was not that Zimmerman was not arrested much like the members of lynch mobs in a not to distant past but rather the lack of analysis. In 2012, Black people find ourselves still fighting to be citizens and treated equal by the law a battle that has not ceased since the first slave ships arrived to eastern American shores. The lack of action taken post Trayvon’s murder is the tip of the iceberg but this tragic event has helped to bring further attention to the intentions and possibilities created by capital and it’s bearers in the years to come.

Recently Zimmerman was arrested and now faces trial for second degree murder. This came on the heels of protest and outrage around the country some forty days later. We can assume that this mass response played a hand in the state finally stepping in. The laws and basis’ of the justice system have to be examined in the history they are a product of. The fact that he has been arrested and will be tried does not and will not affect the system of white supremacy that allowed for the killing of people of color on a whim.

Initially, Zimmerman was not jailed due to Florida’s Stand Your Ground law which states that one can use lethal force to defend oneself if proven beyond doubt one was in imminent danger. Sounds reasonable? Let’s back track and look at the past forty or more years in the US.

Starting with President Nixon and finding further definition with President Reagan, we were introduced to the War on Drugs. This “war” was the driving force in the increased incarceration of many Americans, especially Blacks. New laws were implemented targeting certain activities, targeting drugs found in majority black communities, and black cultural norms. These laws were racially coded as evidenced in the sentencing ratio given for possession of crack cocaine in relation to powder cocaine, the former apparently being cheaper and more accessible in poor black communities. In addition, we witnessed gang injunctions targeting alleged criminal behavior often in relation to styles of dress found predominantly in communities of color. The police, learning from the movements of the 60′s and 70′s became more centralized and militarized in their conduct. Surveillance became more wide spread, politicians used all kinds of fear-mongering tactics, the institutions of society (media, schools,etc) assisted in perpetuating a drug epidemic and the changes in policing. All this contributed to the break down and conquest of cities and communities that were once epicenters of rebellion such as Oakland,Detroit, Chicago.

The enemy became the drug addict, the dealer, the welfare queen, terms that became synonymous with Blacks and Latin@s in large part due to skewed media portrayals. The War on Drugs and the architects behind it played upon the centuries old fears and tropes about Blacks that had been at the heart of American culture/society prior to the movements which later forced white supremacy to change the manner in which it manifested itself. The common perceptions of Blacks during turn-of-the-century American pop culture and academia (and even further back in the annuls of history) went from the insulting paternalistic view of ignorant,happy carefree coon children to dangerous knife carrying rapists to people who were less than human, according to pseudo-scientific explanations, all of which justified oppression and mob violence done by whites.

These major changes were done within the backdrop of major changes in the global world economy and the role of the United States within it. Neo liberalism was on the rise and capital and it’s bearers unleashed a cold calculated assault on the proletariat in the US and abroad. It was in large part in response to the openings created by the resistance of the masses. Workers and communities had made many advances changing American culture and values. But, left intact was capitalist social relations a system historically built upon and maintained by dividing humanity into castes hiding and all out hindering the collective potential for communism. We can’t pinpoint the origins of white supremacy to the t, but we certainly can pinpoint the moments in US history where laws and social norms were implemented, often with economic motives, that brought about the relationship to capital that Blacks have had for the duration of our presence on this continent. Often these laws were were created to hinder the unity that could and did develop among poor whites, slaves,and the indigenous peoples. The material economic motive to otherize Blacks was pivotal to the history we endured and continue to endure.

It is this history,one which lives on in this present in new ways, that laws Like Stand Your Ground must be assessed. We have been conditioned to associate crime and poverty with Blacks. Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that we often hear that Blacks wantonly murdered by police or vigilantes were said to be reaching for weapons or, according to Mr.Zimmerman, “looking suspicious.” What of the murder of Sean Bell, Kenneth Chamberlain Sr, the recent developments around profiling and harassing whole communities of color in East Haven,Connecticut and New York? We can no longer say these were incidents involving bad apples,or that solutions should be about reforming the police and laws to be more racial/culturally sensitive. If after centuries of resistance, most recently the historic battles of the Civil Rights/Black Power movement, the institutions of this country haven’t become more culturally sensitive, then it is clear that something more systemic is going on.

Furthermore, the recent connections between the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) further show the ongoing systemic attempt to uphold white supremacy and Capital, two inextricably linked systems of social oppression. It then comes as no surprise that ALEC was also in support of racist legislation and practice against undocumented communities. We can see a horrifying link between wealth, white supremacy,and pure violence in ALEC’s positions and how, in light of the death of Trayvon, they can agitate and make room for violent action by vigilantes.

Finally, with the economic collapse we’ve seen a rising wave of white supremacist activity from working/middle class whites who are becoming disenfranchised and have few other analytical conceptions of what is taking place outside of racist propaganda. With the effects of neo liberalism being increased migration from the peoples of Latin America the state/capital has found a scapegoat which it has been preparing for the slaughter at the alter. There is an undeniable attempt to cast undocumented folks as criminals much like blacks. This anti-immigrant propaganda and the historical/material reality that it draws from is exasperating the tension and fear brought to the fore by the economic crisis. Laws such as Stand Your Ground may only help to justify the murder of innocent peoples based on stereotypes and blind hate.

As mentioned earlier, we, Blacks, are thus in a position where we are still struggling for citizenship and thus fair treatment under the law. I question if this can ever happen after the bloodshed that is still being shed to this day in a country where it’s seems that the requirements for citizenship is a either wealth or whiteness and what jackpot you hit if both. As troublesome is the nationalism/racism exhibited by poor/downwardly mobile whites who have been dealt a bad hand by this system as well. How can we reach them? How must we fight the system when the methods of our fore-bearers failed? What use is there in fighting for acceptance into a system, where we have all been put into castes forced into conditions, where we learn what it is that capital wants us to learn (or not learn!) to reproduce our own oppression?

I do not believe we can truly find justice for Trayvon in such a system nor for anyone. I find solace in the rise in activity among multiracial groups and youth of color who deal with the possibility of unprovoked death everyday. The future and justice will be in their hands. When they move,when we move for freedom beyond the constraints of these social relations, we will find justice.

[American Dream]

http://machete408.wordpress.com/especifismo/

Especifismo




Throughout the world, anarchist involvement within mass movements, as well as the development of specifically anarchist organizations, is on the upsurge. This trend is helping anarchism regain legitimacy as a dynamic political force within movements and in this light, Especifismo, a concept born out of nearly 50 years of anarchist experiences in South America, is gaining currency world-wide. Though many anarchists may be familiar with many of Especifismo’s ideas, it should be defined as an original contribution to anarchist thought and practice.

A new edition of the “Especifismo Reader: Anarchist Organization and Praxis” has been made publicly available. Topping 120 pages, the updated reader compiles a number of translated key articles as well as several excellent though yet to be translated pieces in Spanish in the tradition of Especifismo in Latin American anarchism. The next steps for this reader are the inclusion of several more pieces by Latin American anarchists and a organization in Mexico, as well as a section of articles called “Towards a North American Especifismo,” with pieces written by North American anarchists influences by the Especifismo Latin American Anarchist tradition.

One of the key concepts of the Latin American Anarchist tradition of especifismo is “social insertion,” which is the concept they use to define the relation to mass struggles and movements. The Especifista anarchist current advocates that involvement in the social struggles must be firmly rooted, argues for anarchist values rather the conversion of movements to “anarchism itself” or a specific political line, and which aims to build popular power (“horizontal power” and “of the base” I think are similar concepts from Latin American traditions that readers might also be familar with).

The first organization to promote the concept of Especifismo – then more a practice than a developed ideology – was the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU), founded in 1956 by anarchist militants who embraced the idea of an organization which was specifically anarchist. Surviving the dictatorship in Uruguay, the FAU emerged in the mid-1980s to establish contact with and influence other South American anarchist revolutionaries. The FAU’s work helped support the founding of the Federação Anarquista Gaúcha (FAG), the Federação Anarquista Cabocla (FACA), and the Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro (FARJ) in their respective regions of Brazil, and the Argentinean organization Auca (Rebel).

The key concepts of Especifismo can be summarized in three succinct points:

1. The need for specifically anarchist organization built around a unity of ideas and praxis.

2. The use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and develop strategic political and
organizing work.

3. Active involvement in and building of autonomous and popular social movements, which is
described as the process of “social insertion.”

For all articles relating to especifismo at Machete408 please click here

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://nothingbutahuman.wordpress.com/2 ... arassment/

Fanon, Alienation and Sexual Harassment

DECEMBER 4, 2011

* Eventually I’m gonna finish this post. It just ain’t gonna happen until I get a chance to return to Fanon in a more serious way. Which means the second part of this post, arguably the most important part is extremely underdeveloped. But I’m still posting it to clean house behind the scenes and get some writing drafts onto the blog.


Over the past few months I’ve had some good conversations with R, E and maza de adelita about street harassment. We were sharing war stories of what we’ve experienced and the conversations have really reminded me of how often and, frequently, how violent street harassment of female-bodied people can be. It also reminded me of the contours and relationship of gender, patriarchy and alienation which come out in harassment. Here’s some of the war stories I shared with them, and a couple others.

1.
I’m walking down the street. Two young dudes on bikes roll by, ask if they can walk with me. One gets an attitude when I decline, says something about oh, well you’re just a booshie white girl anyways. (I guess cuz I’m light-skinned)

2.
I’m coming out of a subway station, walking with a male friend. Another dude walks by in the opposite direction and says “damn girl, lemme holler at you.” I politely decline, he flips out and yells that I’m a stuck up bitch, so fuck me anyways. I feel embarrassed. My male friend makes a weird face but doesn’t say anything. We both walk away.

3.
I’m standing on a crowded train, it’s completely packed after picking up fans right after a fútbol game ended. I’m standing with a female friend, we’re surrounded by men bumping into us and staring at our bodies. The dude behind me pops a boner and starts rubbing it into my ass. I shoulder him to push him away and then give him a dirty look. I was pissed but being surrounded by a shit ton of other dudes, I didn’t feel confident or safe to do more than that. My friend and I talk about it after we get off the train and she tells me that a dude behind her kept grabbing her ass.

4.
I’m sitting on a train coming home from work. The train is pretty empty, there’s only a few other people in my train car. A dude gets on and is clearly intoxicated. After spotting me he passes a dozen empty seats to come sit down directly next to me, then starts leaning in and asks if he can kiss me. I firmly say no, he asks what will happen if he does it anyways? I again firmly say no, we sort of have a staring contest as he ponders doing it while I think about what the fuck am I gonna do if he actually goes for it. The train reaches the end of the line, breaking the deadlock as the other passengers start to notice the tension and I push past him to exit the car.

This is a short list of what is a daily reality. The more routine harassment I have faced has been the cacophony of unwanted flirting (kissing noises, whistles, claps, tsk-tsk sounds, howls, etc.), the offers to get in a car or go somewhere with someone I don’t know, the uninvited touching (grabbing a hand, shoulder, arm, ass), or the words of what a dude would do to me if he could (once a dude said he could fuck me so good I’d shave him afterwards…not sure why he thought that would turn me on…).

This unfortunately isn’t out of the ordinary and I think many women experience similar or worse types of harassment. It’s so normalized that to really stop and think about the toll of years of harassment is stunning. It’s definitely shaped my gender presentation. It’s also shaped my activity. It shapes the route I decide to take when going anywhere, which streets I walk down, which corners I avoid. And, though I hate feeling this way, I often feel safer if I’m walking with a male-bodied person. I don’t get any harassment then cuz if I’m with a man it is assumed that I am that man’s property, so his presence “protects” me. I’m made to not feel safe in my own body. I am alienated from my own physical self. I think of Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks with regard to this point.

In “The Fact of Blackness” chapter (I think it’s called something different in newer editions), Fanon lays out a phenomenology of being black; in other words he is describing the lived experiences and perceptions of black folks in a white supremacist world and the developing, contradictory consciousness that arises from it. He describes alienation as the experience of being through others, as being made an object for others. All people come into this world “imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, [our] spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world,” [109] but as a person of color in a white supremacist world, I find that I am an object in the midst of other objects.

We come into the world fully human until the eyes of white supremacy are set upon us. We find that a new way of thinking about ourselves and being ourselves is imposed upon us, a “crushing objecthood”:

“I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’.” [112]

For Fanon, alienation is not simply a question of perception, ideology or language. I don’t experience alienation under white supremacy because someone calls me nigger; I feel alienation because underneath “nigger” is an entire set of social relations that are predicated upon controlling and exploiting my creative activity (my labor).

“In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table.

The matches, however are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all of these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world – such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world – definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.

Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by ‘residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, visual character,’ but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more.” [110-111]

Alienation therefore is material, physical and historical, it is the dialectic between me and the world around me. It is social, for I can only be black in relationship to someone else being white. There is much more complexity to the ideas that Fanon is presenting in this text, but I want to pick up on this point about the bodily experience of alienation. Fanon at one point describes it as one’s body being given back to them sprawled out, distorted, re-colored, clad in mourning.

Street harassment has the same effect. Every time I’m harassed, I’m reminded that my body is not my own, it is rather the tool used by others to perpetuate a history that is both false and real. False in the sense that women have always been more than what patriarchy tells us we are or can be. Real in the sense that there are real social relations that attempt to make me live out my life according to that false history. My body is made to be the drawing board for patriarchy to draw out all its illusions of what I am, what I should be, what I should do for men. I am not L Boogie anymore, rather I am stripped down to only being what I can make a man feel, what I can make him want to do. Underneath the “rude” language of harassment is an entire set of social relations that force my body and labor into the service of men and capital. And, always, just underneath the surface of “rude” language is the spectre of violence that will be meted out in response to any resistance to this “crushing objecthood.”

[to be continued...]

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Defend CeCe McDonald!

Self-Defense is Not a Crime!

Stand up Against Racism and Transphobia!

An important case demands our support. Crishaun “CeCe” McDonald, a young Black transgender woman faces two counts of second degree murder for defending her friends and herself from physical attacks by a group shouting ugly racist and homophobic insults.

Please contact the Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman and demand he drop the charges against CeCe:

612-348-5540 fax * 612-348-2042 * citizeninfo@co.hennepin.mn.us

Please bring this case before local GLBTQ groups, Black Community organizations, Unions and community groups, Occupy assemblies and anywhere people are struggling for freedom and justice. An Injury to One is an Injury to All!

According to the Support CeCe website http://supportcece.wordpress.com:

“Around 12:30 am on June 5, CeCe and four of her friends (all of them black) were on their way to Cub Foods to get some food. As they walked past the Schooner Tavern in South Minneapolis, a man and two women (all of them white) began to yell epithets at them. They called CeCe and her friends ‘faggots,’ ‘niggers,’ and ‘chicks with dicks,’ and suggested that CeCe was ‘dressed as a woman’ in order to ‘rape’ Dean Schmitz, one of the attackers.”

“As they were shouting, one of the women smashed her drink into the side of CeCe’s face, slicing her cheek open, lacerating her salivary gland, and stinging her eyes with liquor. A fight ensued, with more people joining in. What happened during the fight is unclear, but within a few minutes Dean Schmitz had been fatally stabbed. CeCe was later arrested, and is now falsely accused of murder.”

The coroners report showed Schmitz had a large nazi swastika tattoo.

CeCe now faces a Justice system that is anything but. African-Americans are imprisoned in Minnesota and the U.S. at rates far disproportionate to the population. Black defendants incur greater rates of conviction and harsher sentences than whites, especially when the alleged victim is white. In fact the CeCe Support Committee has documented four separate recent instances when the local Hennepin County Attorney has declined to press charges when a white person killed an alleged attacker.

Likewise the Criminal Justice system is grossly discriminatory against transgender defendents. Trans people are routinely placed in isolation and/or subjected to increased sexual violence, harassment, and abuse at the hands of prisoners and corrections facility staff. Cece herself “was kept in solitary confinement “for her own protection”; she had no say in this matter. Finally, she was transferred to a psychiatric unit in the Public Safety Facility. It was nearly two months before she was taken back to a doctor to check up on the wound on her face, which by then had turned into a painful, golf ball-sized lump”, according to the CeCe Support Group website.

The Hennepin County Attorney, Mike Freeman, is the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party politician responsible for prosecuting CeCe. Previously Freeman unsuccessfully prosecuted an Anti-Racist Action activist for defending himself from a neo-nazi at an anti-fascist demonstration in 1993. Freeman’s office also led the racist railroading of the young African-American men known as the “Minnesosta 8″ for the shooting of a police officer in 1992.

CeCe had every right to defend herself and her friends from this assault. Black folks, queer folks, and trans people deal with enough insult and abuse from bosses, the police, school, and other official institutions without having to worry about physical attacks just for being who they are. Racist and transphobic violence cannot be tolerated. Silence and inaction will only aid the perpetuation of white supremacy, sexism, homophobia and transphobia inherent in the structure of this oppressive and exploitive system. The necessary unity to defeat this system requires the solidarity of all of us – not just lowest common-denominator unity that favors the most privileged – but defense of the most oppressed and exploited. As the social crisis sharpens, the need for self-defense from both individual bigots and from a system built on white supremacy and patriarchy will only increase.

A strong support group, based among young transgender activists and including anarchists, has come together to defend CeCe. First of May Anarchist Alliance pledges our solidarity as well. We will work to make this case well known among working class activists and organizers and help to raise the costs for the prosecutor and the system he represents for carrying out this injustice.


First of May Anarchist Alliance

m1aa.org

December 2011

[American Dream]

Makere Harawira in his essay, Neo-imperialism and the (mis)appropriation of indigenousness:

Haunani-Kay Trask has defined imperialism as a total system of foreign power wherein another culture, people and way of life penetrate, transform and come to define the colonised society. The primary function of imperialism is exploitation; exploitation not only of the land and resources of the colonised country, but also of its peoples. Thus imperialism is the defining characteristic of colonialism in both its past and present forms. Some might ask what still remains to exploit now that colonisation has done its worst - has raped the land of its minerals, the seabeds of their fishes, the soil of its biodiversity, the peoples of their language and DNA, and long since reduced them to a state of dependence on their colonisers? The answer of course is the exploitation of indigenousness itself, the exploitation, nay even theft of cultural identity, the misappropriation of the essence of indigenous being. In recent decades, the imperialist practices of global capitalism carried out by certain non-indigenous interest groups not only continue to assert the relative social and economic supremacy of non-indigenous and peasant peoples through market-driven policies and the reification of notions of `economic man’ but also appropriate and commodify for their own economic gain indigenous knowledge, sacred sites and traditional practices.

Throughout the world, indigenous peoples whose lands, whose resources, whose ways of life has been destroyed by capitalism and greed, who since the beginning of colonisation have been constructed as an inferior `Other’ somewhat less than human, are engaged in a struggle to retain control over the last remaining vestiges of what makes them unique; their traditional spiritual beliefs, practices and knowledge. For too many indigenous peoples, it is already too late. Imperialism which throughout the 18th and 19th centuries legitimated its rape and pillage of both peoples and lands through liberal ideologies of difference which saw civilised man as godly, indigenous peoples as primitive and different and idleness as belonging to the devil, has reclaimed `difference’ as a commodifiable asset and appropriated ‘indigenousness’ for economic gain.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

One of the cool things about the internet, and about tumblr especially, is the way that it allows for the quick propagation of all sorts of antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic, etc., ideas. The appearance of sites like Color Lines, Jezebel, Racialicious, Feministe (sites which vary greatly in quality and ideological orientation), among others, have all been really important in popularizing antioppression ideas in general, and in producing a class of people able to problematize and critique oppressive discourses, especially those that can be found in popular culture.

One of the not so cool things about the internet is that it has helped to produce a class of people who are, relatively speaking, quite comfortable in their general anti-oppression stance. Anti-oppression discourse, nowadays, isn’t even about a politics (i.e. working collectively to change the world you inhabit) as much as it is about style—about speaking the right language, using the right terms, expressing outrage at the right moment, etc. Unlike previous generations of people discussing anti-oppression ideas, we who are members of this class don’t need to go to long, drawn-out meetings or to join activist groups in order to satisfy our desire to be against oppression. The discussion, in many ways, comes to us—just follow the right people, read the right blogs, etc. Anti-oppression, that is, arrives to us with the slick, polished ease of a commodity.

Without even talking about the billions of people who cannot access this kind of discourse precisely because the very late capitalism that provides us with cheap-ish computers and internet access needs to keep their wages incredibly low in order to do so, I’ll end by saying this: I believe that there’s a difference between producing evidence of oppression, explaining oppression, and fighting oppression. One can produce evidence of oppression without being able to explain why oppression happens. My problem with the Jezebels and Racialiciouses of the world, as well as with a lot of stuff I see around here, is that they glorify their own capacity to produce evidence about oppression without explaining it. Or if they do explain it, the explanation tells us very little: it relies on the fact that we know oppression is bad and the fact that it feels good to know that. This, I think, is why sarcasm works so well on Jezebel and various other liberal feminist blogs—it allows its reader to ignore the lack of analytical depth by allowing her to substitute the feeling of Knowing Better Than Someone Else Does.

You might think that people who analyze oppression professionally would at least think about the question of who benefits from oppression, a question that necessitates at least a critical view onto capitalism. The problem is, of course, that those who produce evidence of oppression professionally have a class interest in not explaining or learning to explain who benefits from oppression. Folks like (Racialicious founder) Carmen Van Kerckhove have found creative ways to make a living off of talking about race (and talking about talking about race) without explaining much at all save the fact that racism exists, a fact that we seem not to be able to be reminded of enough.

But the fact that an entire industry has emerged to produce evidence about oppression without doing much at all to fight it should tell us something about where we’re at in terms of capitalism. Anti-oppression has become a commodity, too, and “we” are part of the machine by and through which that commodity is made and consumed. I’m not trying to trivialize or downplay the existence of oppression—oppression exists, and exists on a scale any in ways I am not even in a position to know or speak about. But I am trying to begin to understand how capitalism has enabled people—especially upwardly mobile, college educated people like me—to generate an anti-oppression discourse that allows many of us to feel as if we are doing much more to fight it than we actually are.

http://www.lowendtheory.org/post/803175 ... rst-of-all

[American Dream]

http://colorblue.dreamwidth.org/60441.html

this is not a post about yoga!

Jan. 18th, 2011 02:05 am

colorblue

I've been doing yoga all my life; I've never in my life paid to go to a yoga class. Sometime when I was too young to remember, my father started teaching me how to do the basic asans and meditation and pranayam, and then yoga classes in temples or community centers or acquaintances' houses, etcetc.

There was no way I could have afforded going to a white person's yoga class, and anyway, learning yoga isn't supposed to be something you pay for. It is too important for that; it is something that everyone is supposed to have a right to, and to charge money to teach is to degrade both the knowledge and yourself. This is what I believe; this is what my teachers believe; this is what my people, for literally thousands of years, have believed.

Of course that matters for shit these days.

*

A couple of reasons that free yoga classes are held and advertised in predominantly Indian spaces so often, when Indians make up a very small portion of the US:

Because Indians are awesome!

Because if you market to anyone else you have to pay thousands of dollars to get white people's yoga certification, no matter if you have been doing yoga all your life, no matter that your gurus, with a teaching lineage that can be traced back centuries, have given you permission to teach (sometimes with a shiny modern certificate attached natch!). You require white people validation, which usually costs thousands of dollars, and you require membership to a white people's yoga teaching association, something like that, am unclear about the details of all this except for the fact that it, once again, costs a lot of money. If you don't jump through these white people's hoops, even if you are doing this on your own free time and charging absolutely nothing, you will not be seen as qualified (to teach what is yours; to teach what you have been practicing all your life) and you might be held liable if something goes wrong.

So, be careful with giving free yoga classes to people (even if they are lower-income people who have so few other options for preventative health care) unless they are Indian. Because not only have clueless appropriative white people completely mangled yoga in pretty much every way possible by turning it into some hobby plaything (it is supposed to be a way of life and the asans are only a small small part of it) for the well off, they have made it horridly difficult for anyone else to teach it the way it should be.

This isn't even getting into the mess where the US patent office is apparently ready to award patents for yoga asans to whichever complete and utter waste of space sell-out has gotten there first to exclusively claim a practice thousands of years old, created and refined for the good of all people, as his own personal property in order to profit off it. [url]And Indian organizations and the Indian government are trying to prevent that[/url], and are being attacked by people saying that yoga isn't an Indian or a Hindu thing, and therefore we have no claim to do this. And does this mean one of these days we will have cops bursting through the doors of temples to charge volunteer yoga teachers with teaching the sun salutation without a license? The ridiculousness of having to live in this society, I can't even begin to explain it.

*

The reason I find this so grating is because yoga is not the only thing this has happened to, not by a long shot; the reason I find this so grating is that what has happened to yoga is practically benign compared to what has happened with some other things. There is apparently a Western company that has licensed genes that are crucial to studying breast cancer, thereby preventing some university research scientists from conducting research on how to cure it; there is a Western company that is trying to patent all the seeds it can get its hands on (the same Western company that was responsible for the terminator gene that was going to bring such glories to third-world farmers, btw, if the farmers had been smart enough to realize it! which leads to interesting question of what exactly it intends to do with those thousands of seed patents once it succeeds in collecting them); I could seriously go on all day. But I don't have to, because other people have.

It's what Patricia Hill Collins wrote in Fighting Words:

It is not that elites produce theory while everyone else produces mere thought. Rather, elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as being universal, normative, and ideal. Legitimated theory typically delivers tangible social rewards to those who possess it... Describing this process in the UK, writer Michelle Cliff observes that "one of the effects of assimilation, indoctrination, passing into the anglocentrism of British West Indian culture is that you believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King's English and in the form in which it is meant to be expressed. Or else your writing is not literature; it is folklore, and folklore can never be art." In this sense, analyzing social theories in isolation from their embeddedness in race, class, and gender produces the objectified knowledge that characterizes hierarchical power relations.

It's what bell hooks wrote in Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black:

In a white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal state where the mechanisms of co-optation are so advanced, much that is potentially radical is undermined, turned into commodity, fashionable speech as in "black women writers are in right now." Often the question of who is listening and what is being heard are not answered. When reggae music became popular in the United States, I often pondered whether the privileged white people who listened were learning from this music to resist, to rebel against white supremacy and white imperialism. What did they hear when Bob Marley said, "we refuse to be what you wanted us to be" - did they think about colonization, about internalized racism?

Appropriation of the marginal voice threatens the very core of self-determination and free self-expression for exploited and oppressed peoples. If the identified audience, those spoken to, is determine solely by ruling groups who control production and distribution, then it is easy for the marginal voice striving for a hearing to allow what is said to be overdetermined by the needs of that majority group who appears to be listening, to be tuned in. It becomes easy to speak about what that group wants to hear, to describe and define experience in a language compatible with existing images and ways of knowing, constructed within social frameworks that reinforce domination.

It's what Dick Kawooya wrote in Copyright, Indigenous Knowledge And Africa's University Libraries: The Case of Uganda (right before tearing into how the dichotomies of south/north insider/outsider are not at all what they seem, which is def. worth a read):

Recent interest in ITK (indigenous and traditional knowledge) has ignited heated debates on misappropriation of ITK aided by western intellectual property (IP) laws, or lack thereof. At the centre of the debates are 'Indigenous Communities' whose resources are misappropriated by 'outsiders.' Ironically, the ITK debate occurs in a context where such knowledge was, and in some cases still is, considered "inferior and of no value"... Not mentioning the fact that Africa's 'inferior' knowledge, transferred with the aid of the international IP system, plays "pivotal role" in scientific and technological advancement in western societies.

IP laws facilitate exploitation by applying western IP standards and constructs in non-western settings where alternative systems of protection and control existed. From patenting of biological substances to copyrighting cultural expressions, the 'south-north' flows of indigenous resources present major socioeconomic, political and cultural challenges to affected communities.

It's what Dieter Dambiec said in Indigenous People's Folklore and Copyright Law:

The close identification of indigenous folklore with community life has as its corollary the notion of overriding community control of intellectual and creative works so that to impart total control to the individual creators of these works is seen as undermining part of the foundations of that community [8]. This means that an individual's creative work attains a place and is attributed with some meaning within the indigenous culture when it is somehow co-extensive with the performance of communal obligations and adherence to communal requirements.

In consultation with others in the indigenous community, it is not uncommon for individual creators to work with concepts, styles and techniques handed down to them and be restricted in their creative and aesthetic inclinations in order to advance the mode and manner of collective traditions and practices [9]. As a result, the creative expression of an individual or group of individuals is considered to be an expression and product of the community as a whole. This is particularly so where current works are derived from older works whose original creation cannot be ascribed to any definite persons. This situation gives rise to ownership rights within indigenous cultures regarding works of folklore which are at odds with Western legal concepts such as absolute individual ownership and freedom of alienability of property [10].

The idea that folklore belongs to a living and changing group of people means that Western concepts of individual creation and individual ownership reflected in copyright law through such exclusive rights as reproduction and adaptation, publishing and recording, performing, and broadcasting rights [11] do not necessarily hold up for indigenous peoples [12].

It's what Makere Harawira said in his essay, the neo-imperialism and the (mis)appropriation of indigenousness:

Haunani-Kay Trask has defined imperialism as a total system of foreign power wherein another culture, people and way of life penetrate, transform and come to define the colonised society. The primary function of imperialism is exploitation; exploitation not only of the land and resources of the colonised country, but also of its peoples. Thus imperialism is the defining characteristic of colonialism in both its past and present forms. Some might ask what still remains to exploit now that colonisation has done its worst - has raped the land of its minerals, the seabeds of their fishes, the soil of its biodiversity, the peoples of their language and DNA, and long since reduced them to a state of dependence on their colonisers? The answer of course is the exploitation of indigenousness itself, the exploitation, nay even theft of cultural identity, the misappropriation of the essence of indigenous being. In recent decades, the imperialist practices of global capitalism carried out by certain non-indigenous interest groups not only continue to assert the relative social and economic supremacy of non-indigenous and peasant peoples through market-driven policies and the reification of notions of `economic man' but also appropriate and commodify for their own economic gain indigenous knowledge, sacred sites and traditional practices.

Throughout the world, indigenous peoples whose lands, whose resources, whose ways of life has been destroyed by capitalism and greed, who since the beginning of colonisation have been constructed as an inferior `Other' somewhat less than human, are engaged in a struggle to retain control over the last remaining vestiges of what makes them unique; their traditional spiritual beliefs, practices and knowledge. For too many indigenous peoples, it is already too late. Imperialism which throughout the 18th and 19th centuries legitimated its rape and pillage of both peoples and lands through liberal ideologies of difference which saw civilised man as godly, indigenous peoples as primitive and different and idleness as belonging to the devil, has reclaimed `difference' as a commodifiable asset and appropriated 'indigenousness' for economic gain.

It's what so many people, all over the world, have been saying for so long. The current system of intellectual property rights, embedded in the racist classist hegemonic individualist capitalist Western ownership system that by now has been imposed, in one way or another, on everyone, with or without their consent - this system is not just completely fucked up, it is a weapon wielded by those who have power, a weapon aimed directly and deliberately at the hearts of the people and communities and cultures that are considered lesser.

In this way, it is a system that does exactly what it has been designed to.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Sex in Exchange for Gifts and Cash? What It's Like to Sleep With Wealthy Older Men for Financial Support

By Clarisse Thorn, Role Reboot
Posted on April 25, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/155147/se ... al_support

The following piece first appeared in Role/Reboot.


Sex work is a controversial and polarized topic, and there are many perspectives on it. My position is complex—but for me, when it comes to how we actually interact with sex workers, one important factor is whether or not they consent to and enjoy their jobs. I am absolutely in favor of giving better options to sex workers who do not enjoy their jobs, and I am horrified by the idea of a person being trafficked or coerced into sex that they don’t want to have. But I also know people who have sex for money 100% voluntarily, and I do not want to deny their experience.

My friend Olivia, a 25-year-old graduate student, recently started advertising her services on a “Sugar Baby” site called SeekingArrangement.com. I think it’s important for more people to understand these kinds of experiences, so I asked to interview her. Many people have pointed out that once a person starts thinking about the definition of “prostitute,” it’s a bit difficult to define what exactly a prostitute is. Some of my sex worker friends have asked the question: What exactly is the difference between a person whose partner buys her a fancy dinner after which they have sex, and a person whose partner buys sex with money? Olivia has thought at length about this, and I’m grateful to her for sharing her perspective on that question, and others.

Please note that Olivia is exceptionally privileged. What you are about to read is a portrait of what the sex industry looks like for a person who is very privileged: she comes from a white upper-middle-class background, she is not desperate, she is being paid a lot of money, she does not have a drug addiction. Many other peoples’ experiences in the sex industry are very different.

The interview went long, so we’re going to post it in two parts. Here’s part 1:

Clarisse Thorn: Hey Olivia, thanks so much for being willing to talk about this incredibly complicated topic. Could you start by defining a sugar baby site? What is it?

Olivia: I use the site SeekingArrangement.com. It’s very hard to pin down exactly what it does. I guess it connects people, usually with a big age gap, who are interested in exchanging some kind of material goods or financial resources for some form of companionship that is often sexual—but not always.

As far as I can tell, the site’s founder is very against the claim that this is prostitution. He puts out a lot of publicity claiming that this site has nothing to do with prostitution. At first I thought that he was trying to evade legal consequences, but I think he actually probably believes that. The site has a blog that he controls, and you can look at it to get a sense of what he’s thinking. One post I think is really interesting is called “Sugar Baby & Sugar Daddy: The Modern Day Princess & Prince?" which compares being a sugar baby to a kind of “happily ever after” princess fantasy.

So far, no one I’ve talked to seems remotely interested in hiring what they see as a “prostitute.” They seem to want to be having sex with someone they find very attractive who is also someone they feel like they can respect, whose intelligence they respect. For example, someone I see occasionally—the last time I saw him, he gave me money at the end and he said that he felt good about giving me the money because he knew I wouldn’t spend it on, quote, “a designer handbag.” He seems to think that I am reasonably ambitious and have my shit together, and he seems to feel more comfortable giving me money because he knows it goes towards my grad school costs and credit card debt. My ability to write with proper grammar, without overusing emoticons, appears to be my biggest sales point. Men have told me this outright.

That guy also mentioned feeling more comfortable because he thinks I’m from the same social class as he is. There are a lot of class issues coming up in these encounters, I think. Being white and from an upper-middle class background may help me get clients. My background has also given me a ton of confidence that puts me at an advantage when negotiating. I do not think I radiate “take advantage of me,” and I (nicely) tell guys who start doing that to go away.

The guy I was just talking about—he also mentioned that he feels like he doesn’t want to have sex with someone that he doesn’t feel at least a little bit connected to. There’s a distinction between meaningless sex and casual sex. I think these guys want casual sex—maybe they aren’t at the point where they want to deal with having a partner, or they’re really busy at work, or they already have another partner—they want casual sex but not meaningless sex.

In my encounters with these men, the money does two things. Firstly, it enables them to have a relationship with me that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to have. Secondly, it puts them in this position where they can give me something valuable and have that be appreciated. The guys I see really want to feel appreciated.

Clarisse Thorn: Do you feel like this has given you any new insight into gender roles?

Olivia: Hmm …. It’s made me feel more powerful. I definitely feel like I am the one with the power in this situation. When I show up, I don’t feel like: Here is this rich, powerful person who is about to bestow wealth upon me. I feel like: Here is this person who is a bit sad and lonely, and maybe I can make their day better.

A lot of the men who are on this site want to feel appreciated, so it’s important to them that the woman they’re with gives off the appearance of appreciating them. So, for example, on the website, there’s a lot of talk about sugar daddies being “mentors” or “benefactors” rather than clients. They seem to want some combination of me asking them about their day, and they also want to feel like they’re bestowing knowledge upon me about the world. One of the men I see will always talk about his opinions about money. He has complicated feelings about himself having money because he doesn’t come from money, so he’s trying to work those out. But he also keeps telling me in a very serious voice that money will not make me happy, that nothing I can buy will make me happy. I tell him that I can buy security and he says yes, that is one thing I can buy.

Other men seem to be having issues with their age. One mentioned that he’s just turned 40, and that’s really bugging him. Then he flaked out on me a couple times—I don’t think he was completely OK with his own decision to be seeing me. But anyway, often, another thing these men seem to get out of it is access to someone who has a bunch of youthful energy and optimism and just plain new ideas. A lot of them have mentioned feeling stuck, or bored, or cynical, or intellectually constrained. So in this sense, sex is only one thing I’m offering them—I’m also offering them optimism, hope, energy, and so on. Firstly, the sex is good in and of itself, as most of them aren’t getting laid otherwise. But the sex is also a symbol of them getting access to my youthful energy or whatever.

I think the archetypal image of a mistress involves a woman being “kept” so that she doesn’t have to work, so that she can be available for sex basically whenever. But I don’t think this is what the men I see want. I am more valuable to them because I have other work that I am seriously invested in, and am having sex with them anyway. Again, these men are interested in a woman who they see as more “equal” to them—in this case, defined by earnings potential—and they seem gratified by the idea that they could help me enter their income bracket someday. This is, of course, still kind of patronizing; like I said, they keep using words like “mentor.” It’s also presumptuous. But I think a lot of them being patronizing and presumptuous can probably be attributed to age and wealth, and only some of it to gender.

I think I’ve learned more about class and money than I have about gender. It turns out there are people to whom $1,000 versus $3,000 doesn’t matter that much, and I finally understand that on a visceral level—$1,000 doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to most of them. I knew this, but now I really know it.

Another thing I’ve been struck by is exactly how much romantic relationships are worth. I’ve had several clients tell me they don’t feel wealthy, and they feel like they worry about money a lot. I think they were sincere. Of course, my first thought was: don’t you think that your $2,000-per-month prostitute is part of the budget that could be trimmed? But I think that maybe it’s not, actually. I think they think that investing a lot of money in me is a good investment for them if it gives them a release valve so they can deal with the rest of their lives. They’re probably right.



Clarisse Thorn: You mentioned that you feel powerful in your relationships with these men. But there are issues of your safety, right?

Olivia: I think there are issues of safety anytime a person meets someone they don’t really know, especially if they plan to spend time in private. And especially if you’re dealing with topics as sensitive as sex or money. There may be more issues of safety with this because some people really do believe that money can buy them anything. But for the most part, when I meet people they seem very respectful.

Things I do to increase my safety are that I tell my husband and my friends where I’m going to be, I tell them exactly where I am. I’ll do things like take down a client’s license plate number and text it to my husband. I’ve been thinking maybe I should look at each client’s driver’s license too, and text the client’s name and driver’s license number to my husband. I think some clients might feel threatened by that, though.

The most important thing for my safety is that I’m willing and able to walk away from situations. I’m not desperate—I won’t starve or die if I don’t do this work. I meet all my clients in public first for a meal, and if someone sketches me out, I leave. I’m not so desperate that I’ll get into a situation that scares me.

I guess I am at risk if I meet a really crazy person who wants to chop me up and put me in a dumpster. But I could meet a person like that during a normal night at a bar, too.

The major risks that I see is that I might catch an STD—but I use protection. I might end up alone with someone who believes that the money he’s paying actually gives him the entitlement to do whatever he wants to my body, but I’ve never encountered anyone like that. The thing is, as I said before, I haven’t met anyone who I think would actually describe themselves as paying for sex. The terms on which I continue to see these men are probably less explicitly negotiated than an escort’s terms would be. I don’t have flat rates, for example.

I’ve heard escorts complaining that people who use sugar baby sites are unprofessional, and I think that from an escort’s perspective, they probably are.

Clarisse Thorn: If people are unwilling to actually talk about sex for money, it must be hard to negotiate your encounters. Do you have a set of steps for negotiation?

Olivia: I haven’t been doing this for very long. It’s varied so far. Usually, I meet them for some kind of meal, and we chat. We have a perfunctory conversation, like, “How was your day?” Then one of us will say something like, “Tell me a bit more about what you’re looking for. Why are you on the site?”

Then we’ll explain our deal to each other. Like, he might say: “I’m divorced, I’m looking for companionship.” At some point, money comes up. I am always extremely vague when I talk about money. I’ve found a good deal of variation in how squeamish people are about money.

For example, one client was saying that he wanted to get married again, but not yet. I said, “Huh, well, if you’re interested in a more emotional relationship, how do you feel about involving money?” The way he explained it to me was that people are attracted to each other for all kinds of reasons, probably including money, so why not be up front about the fact that money is attractive. He seemed almost confused about why I asked. With that guy, I ended up sleeping with him before we even talked about money, which was a huge risk, but I thought it might work, and it did. We had the money conversation immediately after we had sex—at some point when we were taking a break, I asked what he was looking for more specifically from this relationship, and he said that he wanted to see me again, maybe once a week. I think I asked him his preference for a monthly allowance as opposed to every time we meet, and he said he’d rather do something monthly. Then when we were getting dressed, he pulled out $1,000 cash and handed it to me, and said, “I’ll give you the balance next time we see each other.”

With other people, I can be more straightforward. Maybe they aren’t sure how to set up the relationship, so maybe I talk about another client, like: “I have another client I see three times per month for $3,000,” and they might say, “That sounds good.” But some guys will just negotiate it per encounter. One guy brought it up very quickly after we’d exchanged some emails. He said that he prefers to do a “per meet” of $300—he called it a “per meet”—I told him that was too low and quoted him $1,000, and he said he’d meet me in the middle. Another guy told me that he would just slip $400 into my purse when he saw me, and that’s exactly what he did.

I have one client I’ve never explicitly discussed money with at all. I had lunch with him, and we didn’t negotiate anything, though we talked a little bit about our reasons for being on the site. The next time I saw him—we were deciding where to meet, and he asked if he should get us a room. I said that I would like that, so I met him and we had sex. He knew it was my birthday soon, so as we were getting dressed, he said, “I know we haven’t talked about money, so I got you some birthday spending money,” and he handed me an envelope with $400. The next time I saw him, he asked about my plans for the evening. I said I was having dinner with a friend, and he handed me $400 in an envelope and said, “Maybe this will help pay for it.” I’m lucky that I’m willing to accept $400—it’s my lower bound, but I’m willing to accept it. Imagine if I hadn’t been willing to take $400—that would be super awkward. Probably I should have negotiated that situation more clearly, but it worked out OK .

I’ve heard about situations where unclear negotiations did not work out OK. There was a “New York Times Magazine” article about the site published in 2009. In that article, there were some examples of unclear negotiations that didn’t work out well. But it sounded like that woman didn’t really know what she wanted, and didn’t really enjoy the work. But I do. And I know other women who do, too.

I have a new client who paid me $3,000 up front to see me three times a month. But I haven’t heard from him since our first meeting. If I were his girlfriend, I’d call him, but he asked me not to call him. So I don’t really know what the deal with that one is. Maybe he’s gonna flake out on me, but he already gave me $3,000, so that would be weird.

Clarisse Thorn: So, your husband. You mentioned him briefly. How does your husband feel about this?

Olivia: He does not seem particularly threatened. We already have an open relationship. I think he sometimes feels very visceral jealousy, but that’s just like any other time one of us has sex with somebody else. We just have to talk about it.

Part of the deal here is that I’m doing this because I’m broke. My husband really wants to be able to support me financially, but he can’t right now, so I’m supporting both of us doing this. I think that’s a real blow to his ego. To the extent that he gets bothered, I think it’s because I’m allowing other men to support me and give me money; he doesn’t care about the sex. Even though I see this as work, he sees this as “here’s this rich successful guy who just gave my wife a bunch of money, and she slept with him, so probably she’s attracted to him.”

I am kind of attracted to my clients, and I kind of get off on making them happy, and I happen to think that the age difference is kind of hot. I like having sex with them; it’s not unpleasant. I like hearing about these guys’ life stories. I think it’s interesting. But these guys would never be a threat to my husband. I would never be sleeping with any of them except for the money. And I love my husband. I’m always very up front about the fact that I’m married and I love my husband. My clients accept that.



Clarisse Thorn is Role/Reboot's Sex + Relationships Editor.

[American Dream]

http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2011/ ... ansgender/

Living Out Loud: I’m Transgender

by: Be Scofield on October 28th, 2011

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
- Joseph Campbell


I can remember the moments just like they happened yesterday. On one occasion my friend and I were standing in the parking lot of my high school next to my gray two-door ’88 Nissan Sentra. He was looking at a paper I had written when he casually said, “you write like a girl.” For some reason, unknowingly to me in that moment, time stopped. His words resonated deep in my body. Despite this event occurring 15 years ago I can tell you the first and last name of the person who said it, the weather outside, the time of day, where we were standing in relation to my car…etc. Another time a high school friend told me that my leopard print steering wheel cover “was for girls.” When I bought it I had never even thought twice about it. It was simply what I wanted. But, again time stopped and I became extremely present. On one occasion a coworker told me I looked like a woman. His words shook me. All of these incidents shook me. While I wasn’t thinking this at the time I suppose at some deep level my spirit was saying in each occasion, “Oh, my god he knows.”

When these incidents occurred – in high school and in my early twenties I had never heard the word transgender before. This was in the mid 90′s and early 2000′s. I’m sure I’d heard the term transexual used in a pejorative manner, but my knowledge was extremely limited. Like many other teenage boys I had been called “gay,” “fag,” or “sissy” and a whole wide range of other terms – typical of the homophobia rampant in our culture. I know that I also participated in this homophobia by joining my guy friends in using this kind of language with each other. We’d also throw around sexist and racist jokes not realizing the impact these types of words have in everyday lives of people of color and women. But, despite me being called gay or fag those moments never stayed with me. I can’t remember even one specific incident in which I was called this, yet I can remember in painstaking detail the times I had been called a woman or a girl.

Today, it is ten years or more after these incidents and I’m trying to make sense of my life and pave the way for a future. I’m currently taking hormones (estrogen and testosterone blockers) and undergoing laser hair removal. I’m in the process of transitioning to live as a woman. How could this be? I was born in a male body. I have a penis. I have hair on my chest and on my face. My voice is low. I’m sexually attracted to women. My legal name is Robert. How can I be a woman?

When I told someone that I was transitioning they asked, “Why can’t you just stay the same?” Here’s why I can’t.

Change or Die

I recently called my mother and revealed to her my secret. I told her that for much of my life I have struggled immensely for being born in the wrong body and at times have wanted to die because of it. I explained to her in tears that I’ve long believed I have no conceivable future as a man. I said I’d rather live for one day as a woman than another 30 years as a man. I told her I’ve felt this tormenting split between being a woman trapped in a man’s body. “I have to get out of this body. I can’t live like this. Why is this happening to me? I don’t understand this.” She told me it was going to be ok. She said I still have music to make in this life.

I’ve tried “staying the same” for my whole life and it hasn’t worked. If it had I wouldn’t be writing this right now. I’ve been to individual and group therapy, received counseling from gender specialists, been to gender groups and studied transgender issues among other things. I’ve prayed, danced, meditated, done yoga, written, screamed, played, cried and sang. I’ve tried to think my way out of this to no avail. “Maybe your gay?” I’ve been asked. I’ve been sexual with men. No luck there. I’ve spent much of my life overachieving – academically, intellectually, through writing, activism and getting involved in projects. All of my work changed nothing. Yet, such is life. At some point we all confuse having with being.

I am transitioning because if I don’t it means living at some distance from an authentic interior life. It means being alienated from my own self. For too long I’ve been cut off from my creative, emotional and spiritual body. One of the things I value most is connecting with people and I’ve felt stunted in my ability to do this because of a disconnection from my true self.




I am transitioning because I’m very uncomfortable in my body. For as long as I can remember I haven’t felt right in this skin. When I was young, I remember at times placing my hands over my chest when I had my shirt off, thinking that I shouldn’t be exposing my breasts in public. When I was in 8th grade I vividly remember feeling extremely uncomfortable in the boys locker room. I look at my hands and I see female hands. I look at the hair on my chest, face and legs and wish it were gone. It’s awful. I’ve long thought that my penis doesn’t belong on me and wish it were gone. Sometimes in the shower, in tears, I will gesture with my hand cutting off my genitals. This is a serious medical condition of which I have no ability to change.

I am transitioning because I want to have authentic intimate relationships. Dating, sex and relationships have been challenging. I’ve had serious discomfort with my body and identity, so it’s been difficult to have a truly honest relationship. Of course some type of relationships are possible. There are many gay men still married to women but too afraid to come out. And, there are of course transgender people married or in relationships but who haven’t come out. I’ve thought about doing this. You know, just simply deny my truth because it is too painful and then get married and act as if everything is fine. But, for me it is more painful to live a lie than it is living my truth, even if it means transitioning.

I am transitioning because I want to align my voice with my passion and purpose. I’m a speaker, educator and in training to be a spiritual teacher and yet I’ve never felt real when talking, whether in person or to a crowd. I feel stuck and like I can’t move forward until I transition and bridge this gap between my identity and my voice.

I am transitioning because I want the anxiety to end. For much of my life I had debilitating full body panic attacks. For several years around the age of 18 I was in my ways housebound. Leaving was terrifying. Trying to work was overwhelming. I remember working as a busser in a restaurant and literally being overwhelmed with panic and feeling like I was outside of my body. Everyday I’d have uncontrollable panic attacks that would crush my morale and further disconnect me from my body. A psychiatrist quickly proscribed me xanax but it only made things worse as it created a sick cycle of dependency. Xanax never treated the core issue. In 2008 I found a wonderful therapist and for the first time in my life I noticed a drastic reduction in my anxiety. I’ve known now for a while that the core reason for such anxiety has been being trapped in the wrong body. Thus, bringing my secret out of the shadows in therapy and to friends has been crucial to my healing process.

I am transitioning because I want a future. I’ve seen stories of young transgender children who are hopeless, suicidal and depressed and placed on lots of medications. As soon as they are allowed to dress and express themselves as they want they are immediately off all medications and their behavior drastically changes. They become very happy! I know that transitioning doesn’t solve all personal problems but it can make a huge difference. I know because the times that I’ve dressed as a woman at parties or elsewhere I’ve felt incredibly alive. I have access to a creative energy that is lacking in my daily life. Transitioning won’t cure all of life’s ills but it will help reduce the daily stress of being stuck in the wrong body. I have dreams, passions and goals that have been on hold.

Unlearning Sexism

Raised as a man in a sexist and patriarchal culture I was taught that men were better and smarter than women. Ingrained deeply in our institutions, cultural norms and social practices is the belief in the inferiority of women. Think about it. What’s the worst thing you can call a boy or a man? Girl, woman, sissy or some name for the feminine. We must ask then, what does this say about how our culture views women? You can hurl all kinds of insults at a man but the worst is to be called a girl!

I’m unlearning my own sexism and transphobia. I’ve held prejudices against myself! But I’ve been reeducating myself. I now know that some Native American cultures hold two-spirit people in high esteem as the spiritual leaders and mediators between tribes. Just because one culture marginalizes and discriminates against transgender people doesn’t mean that it is the end all and be all. Now, I see transgender people as having unique gifts to offer the world. We can help continue the democratization process of this country and teach people about the diversity in human nature. I’m now seeing that I have a special opportunity to experience this world in a different way than most. Despite all of my struggles I can now embrace my true self and share my heart with the world.

Transgender Life

There are approximately 750,000 transgender people in the United States and countless others worldwide. While we are still a minority, recent years have seen an increase in media awareness and social acceptance. You may have seen Cher’s transgender son Chaz Bono on the reality show Dancing with the Stars and followed the controversy that it spurred. The cover story of the New Republic in August was about transgender people. It was titled “Welcome to America’s Next Great Civil Rights Struggle,” and offered a wonderful story and photos about transgender life and profiled several people. The first transgender firefighter was just hired on the NY fire department. In the last few years there have been a few famous female transgender models which have been profiled internationally. Several shows such as ABC 20/20, Nightline, Tyra Banks, Oprah and others have run very positive reports on transgender children and the struggles they go through. Recently, Kim Petras became the youngest person to have full sex-reassignment surgery at age 16. She is a budding pop-star. Everyday there are news stories about transgender people breaking boundaries in sports, education, government and business.


Chaz Bono

Of course there is still a long ways to go. There has recently been a series of murders of transgender people in Washington D.C. Public knowledge about transgender people is still very limited despite some growing awareness. Transgender people still face discrimination and harrasment in the workplace and society. And of course there are varieties of oppression that transgender people face. I’m white and middle class with a graduate degree. I will still experience privileges that transgender people of color, poor people, differently abled or those without access to higher education will not. Regarding the whole Chaz Bono controversy a psychiatrist on Fox news compared transgender people to farm animals. Surprisingly, the Fox host Megyn Kelly strongly defended transgender people against these attacks, but his hateful words will still influence many. And of course Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed which paved the way for gays and lesbians to be out and open in the military. But, this had no effect on transgender people as they can still be kicked out of the military at will. And there are still numerous states where one can be legally fired for simply being gay, lesbian or transgender.

Supporting My Transition

Now I need your help! I’ve taken a HUGE step in starting transitioning without the funds to continue it. I hope to raise $10,000 to cover the continuing costs of laser hair removal, hormone treatment, doctor visits, therapy, clothing and possible surgeries. If you can’t donate anything then I simply ask that you become more educated about transgender issues. There are lots of great resources out there and I’d be happy to answer any questions as well. FYI: For now, until I transition fully I prefer a male pronoun.

Please donate to my Indie Go Go campaign: http://www.indiegogo.com/transgender

Thank you to everyone who has supported me on my journey and listened to my story! Lots of love! And don’t forget to Live Out Loud!

In Peace,
Be Scofield




Be Scofield is a Dr. King scholar, founder of God Bless the Whole World and studying to be an interfaith minister at Starr King School for the Ministry. He writes for Tikkun magazine and Alternet.org. He is currently teaching a graduate course called “Dr. King and Empire” about the radical teachings of MLK Jr. Follow him on twitter: http://twitter.com/bescofield

[American Dream]