Girls Just Wanna Ride Bikes...In Iran

If you were going to start a movement, would you ban 51 percent of the people from participating in it?

Perhaps that seems like a rhetorical, or merely silly, question. 

It is, however, one that is begged by a turn of events in a country full of paradoxes.

I'm not talking about the US Presidential election campaign.  Rather, I am referring to a something that happened in a country where such things normally don't happen--and what resulted in one part of that country. 

The nation in question is performs more gender-reassignment surgeries than any country except Thailand.  Yet its leader once famously declared that there are no homosexuals in his country.

By now, you may have realized that I am talking about Iran. 

It's not a country noted for its advanced environmental policies.  So more than a few eyebrows were raised when, in November 2015, environmental activists in Aran, an industrial city in the western province of Markazi, introduced the idea of "Tuesdays Without Cars" or, more generally, "Clean Tuesdays", on which people are invited to leave their cars at home and, instead, commute by bicycle. 

The idea quickly spread and now all of the Iran's provinces have joined in.  Now it's on the verge of becoming a national event.

But national events aren't easy to coordinate in a country like Iran.  I have never been there, but I have been told that in at least one sense, it's like neighboring Turkey, where I have spent some time:  there are great cultural differences from one region to another.  So, in a city like Tehran or Istanbul, there are neighborhoods full of people who live lives not too dissimilar from those in Western capitals.  However, in both cities, there are also conservative religious enclaves.  So, it almost goes without saying that in the countryside, customs and interpretations of Islam are, shall we say, not exactly liberal.

In Marivan, a county of Kurdistan province about 500 kilometers from Markazi, some women were stopped on 29 July for the crime of...cycling.  At least, some police officers had the idea that women on bikes were haram.  For the time being, women can't ride bikes on the streets in the area.

While there is nothing in Iranian legal codes that prohibits women from cycling, in places like Marivan, the idea of a woman riding a bicycle goes against traditional religious values--or, at least, interpretations of them.

Now, I am certainly no expert on the Qu'ran or Sharia law, but I don't think anything in either would exclude women from riding bicycles, specifically.  But some would interpret those texts, which warn against shameful acts, to mean that women should not ride bicycles.

Or, at least, they would interpret them to mean that women should not be seen riding bicycles in public.  Upon hearing about the July incident, Mamousta Mostafa Shirzadi, the Friday prayer Imam for Marivan, said that officials of the Sport and Youth Organization "need to provide" the women an "appropriate indoor space" for cycling.

In response, organizers of Tuesdays Without Cars pointed out that women, as much as men, need to be able to use their bikes as transportation-- and not just for exercise or recreation, which is all that an indoor space would allow.

Here is a video from a protest against the ban:




Below is a still from a video of a mother and daughter defying the de facto ban on women cycling:




A mother and daughter defy the fatawa against women cycling.

 

The Double Bind

This morning, before going for a bike ride, I went to the store.  Along the way, I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen in a while.  She recently completed her Master of Fine Arts degree.  For her thesis, she made multi-media collages that celebrated women’s sexuality.  While she was working on it and taking her classes, she had a job in the same institution where she earned her degree.

She talked about the shame and guilt she had to overcome to do her creative work.  It occurred to me then that women still have to get past the notions that we are tainted and damned simply because we are women and have sexual desires, whatever they may be.  And people denounce us whether or not we express who we are.  Those who tell us that we’re being too conservative or dowdy are the first ones to condemn us for wearing anything that even hints at our sexuality, and those who denounce us for being “too sexy” are the ones who complain that we’re “too boring” when we “tone it down.”

I’m thinking now about Segolene Royal, who lost the French Presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.  She’s been voted “the best-dressed politician in Europe and, while not provocative, does not play down her physical attractiveness.  In response to those who criticized her for that, she’s said, “Who says politicians have to be ugly and boring?”

It occurs to me now that this is one of the dilemmas trans people face all the time.  Those of us who identify as women experience everything I’ve just described and, because we have lived as males, we are probably even less prepared for it than people who’ve lived their entire lives as female.  It even happens to someone like Caitlyn Jenner:  There has been the sort of praise and damnation we’ve come to expect, from the people we’ve come to expect.  But there are also people who’ve criticized her for being too glamorous or, as one female celebrity said only half in jest, “Who does she think she is, looking better than I look?”

Now I realize that this bind women, and trans people in particular, face is one of the things that exacerbated the plight of the Lost Generation of Transgenders to which I’ve alluded in other posts. After gaining some visibility—and even a little support—during the 1960’s and 1970’s, trans people were rendered visible, at best, and vilified, at worst.  As I’ve mentioned,  the more extreme aspects of Second-Wave Feminism—sparked by Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire and by other writers, scholars and activists like Mary Daly and Germaine Greer—helped to undo the small gains we made during the previous two decades. 

During the time when we—all right, I’ll say it—were moving with the moment of the nascent Gay Rights movement—trans people were taught to efface all signs of the gender they were assigned at birth and to, in essence, re-invent their pasts.  In brief, we got by (to the degree we did) through induced amnesia and denial.  That, of course, was not a healthy way to live, but it was better than simply being denied and negated altogether.

However, around the same time as Raymond, Daly and their ilk were saying that we were simply men who wanted to take jobs in Women’s Studies departments, there was a “conservative backlash” against whatever gains women, including trans women, made.  Ronald Reagan had been elected; while he is by no means the only cause of the backlash, he at the very least galvanized it.  Although women were becoming lawyers, professors and corporate executives, they were always “under the microscope”:  criticized when they tried to look professional and vilified when they tried to express any kind of personal style.  This actually dovetailed very neatly with Second Wave feminism:  Phyllis Schlafly and Germaine Greer were both saying that womanhood existed only within a very rigid set of boundaries.  What neither Schlafly’s Evangelical Christian conservatives nor Germaine Greer and the Second Wavers never acknowledged, however—or perhaps didn’t realize—is that they were defining womanhood in terms that were set by men long before they or their mothers or grandmothers were born.

The few (at least in comparison to the numbers who came before and after) trans people who decided to live as the people they are during that time were therefore doubly damned.  In addition, the Gay Rights movement focused its attention on the newly-developing HIV/AIDS pandemic—as they should have.  As most of those afflicted at the time were men, HIV/AIDS activism—and, with it, the gay rights movement—became  almost wholly male-centered.  Even lesbians had to subsume their interests and needs; there was almost no room, it seemed, for trans women to simply exist, let alone define ourselves, as a group and individually, and flourish. 

Thus, I think it will be some time before trans women—and women generally—will be able simply to express who we are, sexually and otherwise, and reap the fruits of our labor and talents.  In the meantime, we’re going to be damned—by some people, anyway—whether are or aren’t, can or can’t, will or won’t, do or don’t.

Why The Fact That An Adjunct Teaches Your Class Is A Feminist Issue

Someone passed this very interesting article from the Feminist Daily News  to me:

April-02-14

Adjunct Faculty Demand Fair Pay and Benefits

Prompted by a homeless adjunct professor's one-woman protest outside the New York State Department of Education in Albany, adjunct professors across the nation took to Twitter over the weekend to call attention to the low-wages and exploitation of adjuncts working in higher education.

Mary-Faith Cerasoli went to Albany during Spring Break to protest working conditions for adjunct college professors. Cerasoli is an adjunct at Mercy College in New York where she teaches a full courseload, but makes only $22,000 per year before taxes. Ineligible for public assistance, Cerasoli relies on friends for shelter but is sometimes forced to live out of her car - a gift from a used-car dealer in Westchester, NY. Cerasoli has no office, no health benefits, and a sizeable debt-load thanks to unpaid student loans and medical bills. "They call us professors, but they're paying us at poverty levels," she said. "I just want to make a living from a skill I've spent 30 years developing."

Cerasoli is not alone. Adjunct professors - the majority of whom are women - are contract employees usually paid per course taught, and the pay is low. The average adjunct is paid less than $3,000 for a typical three-credit course, but one study found that adjuncts at several colleges reported earning less than $1,000. The vast majority of adjuncts do not receive health insurance, retirement benefits, or sick leave, and many must cobble together a living, often by traveling miles to teach at multiple campuses. In terms of annual compensation, then, adjuncts earn between $18,000 and $30,000, without any benefits, for the equivalent of full-time work, compared to "tenure-track" professors who earn between $68,000 to $116,000 plus benefits.

Some adjuncts have joined labor unions at their institutions in order to organize for better pay and working conditions, but the average adjunct professor is still a source of cheap labor for many colleges. And the use of adjuncts is more widespread than ever. Adjunct professors now make up approximately half of all college faculty.

"I had this idea that I could get a job so that I could have a good income to support my son, and it didn't work out that way," explained Nicole Beth Wallenbrock, an adjunct professor featured on PBS NewsHour. "I'm a precarious worker. I have no job security."

Media Resources: Minneapolis Star Tribune 3/31/14; PBS NewsHour 3/31/14, 2/6/14; New York Times, 3/27/14; The Nation 7/11/13; The Chronicle of Higher Education 1/4/13

The issue of adjunct (i.e., paid as part-time) instructors in colleges and universities has been getting some attention in the media lately.  But this article is the first I've seen that framed the adjunctification of higher education as a feminist (i.e., women's; a.k.a., gender) issue.

And it is exactly such an issue--unless, of course, you believe that the fact that faculties have gone from having almost no adjuncts thirty years ago to having adjunct majorities today and the fact that women constitute the majorities of many departments is purely coincidental.  Or that the fact that every trade and profession that has ever gone from being mainly male to mainly female has lost respect, let alone prestige, not to mention pay relative to the consumer price index.  Or that the least-respected professions--and the ones avaricious managers try to bully--are the ones that employ mainly women.

What Nobody Planned

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

ROBINSON HALL

CAMBRIDGE 33, MASSACHUSETTS

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN DEPARTMENT OF CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING

June 21, 1961

Mrs. Alvin Richman

3055 16th Street, NW.

Washington 11, D. C.

Dear Mrs. Richman:

Although we have not yet received your official transcript from Brandeis, on the basis of your letters of recommendation there would seem to be a possibility of your admission to the Department of City and Regional Planning even at this date.

However -- to speak directly -- our experience, even with brilliant students, has been that married women find it difficult to carry out careers in planning, and hence tend to have some feeling of waste about the time and effort spent in professonal education. (This is, of course, true of almost all graduate professional studies.)

Therefore, for your own benefit, and to aid us in coming to a final decision, could you kindly write us a page or two at your earliest convenience indicating specifically how you might plan to combine a professional life in city planning with your responsibilities to your husband and a possible future family?

Sincerely yours,

William A. Doebele, Jr.

Assistant Professor 

 for the Department

*******************************************

 

"Mrs. Alvin" is, in fact, Phyllis.  She was the Washington Post's restaurant critic from 1976 until 2000.  

Ms. Richman also managed to write books about food--including "food mysteries" as well as numerous articles on other topics for other publications.  And, oh yeah, she raised three kids, who are successful professional who report fulfilling lives.

But, as you can see, that was not what she envisioned in 1961.  She wanted a career in urban planning. A few years later, she would follow her husband when he got a job teaching political science at Purdue University.  She thought about enrolling in that school's urban planning program, but it was part of the engineering school.  Thus, the program emphasized things like land use and architecture. But Ms. Richman opted against it because she was more interested in people and the impact that urban planning has on our lives. 

She would, like many ambitious, intelligent women of her time, fashion a career around the "duties" to which Professor Doebele alluded in his letter.  

Fifty-two years after receiving that letter, she wrote back to Professor Doebele, who taught at Havard until 1997.  And he responded to her.  To be fair, he said he wouldn't write such a letter today, though he defended having written it.

I chose to write about Ms. Richman's story because, while interesting in its own right, it's also relevant now, as more states and countries are legalizing same-sex marriage and passing laws (or amending laws currently on the books) to ban discrimination based on gender identity, expression, history or appearance.  These things simply would not be happening were it not for the gains that women have made in the workplace, education and other areas of life.  While, as Professor Doebele says, things are "far from perfect," they are better.  And the fact that women are still fighting and making gains offers us lessons in the struggle for LGBT--and especially transgender--equality.

(You can see a copy of the original letter here.) 
  

Susan B. Anthony On Cycling

"Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance."

Those words were uttered by none other than Susan B. Anthony.  What she said was not at all hyperbolic:  bicycling almost single-handedly brought women's clothing from the 19th to the 20th Centuries.  

In this illustration from an 1895 issue of Punch magazine, the young woman on the left is wearing the then-new "bicycle suit."  The woman on the right, in contrast, is wearing the ankle-length skirt and bodice that were more typical of women's attire until that time.  

I wonder whether the woman in the "bicycle suit" is wearing some sort of girdle or other torture device to cinch her waist. Looking at the woman on the right, and knowing about the fashions of the time, I would guess that she had a corset underneath her outfit.  By the end of the decade, that undergarment would become as outmoded as seamed stockings would later become.  As women were released from the bondage of whalebone, their skirts got shorter and, sometimes, morped into the then-shocking "bloomers", which resembled, more than anything, old-style Turkish trousers.

Even Susan B. Anthony herself probably didn't realize how true her comment was.  Even during the "dark ages" of cycling in the US, women wore clothing that allowed much greater freedom of movement than what their grandmothers donned.  So, by the time the "bike boom" of the 1970's came along, it was that much easier for us to ride--and to work 18-hour days.

National Coming Out Day

Today is the 25th National Coming Out Day.

When the first such day was held, "coming out", even for white lesbians and gay men and lesbians who were secure in their jobs and lives, was a risky proposition.  The so-called "Gay Liberation" of the 1970's boomeranged into a conservative backlash during the 1980s.  (I apologize for the mixed metaphors.)  

One reason was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Of course, the election didn't happen in a vacuum:  There was a counter-revolution to the Gay Rights movement, just as there was for the Women's and Civil Rights movements.  That counter-revolution was not always visible or audible:  Most of the time, it was more like a series of tremors that one only felt when one happened to be in its path.  Those tremors culminated in the earthquake of Reagan's election.

Perhaps even more important, though, was the outbreak of HIV/AIDs.  In the early years of the epidemic, all of its known (or, at any rate, recorded) victims were believed to be gay men, intravenous drug users, Haitians or West Africans.  The last three groups I've mentioned were near the bottom of the American socio-economic ladder; the early path of the epidemic caused many Americans to lump gay men with them.  Naturally, that only helped to inflame existing prejudices against gay men.

Another reason, I believe, why "coming out" was difficult during the 1980's was that many people associated lesbians with the most shrill and hateful kinds of feminists (or pseudo-scholars who called themselves feminists, anyway).  The conservatives and religious hatemongers who were spouting anti-gay rhetoric tended to look none too kindly on feminists anyway; the association those conservatives made between feminists and lesbians surely made things worse for both.

If it was difficult for gays and lesbians to come out in 1988, you can only imagine how much worse things were for trans people.  Of the trans people I've met (which include everything from those who haven't yet begun-- or who have chosen not to-- to transition, to post-ops), it seems that there are, chronologically, two groups: the ones who transitioned during or before the early 1980's, and the ones who transitioned during or after the early 1990's.  

If my observations in any way reflect what has happened throughout the trans community, there is a "lost generation" of trans people--the ones who didn't transition during the decade or so between the two groups I've mentioned.  That period almost perfectly coincides with the conservative backlash I've mentioned against gays and lesbians, and that "lost generation" includes many who took their own lives or who died slower deaths from drug and alcohol abuse, as well as those who simply didn't transition and those--including yours truly--who transitioned later in their lives than they might have otherwise.

So, even though we have a long way to go, things are certainly better for us, in many ways, than they were in 1988.  National Coming Out Day is one reason for that.

From Angel To Working Girl

Even if you're not my age, you've heard the song at least 500 times on the radio.  You might have even heard it that many times if you don't listen to the radio anymore.  So, you might be sick of it.  I'm not:  I guess if I'm not by now, I never will be.

I'm talking about Angel of the Morning, a megahit (and just about the only hit) for Merrillee Rush and The Turnabouts.  I've always liked her voice, which was classically trained, and the classical instrumentation.  If Sheryl Crow had been born about fifteen years earlier than she was, she might have been Merrilee, though I'm glad things didn't turn out that way!

You've also probably heard (or read) that some people regard Angel a kind of proto-feminist anthem.  It certainly is a song about a woman who can stand on her own two feet. ("I won't beg you to stay," she says to the guy with whom she has an apparent one-nighter.)  In that sense, it was certainly different from just about any other pop song of that time, and arguably more enlightened than much of what is being sung today.

I'm mentioning all of this because, for the first time in a long time, I listened to the eponymous album on which the song is found.  Some of the other songs are forgettable pop "filler", no better or worse than other things you've heard from that time.  But a couple of other songs are good, or at least interesting.

One of them is called Working Girl.  If you listen to it, remember that the album was released in 1968.  To my knowledge, nobody was using the term "sexual harassment."  But that's exactly what the song's lyrics describe.  ("Mr. Jones--is that a ring on your hand?  A new job?  No, I like it here.  Yes, I read your intentions clear.")  As with Angel, there is nothing else like it from that time, and hardly anything like it since.  

From what I've mentioned so far, it probably isn't surprising that Merrilee would have recorded such a song.  But, the song actually turns into the polar opposite of Angel.  The protagonist of the song doesn't stand up for herself (Then again, how could she have done so in 1968?); instead she wishes that some man would "find this working girl, and give her heart a home".  

What makes those lines all the more jarring is that on the album, only one other track separates Angel of the Morning from Working Girl.  The song in between, That Kind of Woman, is about a woman in an affair with a married man.  It's not bad, but it isn't as beautiful as Angel or as tense and lugubrious as Working.

After Angel, Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts released, if I'm not mistaken, two more albums, neither of which had the impact of Angel. (How could they, really?)  Now she and her husband, singer/songwriter Billy Mac, live in a farmhouse her grandfather built in the countryside near Seattle, her birthplace.  There, they do a thriving business in raising English sheepdogs.