#bookpassage

Their euphoria intensifies, while you only grow quietly embarrassed for them.

At some point during the evening they will intuit you are judging their follies and become self-conscious. They will despise you for depriving them of the bliss of drunken excess by virtue of your watching.

The reaction is much the same from the gluttonous, rich, and powerful when one reminds them that the resources of the environment are not infinite.

They might continue to plunder, but they will hate you for bringing conscience into their debauchery, for turning the light on during the orgy.

'Why, the house was burning down, but we were so enjoying the glow…'

— Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

this is an excerpt from one of my Sunday Love Letters. If you’d like to subscribe, you can do that here.

*** 

This was an unusual week for me. Not only did I leave the house, I left the country! And WITHOUT CHILDREN IN TOW.

It was amazing.

It was also a bit surreal.

I went to San Francisco to see Rebecca Solnit and Soraya Chemaly in conversation at Book Passage. 

They were talking about Soraya Chemaly's new book Rage Becomes Her(aff) (it's TERRIFIC).

I interviewed Soraya five years ago for a piece I wrote in 2013 for Salon about the online harassment of women.

(It was called Women’s free speech is under attack: The threats and trolling women receive online silence them just as effectively as any censorship.)

At the time, Soraya was working in her role at Women's Media Centre advocating for the protection of women's speech and working with online platforms, trying to steer them into developing methods of preventing/reporting online abuse.

At the precise moment we talked for my piece, there were spontaneous and organized online campaigns mounting against women who dared to suggest women's faces should be on currency.

It would only get worse.

The next year, in 2014, Gamergate erupted. Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian were targets of such wide-scale, organized, deliberate abuse that they had to move out of their homes and have security when they appeared in public. The misogynist networks that coalesced to abuse them still arguably help mobilize and fuel murderous incel rage and massacres and white nationalism. It's not simply that people say unkind or critical things online, which is how the issue is sometimes deliberately misunderstood; it's that men (and primarily white men) are trying to take back spaces that they think belong to them -- starting with the internet, where they meet and build take-down skills and fortify each other in their misogyny and racism, and arguably continuing through to Charlottesville and the most recent US presidential election.

Anyway. All this is to say that's how I "met" Soraya five years ago-- around the topic of how men organize online to silence and terrorize women. Fun times!

And then at Soraya's reading on Thursday, I met Anita Sarkeesian, who was in the audience.

When I came home and told my 14 year old daughter that I met Anita Sarkeesian, she screamed. She follows Feminist Frequency and LOVES Anita, Ebony Adams, and Carolyn Petit. Meeting Anita Sarkeesian -- by accident, for all of a minute!! -- gave me so much cred in my daughters' eyes. She took the postcard Anita gave me promoting her new book and stashed it in her box o' precious things. I wish I'd had Anita sign it.

Sidenote: Anita Sarkeesian and Ebony Adams have a new book coming out next week. It's called History Vs Women (aff) and it profiles several badass feminists who've been left out of the usual history books.

I digress.

What I WANTED to tell you was that I was staying with my friend in El Cerrito and on Thursday morning, we went out for a walk. When we came back, their wife said we should really watch the hearings, because it was unbelievable the way Brett Kavanaugh conducted himself vs how Dr. Ford conducted herself. His anger, she said. His anger.

She was right. We watched the clips with growing sense of wonder, and not the good kind.

It was so stark, so obvious. It was everything we already knew about power and gender and social conditioning, happening right before our eyes. Here's a woman who has experienced incredible violation and trauma yet she's composed, accommodating, helpful, and brilliantly self-expressive. Here's a man who is accused of being a serial predator, and he's nominated for one of the most prestigious + powerful offices in the land, and he cannot keep his shit together. He's palpably angry and not handling it well. He's flinging it all over the place, simultaneously not caring who it lands on and HOPING it lands on people and hurts them and punishes them. And oh my god, the entitlement.

As my friend pointed out, the conditioning applied to feminized persons just makes for better humans.

I was watching this, as a survivor, suspecting it was all a sham. They'd have this hearing, and confirm the nomination anyways -- but they'd be able to say that due process happened! Fuckers.

So, appropriately, I was fairly outraged. And scheduled to attend a reading about feminist rage, by a feminist, with two other feminists.

PURRRRRFECT.

It was the right place, with the right people, on the right day.

A room full of outraged feminist, talking about a book about rage.

Before Rebecca Solnit and Soraya Chemaly even started talking about Soraya's new book, they opened up a discussion about the hearings. People in the audience were sharing their thoughts, reactions, insights, experiences.

I wish you were there. It was the pure feminist fortification we needed after a day like that.

It was SO AFFIRMING. It was so hopeful. (Rebecca Solnit, over and over again said, "I'm the hope lady" -- referring to her book, Hope in the Dark (aff).)

Van Jones said something on TV about the hearings: that there is a superpower in the US, and it's angry women.

I'm hoping he's right; and I'd modify that to say feminists instead of women. Not all feminists are women; and goddess knows you can't count on all women, especially not patriarchy-aligned white women (Trump-voting women, I'm looking at you. Not that any of them are likely to read this newsletter.)

After the reading, which was AMAZING -- of course Rebecca and Soraya were incredible, but it was the brilliance and solidarity in the room that refuelled me -- I went to dinner with Linda Bacon [Health at Every Size (aff), Body Respect (aff)] and Virgie Tovar [You Have the Right To Remain Fat (aff)].

I have to admit: the whole trip I was thinking, how is this my life???!! And with each conversation and connection with each brilliant person I have admired for years, that feeling only intensified.

The day, which started with despair and outrage, became non-stop feminist affirmation and galvanization. My gawd, the brilliance and joy and resourcefulness our collective contains.

And even how I was able to take this trip to San Francisco is because of feminist solidarity and their sharing of time and resources.

I was telling my sister how important Soraya's work and her new book Rage Becomes Her is to me; how I wish I could go to this event featuring two of my feminist heroes. But I just moved and the move ate all my money, there's no one to take care of my kids, blah blah blah.

My (super-feminist) sister said, "BUT I WORK FOR AN AIRLINE, KELLY."

And lo, free tickets materialized.

My mom, who regularly writes me expletive-filled texts about government officials and this hearing and recently wrote Nike a thank you note celebrating their partnership with Colin Kaepernick, said, "Grandma has got this."

And she did, in my house with my four kids, for two days.

And than MORE THAN ONE friend in the Bay Area said come stay with me!

And then dinner plans materialized.

AND I AM FUELLED UP.

We schemed, we dreamed. We affirmed and galvanized each other so we've got the energy and resources to keep moving forward, keep resisting, keep culture-making, keep inventing a future where shit like this -- from sexual assault to institutional collusion -- WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE.

I'm writing this yes, to share a little pocket of extraordinary joy from my life with you. (Seriously, this is not my ordinary routine, so it was the literal definition of extraordinary). Joy is fuel too, and contagious, and ought to be shared with abandon.

But I'm also writing to encourage you to get together with other feminists and process what happened.

Affirm each other. Fortify and strengthen each other. It really, really, REALLY helps to do this with other people, in community, rather than just in your own head.

AND THEN PLOT SOMETHING TOGETHER.

A workshop. A protest. A piece of art. An op-ed. A series of social media posts. A new feminist book club so you can help raise consciousness among friends and family. An appointment to reconvene and refuel each other each week. Some kind of collaboration, some kind of action. It doesn't have to be huge. But let's keep pushing the movement and analysis and solidarity forward.

I'm finding ways to collaborate with brilliant feminist folk. Because it's easy for groups and systems to target one person and take them down.

(Or try to. Anita Sarkeesian is still here, still working, still thriving.)

But it's awfully hard to outnumber a multitude.

Let's be so connected to each other and so powerful in our solidarity that we are impossible to silence.

Let's make a future that is fair and feminist.

We can only do that together.