My Facebook and Twitter feeds often offer more interesting news than the newspaper ever did.  Today, this article crossed my path, about sexual assault in the music industry:

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/6851561/amber-coffman-speaks-in-depth-about-heathcliff-berru-i-hope-this-is-a-big-wake

Here’s my response.

So the problem isn’t just that this happened once, although even once is a major problem. The problem is that this is part of a continuum of inappropriate boundary violation, especially sexual and body-related boundary violation, that starts much closer to home. Even people I like, love, and respect, who like, love, and respect me (and I don’t doubt that they do–or did), have ignored my explicit and clear requests not to do something. Not just the absence of consent, but the explicit statement of nonconsent. They are good people. But somehow our culture teaches them that they will not get what they want if they ask for it–indeed that asking is somehow wrong.

I’m not making this up.  Because these are people whom I like and love, I’ve had the conversation with them, more than once, about what happened.  I’ve stayed in relationship, stayed in conversation, stayed at the table, because these aren’t strangers, these aren’t scary bosses and obnoxious people on the street (I’ve met them, too, but I have never found an effective way to engage.  I’m scared, usually.  That’s another post.)  What they have somehow come to believe is that if they gently edge their way into the thing they really want, that that’s okay, because they’re going slowly, because they’re giving time for me to say no, because they know that the minute I DO say no, they’ll stop.  They’re not Those Guys Over There who rape people.  They stop, right? They stop when they hear no.

when they hear no

when they HEAR no.  They stop.

gentle does not work.  Subtle does not work.  Sometimes you have to shout.

That is, sometimes you have to shout at your friend and lover who loves you to get them to stop.

Imagine how it feels when someone who is NOT your friend and lover starts bending the boundaries toward the quick of your spirit.  If you shout at them they might stop.

Somehow our culture is teaching our kids, especially boys, that wanting is bad, asking is bad, and that it’s better to just “ask” by gently pushing until something gives.

Add a little power, take away some ethics, and not-so-suddenly, right there, is another step on the continuum.  Nice guys breaching boundaries gently become bosses and supervisors breaching boundaries obliviously becomes sexual assault.  It’s all of a piece, and it’s all interconnected and it all stacks on itself.  So the tiny little comments eat away and eat away and eat away.  They’re not microaggressions, they’re something else, but they’re aggressive.  And they hurt.  And they’re exhausting.

This is more than just a grope.

This is the tip of an iceberg.

Recently, I was waxing poetic about handsaws.  Specifically, about my ryoba, a Japanese handsaw that suits my woodworking needs and style to a T.

Like most Japanese hand tools, it’s designed to make good use of your body weight.

It cuts on the pull stroke.

By contrast, most Western saws cut on the push stroke.  That makes the work harder:

1. A saw that cuts on the push stroke has to withstand a lot of force, so it has to be thick.  A thick saw has to remove more wood as it goes, which is more work.
2. A saw that cuts on the push stroke requires the user to generate that force, instead of allowing gravity and mass to do the work.

The ryoba allows a short, relatively small, relatively unmuscular person to make the best use of their available resources.  The tension that comes from using the pull stroke allows the blade to remain stiff without being thick, so the kerf (the slit left by the saw) is narrower, and less wood is removed.  You lean in the right direction, holding the saw in the right way, and the cut happens almost effortlessly.  You don’t press the saw down, you simply hold it and allow it to do its work.

This is all true, but it is also a metaphor.

I’ve been “working on my money stuff” for quite a while.  There was definitely stuff to work on.  But over the years I’ve stripped away the veils and peeled the onion over and over again, looking for the place where the stuff would be resolved and I could move on in maintenance mode.  Trouble was, I thought I got there a few years ago, but the expected transformations in the rest of my life weren’t forthcoming.

There are a few reasons for that.  I kept digging and found most of them.

But tonight, having been told by my therapist that I really must begin making plans to go to India and not just wishing I could, I realized something else:

all this time I’ve been staring at the money itself, trying to deal with money for money’s sake.

I was pushing away at the saw on principle, because I needed to do it, but there was no larger thing.  Wanting to be financially robust was all there was.  And when it related to someone else, family or loved one, it had to do with fear of their judgment or repercussions, or fear of loss.  My own sense of self was so tattered after a while that while I knew it would feel better to resolve these issues, I couldn’t really imagine it.

But I’ve also been watching my friend Natasha as she raises money to rebuild a village she loves in Nepal.  She is there right now, overseeing the beginning of the building.  When she decided that Nepal was an important thing, it reversed the direction of force.  Instead of pushing from her studio in Brooklyn, she was pulled forward by the force of her dedication and vision of the project in Nepal.  It brought her places and got her to do things that became easy because of her motivation, because of who she was working for and why.

She began to cut on the pull stroke.

I think this is critical.  When we cut on the pull stroke, we are pulled forward into the next right thing by the natural forces surrounding us.  Cutting on the pull stroke allows us to make the best use of the resources we have, rather than wishing we had what we don’t.  Cutting on the pull stroke is where we go when we plug into our larger purpose, our deeper meaning, the work we are truly called to do in the world.

Or just something we really, really want.

Cut on the pull stroke, and everything’s easy.

Let nature draw you forward, and the seas part.

Let it begin.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways in which the liberal communities I’m attached to carry bias.  Race, class, sure, but also other kinds of bias.  This is about our bias against business and money.  It was originally a Facebook post, but it got long and I think it needs to be more permanent.  In working with a client recently, I was helping to reframe their approach to money, and it got my gears turning.

It’s amazing how much just listening to Wharton’s satellite radio for a couple of years in my car gave me access to a different way of thinking–about money, about corporate structure, about the role of these things in shaping the economy, about responsible structures in capitalism.

And understanding that stuff better, having access to voices and real humans talking about it (mostly Wharton professors, pretty good at explaining stuff) helps expand the repertoire of things I can random-access, which is how I synthesize my learning and make new ideas. It means that my eyes don’t glaze over when I look at a budget sheet; it means that when I want to think about an idea for my business, the spreadsheet helps me evaluate it.

BUT most important is that it breaks down the false barriers. Liberal social-change-oriented people tend to resist talking about or engaging with money or business structures. And it consistently shoots our momentum in the foot. We can’t afford to ignore a huge part of the available data because it…what, makes us uncomfortable? We can’t do it with race, we can’t do it with sex…AND we can’t do it with money. Or profit or business. It’s killing us, and putting us at a huge disadvantage relative to people with less liberal values.

We don’t need to take on the values that stereotypical corporations have in order to use the learning and information they have. But we do need to use every tool that’s out there. Including this one.

Listen to business radio. Get the Wharton channel if you can. (Wharton is a business school; they can’t help being educational. If NPR had a business channel, this is what it would sound like.) Read business and finance magazines. Read critically; look for bias; break down statistics. Don’t just assume it’s good interpretation. But learn how the system works. Then you can use it.

A little humor, with apologies to Mary Oliver:

Why I Wake Early (my life is not a walk in the woods)

Hello, cat in my face
Hello you who make the morning
And the evening and all the days and nights
About you
And ow! Your claw, and the nodding off in the afternoon
While you sleep peacefully in the sun
Even when I am miserable and crochety–

Best motivation that ever was,
Your meowing and this river of red
That threatens to overflow its banks today
Right now, onto these sheets and this duvet
If I do not heed its subtle warning
Get up, get up, good morning.

Watch now, how I start the day
In duress, in bloodiness.

A little bit ago I posted to facebook: “Pleasure is not always comfortable.”
And I got two comments back: “Explain?”
So now that I have some time…
sometimes, pleasure is comfortable.
The stress melts away and your nervous system takes off
for the beach
with a little umbrella.
The sympathetic responses calm down.
You breathe easy.
Life is good.
Sometimes, though,
sometimes…
it’s not like that.
Sometimes it’s more like…
fireworks.
Or jumping into a cold mountain stream.
It’s like waking up to your favorite dog licking your face
or a fuck that feels like a steam train.
Sometimes pleasure is a roller coaster,
or jumping off a cliff to see if you can, in fact,
fly.
Pleasure is accomplishing something you didn’t think you could do,
or learning to pole dance with a baby belly,
or figuring out that skinny dipping might be okay,
or talking to that twinkle-eyed person serving tea or tennis balls or time.
Pleasure is making uncomfortable art and sharing it,
or climbing over a chain link fence after getting locked into the garden
because it was such a nice night
and the gnats weren’t bad until the end.
Pleasure is eating bad food in good company
or eating something that you don’t even recognize in a country where you don’t speak the language,
or saying I love you first.
Or saying it at all.
It might be comfortable.
But just as likely
you’re on the skinny branches.
The stars are beautiful out there.

(the kind of enoughness I’m contrasting with here was originated by Jennifer Louden http://jenniferlouden.com/art-of-building-your-truer-life/)

I have often threatened to get a button that says, “This is what a minister looks like.”  People don’t expect me to be a minister.  More, they expect me NOT to be a minister.  Whatever the picture of “minister” in their heads may be, THIS is not it.  That might be why I have such a hard time at interfaith clergy gatherings.  Like Reid Mihalko, who shows up at business conferences wearing his Sex Geek t-shirt, I’m not what they thought they’d see.

It happens to me a lot, and not just about ministry.  Justifying my presence is sometimes fine, and sometimes exhausting, and I do it a lot.  I believe in identity-based spaces.  I think they’re important.

AND

There’s a fine line between identity and exclusion.

In fact, sometimes it’s not even a line at all.

And sometimes that’s okay.

And sometimes…it’s not.

Let’s face it: humans don’t come in binaries very often.  Mostly we come in delightful, complex, multitonal shades of grey.  But when we go to create a group, there has to be an out in order for there to be an in.  It is necessary that someone not belong.

That not-belonging can be determined in a number of ways, but especially in identity politics it is often determined by–obviously–identity.

Who are you?  Who were your parents?  Where are you from?  What color or language do you claim?  Who are you attracted to?  Who do you sleep with?  What do you do for work?

It all seems very clear.  And it all seems very important–for marginalized communities, protected spaces are vital for survival.  There’s no question that being among your people is one of the deepest and cleanest breaths of fresh air available.

And then we, even if we are well-intended and well-educated in the ways of oppression, run headlong into the uncertain marshy territory of intersectionality.

Intersectionality is what happens where the ocean meets the grassy plains.  Sometimes it’s wet.  Sometimes it’s dry.  Sometimes you can walk.  Sometimes you need a boat.  It’s muddy.  It’s messy.  And where exactly the ocean ends and the marsh begins is really up to judgment and imagination.

And enoughness…becomes a much bigger question.

Am I brown enough?  Queer enough?  Asian enough?  Religious enough?

We end up in a kind of mashup of oppression and identity competitions.  But the lines aren’t clear, and are not usually formally drawn.  “If you identify as xyz, please come.”

Well I do.

But if I’m dating a cisguy, or I just look like I have a deep tan, or I’m the kind of minister that talks about sex from the pulpit, or if I didn’t struggle to come out, or if I don’t speak Hindi, or I’m an unaccented diaspora child of an educated immigrant…do I belong?  Will you let me in?  Can I be part of your group, your identity, your movement?

And will I feel any relief there, or will it just be another place in my life where I don’t quite fit in?

The more complicated our outward identities get, the harder it’s going to be for us to hold hard lines.  People will show up claiming insider status and we’re going to wonder how that could be true.  We’re going to be suspicious.  We’re going to wonder if we belong, if they belong, how we can know who belongs.

The concept of identity itself is going to be shaken.  Categories are getting complicated and blurry.

Now there’s a danger there, as well as a liberation.

When categories get blurry, individual identity becomes dominant, and with that, prioritizing individual needs over the needs of the group can move from being an imperative to being a tyranny.

That’s another fine line: between seeing that your own needs get met and honoring the trajectory, priority, and process that belongs to the group.

As with inclusion, exclusion, and boundaries, the balance between the two is vital.  In both cases, it leads back to the same place:

you have to know yourself well enough to be able to withstand challenges–to your own identity and to your choice of social locations.  You have to know yourself.  You have to be sure of yourself.  You have to be willing to learn and yet you have to be very clear that you are who you are, that you can tolerate not being fully accepted, that you can stand not getting your needs met, that the group can take precedence.

When you spend your life being told that you’re not quite…right…because you’re not the dominant race, culture, gender, age, class, ability, etc, that confidence is hard-won.  When you ARE dominant, it comes without thinking.  It comes “naturally”, as a gift from the people and culture who form your context.

If you apply that confidence from being dominant in a context where you are not dominant, you can bring down some serious wrath on your own head.  But sometimes it’s worth it.

Sometimes it can gain you entry into the space where previously you were denied or merely tolerated.  Sometimes, it gives you the power and the voice to change the conversation so it includes you.

Being enough–powerful enough, real enough, marginalized enough, even–is sometimes a matter of saying, “This is what [that thing you are including, or talking about, or desiring] looks like.”  It doesn’t look like the picture in your head, or the photo shoot in the magazine.  it doesn’t look like the stereotypes or the brochures or even the speech that one activist made once that was inspiring.  It looks like this.  It looks like me.  I am it, I am here, and I am ready.  Let’s do this.

It looks like you.  It looks like me.  It looks like us.  Let’s do this.

Ever since Charleston, I’ve been watching myself. I’m so far from perfect you can’t even see it from my breakfast table, but I’ve been asking the questions, over and over: where am I actively, outspokenly, effectively, daily anti-racist?  Where am I not?  How can I do better?