Setting: Branch X of Enormous Evil Bank, downtown San Francisco. There are two male tellers and one female teller. Janna is making a deposit at the female teller’s station.

Female Teller: (to Janna) Just swipe your card here …

Guy A: (loudly, to Guy B) So I think I’m gonna go over to [unnamed town across the Bay] this weekend.
Guy B: (equally loudly, in response) Oh, yeah. The girls over there are real slutty.
Guy A: Yeah, seriously. I always head over there when I’m looking for a good time.

Female Teller: (to Janna) Ok, here’s your receipt. Have a great day.
Janna: (in response) Um, yeah. You too. Maybe your day would actually go better if you locked the Misogynist Losers in the vault. Is it airtight?

Photo mine; background image by Design Action

I went to an event called ¡Rini! ¡PRESENTE! last night. It was a showcase of activist materials featuring the graphic art of Rini Templeton, a woman who is firmly anchored near the top of my “people I’d like to meet, dead or alive” list.

Rini’s art is available for free use to anyone promoting causes in line with those she supported. I’ve used her awesome line drawings for flyers, brochures, posters, leaflets, and other materials ad infinitum while doing anti-racist organizing, health care advocacy, rape crisis work and Take Back the Night planning. Design Action (the way-coolest kids on the Oaktown graphic design block) has this to say about Rini’s art:

It’s almost impossible for anyone doing activism in the last 20 years not to have come across Rini’s work. And if like ourselves, you were always the one putting together the last minute flier, or designing the newsletter, or responsible for making the fund-raiser t-shirts, you will have been intimately familiar with her work.

So true. So very, very true. I have made many a leaflet totally on the fly that would have been bland and unremarkable without Rini’s eye-catching art. I think this contribution is often undervalued - it’s just as essential to have attractive and engaging materials when organizing for social change as it is when, say, selling overpriced shoes. Having images like these makes life so much easier when you’re trying to do ten things at once, as so often happens in community organizing.

Thank you, Rini. Your work has made an indelible mark on social justice work everywhere.

Check out Flickr for more photos from the event.

Lots of people seem to find this site by Googling “Janna,” so I decided to make Project Janna a clearinghouse of sorts. Check out this new page. Jannas are hot.

To see a healthy dose of karmic retribution, check out Holla Back New York City. It’s a website that, as an exercise in empowerment, posts readers’ experiences with sexual harassment. Here’s the site’s self-described mission:

Holla Back NYC empowers New Yorkers to Holla Back at street harassers. Whether you’re commuting, lunching, partying, dancing, walking, chilling, drinking, or sunning, you have the right to feel safe, confident, and sexy, without being the object of some turd’s fantasy. So stop walkin’ on and Holla Back: Send us pics of street harassers!

The photo emphasis is great, because it immediately flips the power dynamic. There are all these awesome stories of some guy standing there with that “I just publicly demeaned you and there is nothing you can do about it” look on his face, until his so-called “victim” pulls out a camera and tells him to look for his pathetic mug on Holla Back NYC.

Websites like this make me want to hug every single person who made the internet possible.

Thanks to Ruxandra for the link.

This post is dedicated to Brooke and to Allie, former and present Community Organizers at my old workplace, the Champaign County Health Care Consumers.

Brooke and Allie have given The Man a real scare by leading the Campaign for Access to Emergency Contraception, which advocates for over-the-counter approval of a drug regimen called Plan B, or the “Morning-After Pill”. While Plan B has been declared safe for non-prescription use by scores of doctors and scientists, and is already dispensed after a brief consultation with a pharmacist in seven states, the FDA is dodging the question on the national level.

Reasons for the delay include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Our country currently has a conservative, antifeminist moron at its helm, which has a trickle-down effect
• In a move that almost constitutes comic relief, a licensed veterinarian was actually appointed director of the Women’s Health Office of the FDA

Obviously, it’s been an uphill battle. I haven’t thought about it much since leaving Illinois, as I no longer have 2,000 condoms and a variety of leaflets encouraging me to back up my birth control sitting a few feet from my desk. However, I was reading the Onion the other day, and came across an article offering “arguments” against legalizing OTC Plan B sales. My personal favorite:

Presence of pill on convenience-store shelves will take up valuable Twix space

Voila! The Morning-After Pill is back on my radar screen, and now I’ve drawn you in as well. Click here to read more Onion-y goodness, here for basic information on Emergency Contraception from Planned Parenthood, and here to send an email to the FDA Commissioner via the NARAL Pro-Choice America website. If you have any clicks left in you, leave a comment about the rad-ness of Brooke, Allie, and all the other activists working hard to protect our reproductive rights.

…so I guess we’ll have to settle for “liar”.

That seems to be the mindset of the Duke lacrosse players’ attorneys. And of course, of the media and anyone who takes CNN at face value.

In case you’ve been protesting the corporatization and homogenization of the mass media by boycotting anything news-related, here’s a summary of what is going on:

• Last month, Duke University’s lacrosse team, which has a longstanding reputation for being really obnoxious, had a party for which they hired two strippers.
• Both strippers left at some point because they felt uncomfortable with the atmosphere. One was persuaded to return.
• The woman who returned to the party was raped by three members of the lacrosse team.
• She reported the assault, and two players were charged with rape.
• The lacrosse coach quit and the accused players were kicked out of school.

Note: all of this is “alleged”, of course.

Durham, NC, where Duke is located, is a community where enormous tensions around race and class already exist. This case has magnified those issues, and, according to my mom, who lives in the next town over, things are mighty tense over there. The accused are priveleged white students at an elite university. The accuser is a black woman who is stripping to put herself through a less prestigious school. The whole thing is, depending on the outcome, a veritable time bomb.

Now, about that title…the media was very careful to handle this story delicately. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that outright vilifying the rape victim would be a very bad idea under these circumstances. However, I knew they’d find a way to discredit her eventually, and here it is:

She filed a sexual assault report ten years ago and did not follow through with the investigation.

If you read the CNN article here, you will notice it is never overtly stated that this means she was lying. Nor does it state that, therefore, she is probably lying this time. Instead, the article is written in such a way that it assumes the reader would logically come to that conclusion, because what other answer could there be? Well, here are a few scenarios in which dropping the case makes sense:

• She reported the rape several years after it occurred. This means that there would be no physical evidence, which in turn means little chance the case would ever be charged, because it would be virtually impossible to get a conviction. In this situation, the case is usually closed.
• Reporting a rape is traumatic. The victim has to relive the experience by describing it in great detail, usually to several different people. Many survivors discover that they cannot or do not want to continue.
• There are many amazing, empathetic cops out there, but there are awful ones as well. When I was a rape crisis advocate I had a case in which a detective told my client that she couldn’t have been raped because she removed her own shoes. She walked out of the police department feeling worse than she did going in. Yes, that is an extreme example, but it’s not the only instance in which I saw a police officer’s attitude dissuade a survivor from pursuing the case.

I don’t understand why people are so quick to blame rape victims for the actions of their attackers. Why isn’t our collective reaction, “wow, this woman has been gang-raped twice. How incredibly awful”, instead of “yeah, I knew she was lying”? I have enormous respect for this woman, because her life must be a living hell right now. I don’t understand why anyone believes she would subject herself to this experience for attention, or for revenge, or for any other lame reason. Think about it, people. This is no one’s idea of fun.

This is a girl:

This is an adult woman:

NOT A GIRL. Refresh your vocabulary.

Happy International Women’s Day! Check out more blogging against sexism via vegankid’s blog.