Peanut Butter (or Lead) And Pineapples

I get very annoyed when people talk about the mommy track. Women do not drop out of the workforce because they have children and families. They drop out because the entire conventional business world is predicated on the concept of a housewife. The corporate structure was designed and implemented at a time in past history when it was assumed that men would be the only people ever going to work and there would always be a women at home taking care of everything else. The world has changed completely. The corporate structure hasn’t. In a world that is dominated in every single industry by white guys at the top talking to white guys about other white guys, completely separate to family and child considerations, sensible women look up at the top of their company, at the top of their industry and go, “Who the fuck would ever want to work like that?”

To be an immigrant in America is to wait. This goes double for the millions of immigrants who have found themselves at the sour end of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureaucracy—and triple in the age of Trump. If you are an immigrant in the process of deportation proceedings, you must wait for your Master Calendar, on which a bureaucrat will assign you to a check-in date several months into the future. At this check-in, you may win several more months of anxious waiting—or disappear into a detention center, where you will wait for a one-way plane ride to a country you may no longer know. And if, for instance, your paperwork is straight but, twenty years ago, you jumped a turnstile or got into a barfight, then ICE has a mandate to hunt you down. Once snatched, you, too, will wait in a detention center, losing your job, your apartment, and possibly your health, while the months pass until a judge grants you a bond hearing. Then, you will appear in court—in chains or via video link—and learn how many thousands of dollars your family must pay for you to have the privilege of waiting outside a cage.

I became a writer because I notice too much, feel too much, need to share. The sensitive child’s survival turned career. I want to be a charitable writer, to see the world from beyond my tribal loyalties. I’m capable of being this kind of writer because I believe that everyone is fundamentally reasonable. How to stay charitable while staying safe? How to see the world clearly, openly, from behind the defenses I need to get through a woman’s life? Dear men on the internet who want something from me: I refuse to lose it — the part of me that’s accessible, that’s kind, the part of me that’s willing and able to understand the likes of you.

I’d started off assuming that the rental schema somehow undercut the idea of unconditional love. Now I found myself wondering whether it was even possible to get unconditional love without paying. The questions I’d been asking myself about what Ishii really felt for Reiko and her daughter made more sense when I thought about them in these terms. A person can do things professionally—for a set time, in exchange for money and recognition—that she can’t do indefinitely for free. I knew that Ishii had put a lot of preparation into his job, watching family movies to learn how “a kind father” would walk, talk, and eat. Likewise, I had read about a host-club worker who studied romance novels in order to be able to anticipate and fulfill his clients’ every need, and consequently had no time left for a personal life. “Women’s ideal romance entails hard work,” he said, “and that is nearly impossible in the real world.” He said he could never have worked so hard for a real girlfriend. I thought about my missed shrink appointment, and about a psychology professor I met, Kenji Kameguchi, who has been trying for the past thirty years to popularize family therapy in conflict-averse, stoical Japan, where psychotherapy is still stigmatized. He said that he thought rental relatives were, in an unschooled way, fulfilling some of the functions of group-therapy techniques such as psychodrama, in which patients act out and improvise one another’s past situations or mental processes. Dramatic reënactments can help people in a way that talking with them can’t, because even when we are unable to tell someone what our problem is—because it’s too terrible to say, or because we don’t have the right words, or because we don’t know what it is—we can still act it out with another person. In this light, transference, a key element of Freudian psychotherapy, may be viewed as a process by which the therapist becomes the patient’s rental relative—as Freud put it, “the reincarnation of some important figure out of his childhood or past.”

79,000 Trafficked Kids in Texas? Trying to get to the scope of America's human-trafficking problem, Axell mentioned on The Stream that a new study found "79,000 children" were being trafficked for sex in the state of Texas alone. But there are a few important things to note about that study. First, the 79,000 figure didn't refer exclusively to minors, but rather to people ages 25 and below—something Axtell should have known, considering the organization she works for helped conduct the study (though she did not mention this). Second, the method used to arrive at this figure is questionable. "It is important to recognize that our approach was not to count [known] cases" of human trafficking, the report states, nor to survey Texas households for an estimation of trafficking victimization rates. Instead, researchers interviewed social-services groups and others who might be likely to encounter trafficked teens and learned that about 25 percent of teens these crisis- and support organizations worked with were trafficking victims. From there, researchers came up with various conditions they believed to put youth at risk of being victimized—including homelessless and being served by the state Department of Family Protective Service—and estimated the total number of Texas minors in those groups, then took 25 percent of each group, and added these numbers together to arrive at the figure of 78,998.

If what politicians and careless celebrities tout are true, the only good whore is one who has been rescued and reformed. (We’re still waiting to see what such reformation and rehabilitation looks like in practice—it never seem to include any options for sustainable alternative employment.) To them, she is not the whore who defends your basic human rights to enjoy sexual autonomy, free speech, and artistic expression. Nor is she the one who challenges our common understandings of fidelity, wealth, and power. Similarly, it would appear that Congress is willing to believe a sensational “child trafficking” scare without evidence or an endgame, and without consulting those who have been trafficked; likely because of this good whore/bad whore dichotomy in which there are only victims and criminals. Sex workers have attempted to inform politicians that women across the class, gender, race, and age spectrums choose this line of work out of necessity and desire. We’ve told them repeatedly that within these intersections there are also victims of trafficking, there are survivors of trafficking who go on to choose sex work, there are those who never have a choice, and there are survivors who are trying to leave sex work and find themselves stymied by whorephobic hiring policies. And we’ve explained time and time again that naturally, transparency and decriminalization can help ferret out traffickers and that the best resources for stopping sex trafficking are sex workers. While our cause is nuanced and complicated, the laws against us are simple: those in power are against the sex industry because it exists outside of the legitimized marketplace and some women, queer, trans, and othered people find that sex work gives them more bodily autonomy and power than a straight job. SESTA was passed 97 to 2 by senators who have more likely than not employed sex workers themselves, under a president who may be getting sued by one.