Dearest Precious Deyjah,
It is odd that I, a stranger, have to write you this letter, but I am doing so because unfortunately, your private business became public due to your father's bizarre, abusive, and quite frankly disgusting decision to discuss your medical history in the public press. First of all, no parent should do that in reference to you or any child of theirs. It abrogates their very responsibilities as a parent to discuss such private matters in a public way. It shows that, at least in that moment, they have abandoned the role of a responsible parent and do not need to be treated with the normal parental deference that some folks feel that parents are entitled to. I know that you are over the age of eighteen and this is a good thing as you as not as minor in the eyes of the law and therefore your father cannot force you to undergo any medical procedures that you object to. Nonetheless, you may be looking to older adults for guidance at this time as you try to figure things out from the perspective of the media firestorm that your father has hurled you into and therefore I wanted to say a few things to you as a thirty three year old woman whose life work in large part revolves around supporting and defending the bodily, medical, and sexual autonomy of younger people.
First of all, a test for the presence of the hymen is not a medically valid test and any doctor offering or claiming to perform such a test needs to have his medical license revoked. I have heard that the main purpose of the hymen from a biological standpoint is to keep fecal, urinary, or other bodily material from entering into the vagina during the first couple of years of a baby's life and causing an infection. It has nothing to do with ensuring "virginity" or "purity" or anything of the sort. Many people don't even have a hymen to show past puberty. This is not something that a legitimate medical practitioner would wish to associate themselves with. So I would keep that in mind and consider filing some sort of report to authorities regarding any doctor that was willing to play that game with your father. The entire concept of virginity itself is a cultural, not a medical, construction and you may enjoy learning more about this sort of thing by reading Hanne Blank's book "Virgin: The Untouched History." It is an interesting book that deals with many men who view virginity in ways not dissimilar to your father, among other topics which it broaches.
Secondly, your body belongs to you first and foremost. It is not your father's business whether or not your hymen is broken be it by masturbation, playing sports, or engaging in sexual activity with someone you are interested in. You should feel free to use your body in any consensual sexual capacity that you wish. You, like all folks your age, should also seek out birth control, STD prevention, and sexual health resources from medical professionals who have nothing to do with your family and they cannot reveal anything about you under penalty of law to them. This is your right as an American and as a woman. Your body is for your pleasure and for you to use as you see fit and your father's attitude and actions towards it are creepy, predatory, dangerous, abusive, and wrong. Your father's behavior is not normal within families in America today (although by taking the long view of history you will learn that you are by no means alone in having a father who wishes to control your body as if you were his property, which you are most definitely not). As an African-American woman, there is a lot of cultural history surrounding the control of the bodies of women of color by people other than the woman in question which you might wish to take a deeper dive into. As a white woman, I probably cannot share those particular insights with you as well as other women of color can, but many will be willing and able to do so I am sure. There are many resources available specifically for women of color in reference to sexual and reproductive health. Planned Parenthood and Scarleteen might be good general places to start looking into matters of sexual and reproductive health. SisterSong seems to be specifically interested in helping Southern women of color in this department so they may be a good resource as well. In any event, you have been caught at the crossroads of sexism, ageism, and perhaps racism through no fault of your own and there are those who are ready to help you along the way.
The important message for you to take away from this is that your body is yours to use and enjoy however you see fit. If you want to abstain from sexual activity for any reason, that is completely fine. If you want to engage in sexual activity of any sort, that is completely fine too although there are certain responsibilities to yourself and others that go along with that, which you probably well know. What you need to realize is that you are in control of your body, medical treatment, sexuality, reproductive health, and life. You do not owe an intact hyman to your father or anyone else and it is abusive to even suggest that you do. You deserve better than this. You shouldn't have had to go through this media nightmare of your father's making. But there are many women, men, and non-binary people of all ages, colors, socioeconomic statuses, and backgrounds who wish to support and sustain you nonetheless. Anyone who tries to make excuses for your father's creepy and abusive behavior is dead wrong. Look out for your younger siblings in your household and do what you can to ensure that they are not subjected to the same sort of abuse that you were by your father and apparently unethical medical professionals. Do not be afraid to look outside of your family for support, wisdom, resources, guidance, help, or protection for yourself or others. Know that nothing inherent within you or anything that you did caused your father's abusive and deleterious behavior towards you. I and so many others are rooting for you. May God bless you always.
Love,
Kathleen Nicole O'Neal
Showing posts with label African-American. Show all posts
Showing posts with label African-American. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Thursday, July 5, 2012
On Jonathan Krohn and Ageism
Those of you who have watched cable news of late or follow conservative movement politics may be familiar with the name of Jonathan Krohn. Krohn first rose to some prominence in the conservative movement in 2008 with the success of his self-published book "Define Conservatism" which came out when the author was thirteen years old. Since writing the book, the author went on to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and appeared on numerous television and radio programs. Now seventeen years old, the author has renounced some of his former political views and is once again making the political talk show rounds, now to position himself as a more moderate thinker who has evolved on a number of key issues including same-sex marriage and the role of government in ensuring access to healthcare. You can read more about Krohn's life and philosophical transformation here.
I have followed this story with a great deal of interest because of what it says about a number of issues central to my youth rights advocacy - youth political disenfranchisement, how the idea of distinct developmental stages as applied to youth subverts youth achievement, how narratives about youth incapacity and ignorance serve an agenda of adult supremacy, and how all of us are encouraged as we age to distance ourselves as much as possible from the beliefs, ambitions, and feelings of our younger selves. Krohn's story provides the most striking example of the way these dynamics play out in practice that I have seen in the mainstream media in quite a while.
The only actual interview I have seen with Krohn took place recently on the The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, a political talk program on MSNBC. What I found interesting (if unsurprising about this appearance) was how quick O'Donnell was to chalk Krohn's political conversion experience up to nothing other than the fact that, at thirteen, he was apparently too foolish to think seriously about politics. O'Donnell's comments were almost without exception condescending. As the interview progressed, it became strikingly obvious that Krohn was more well-read than O'Donnell himself. In interviews such as this one, Krohn himself seems eager to chalk his previous political views up to nothing more than youthful naivete. Says Krohn here, "It’s a thirteen-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a thirteen-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were twelve or thirteen. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough.”
In these comments one sees that even someone as thoughtful and intelligent as Jonathan Krohn or Lawrence O'Donnell can fall prey to logical fallacies surrounding ageism that are so prevalent within our culture that they are taken for granted as common sense. The problem is that they simply don't apply in the uncomplicated way that Krohn and O'Donnell seem to think that they do. It would be convenient for all of us if people under a certain age exhibited political immaturity but upon reaching the age of majority suddenly developed seamlessly rational and coherent political views. Instead the political, social, cultural, and economic views of people of all ages often change over the course of their lifetimes in messy and unpredictable ways. In middle age, Arianna Huffington moved from the right to the left after beginning her career writing for conservative publications like The National Review and serving as the token Republican on Comedy Central television programming. There are also examples of young people whose political involvement largely reflects their adult perspectives. Clearly if we are uncomfortable with disenfranchising the young it cannot be because they sometimes change their minds - this happens to many adults and not all young people hold views that are at odds with their later belief systems.
The line that Krohn was conservative solely because he was inundated with conservative political talk in Georgia also strikes one as slightly disingenuous. Krohn did not have his political conversion experience as a result of leaving the state. And many people find themselves fairly unmoved by the political climate of their immediate environs, even as a child. (I was one of them.) Additionally, most adults are influenced to some degree or another by the political atmosphere of their communities.
It is obvious from reading Krohn's writing and listening to him speak while he was in his early teens that he possessed a political sophistication and breadth of knowledge that few Americans of any age possess. Even though he may be a more sophisticated political thinker at seventeen than at fourteen, he was still a more sophisticated political thinker at fourteen than most Americans ever are.
The truth is that when most people see intelligent and politically engaged individuals under the age of majority, they become uncomfortable. Suddenly they are forced to reconsider the wisdom of a society that keeps someone who may be more mature, well read, and sophisticated than themselves socially, economically, legally, and politically powerless. In order to ensure that we do not draw from our own memory banks in order to question the oppression we ourselves experienced as youth, we are taught to distance ourselves as much as possible from our younger selves and to regard views held prior to adulthood not as one set of many perspectives we hold throughout our lives but as inherently deficient and immature. Thus the logic of age apartheid is maintained.
After watching the interview on the Lawrence O'Donnell program, I sought out information about Krohn's book on Amazon. While I flipped through the book briefly, what I found even more interesting were the reviews that the book had garnered from Amazon readers. The reviews largely fell into two categories: those claiming that Krohn's book was mediocre due to his youthfulness and those claiming that Krohn's book was so sophisticated that a person of his age could not have written it. Amazingly, some reviewers seemed to hold both perspectives simultaneously. Only one reviewer seemed to engage in a non-condescending manner with the substance of the writer's ideas.
Reading these reviews I was struck by the enormity of Krohn's courage (or maybe his naivete regarding human nature, a trait present in some individuals of all ages). When you write a book at fourteen years of age you cannot win. If the book is unexceptional or poor, many people will blame it on your age. If the book is edifying and worthwhile, many people will believe that you could not possibly have written the book or that the ideas in the book are not truly your own. Almost no one will engage with the substance of the ideas in the book, the driving force which prompted you to write the book in the first place.
Ironically, most adults claim that they want youth to be creative and to excel to the best of their abilities at whatever they undertake. The Amazon reviews of Krohn's work (seemingly all written by adults) put the lie to this canard. Adults don't really want youth to excel to the best of their abilities when it is threatening to adult sensibilities. Adults want youth to hew to stereotypical age-based scripts in such a way that it doesn't make the adults themselves uncomfortable about young peoples' political, social, legal, cultural, and economic disenfranchisement. Rigid ideas about the developmental stages of youth serve a political purpose at least as much as they serve a pedagogical purpose. When we do encounter an indisputably talented young person, we label them a prodigy in order to assure ourselves that they are so freakishly outside the norm that they pose no threat to age-based segregation and oppression. (Interestingly, Krohn is partially ethnically Jewish and in many ways, Jewish Americans and African-Americans seem slightly less uncomfortable with youth excellence than other American ethnic groups, an observation also made by Shulamith Firestone in her youth liberation and second wave feminist classic The Dialectic of Sex. In a similar vein, it is also worth noting that for at least part of his youth Krohn was home-schooled in keeping with one of Firestone's other observations that contemporary schooling retards rather than promotes young peoples' development.)
As Krohn ages and continues to change ideologically and personally, perhaps he will realize that it wasn't a stark contrast between middle schoolers and the rest of us that gave rise to his political transformation as much as the fact that we are all in a lifelong state of flux regarding our beliefs, values, and personality. (When I was younger I used to think that by the time I was in my mid-twenties I would finally arrive at a stable place ideologically and that my previous state of flux was due to my immaturity. My subsequent life experiences have not borne this hypothesis out.) But I wouldn't count on it. After all, the impulse within our culture to discount and distance ourselves from the perspectives of our youth is hegemonic and serves a convenient set of political purposes in the context of a society largely based upon age apartheid and youth disempowerment. It is time for all of us to raise our respective consciousnesses about the manifest ways in which this phenomenon affects us individually and collectively. And when we do we might realize that when we were younger than we are today, we were not as different or as "other" as we are led to believe that we were.
I have followed this story with a great deal of interest because of what it says about a number of issues central to my youth rights advocacy - youth political disenfranchisement, how the idea of distinct developmental stages as applied to youth subverts youth achievement, how narratives about youth incapacity and ignorance serve an agenda of adult supremacy, and how all of us are encouraged as we age to distance ourselves as much as possible from the beliefs, ambitions, and feelings of our younger selves. Krohn's story provides the most striking example of the way these dynamics play out in practice that I have seen in the mainstream media in quite a while.
The only actual interview I have seen with Krohn took place recently on the The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, a political talk program on MSNBC. What I found interesting (if unsurprising about this appearance) was how quick O'Donnell was to chalk Krohn's political conversion experience up to nothing other than the fact that, at thirteen, he was apparently too foolish to think seriously about politics. O'Donnell's comments were almost without exception condescending. As the interview progressed, it became strikingly obvious that Krohn was more well-read than O'Donnell himself. In interviews such as this one, Krohn himself seems eager to chalk his previous political views up to nothing more than youthful naivete. Says Krohn here, "It’s a thirteen-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a thirteen-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were twelve or thirteen. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough.”
In these comments one sees that even someone as thoughtful and intelligent as Jonathan Krohn or Lawrence O'Donnell can fall prey to logical fallacies surrounding ageism that are so prevalent within our culture that they are taken for granted as common sense. The problem is that they simply don't apply in the uncomplicated way that Krohn and O'Donnell seem to think that they do. It would be convenient for all of us if people under a certain age exhibited political immaturity but upon reaching the age of majority suddenly developed seamlessly rational and coherent political views. Instead the political, social, cultural, and economic views of people of all ages often change over the course of their lifetimes in messy and unpredictable ways. In middle age, Arianna Huffington moved from the right to the left after beginning her career writing for conservative publications like The National Review and serving as the token Republican on Comedy Central television programming. There are also examples of young people whose political involvement largely reflects their adult perspectives. Clearly if we are uncomfortable with disenfranchising the young it cannot be because they sometimes change their minds - this happens to many adults and not all young people hold views that are at odds with their later belief systems.
The line that Krohn was conservative solely because he was inundated with conservative political talk in Georgia also strikes one as slightly disingenuous. Krohn did not have his political conversion experience as a result of leaving the state. And many people find themselves fairly unmoved by the political climate of their immediate environs, even as a child. (I was one of them.) Additionally, most adults are influenced to some degree or another by the political atmosphere of their communities.
It is obvious from reading Krohn's writing and listening to him speak while he was in his early teens that he possessed a political sophistication and breadth of knowledge that few Americans of any age possess. Even though he may be a more sophisticated political thinker at seventeen than at fourteen, he was still a more sophisticated political thinker at fourteen than most Americans ever are.
The truth is that when most people see intelligent and politically engaged individuals under the age of majority, they become uncomfortable. Suddenly they are forced to reconsider the wisdom of a society that keeps someone who may be more mature, well read, and sophisticated than themselves socially, economically, legally, and politically powerless. In order to ensure that we do not draw from our own memory banks in order to question the oppression we ourselves experienced as youth, we are taught to distance ourselves as much as possible from our younger selves and to regard views held prior to adulthood not as one set of many perspectives we hold throughout our lives but as inherently deficient and immature. Thus the logic of age apartheid is maintained.
After watching the interview on the Lawrence O'Donnell program, I sought out information about Krohn's book on Amazon. While I flipped through the book briefly, what I found even more interesting were the reviews that the book had garnered from Amazon readers. The reviews largely fell into two categories: those claiming that Krohn's book was mediocre due to his youthfulness and those claiming that Krohn's book was so sophisticated that a person of his age could not have written it. Amazingly, some reviewers seemed to hold both perspectives simultaneously. Only one reviewer seemed to engage in a non-condescending manner with the substance of the writer's ideas.
Reading these reviews I was struck by the enormity of Krohn's courage (or maybe his naivete regarding human nature, a trait present in some individuals of all ages). When you write a book at fourteen years of age you cannot win. If the book is unexceptional or poor, many people will blame it on your age. If the book is edifying and worthwhile, many people will believe that you could not possibly have written the book or that the ideas in the book are not truly your own. Almost no one will engage with the substance of the ideas in the book, the driving force which prompted you to write the book in the first place.
Ironically, most adults claim that they want youth to be creative and to excel to the best of their abilities at whatever they undertake. The Amazon reviews of Krohn's work (seemingly all written by adults) put the lie to this canard. Adults don't really want youth to excel to the best of their abilities when it is threatening to adult sensibilities. Adults want youth to hew to stereotypical age-based scripts in such a way that it doesn't make the adults themselves uncomfortable about young peoples' political, social, legal, cultural, and economic disenfranchisement. Rigid ideas about the developmental stages of youth serve a political purpose at least as much as they serve a pedagogical purpose. When we do encounter an indisputably talented young person, we label them a prodigy in order to assure ourselves that they are so freakishly outside the norm that they pose no threat to age-based segregation and oppression. (Interestingly, Krohn is partially ethnically Jewish and in many ways, Jewish Americans and African-Americans seem slightly less uncomfortable with youth excellence than other American ethnic groups, an observation also made by Shulamith Firestone in her youth liberation and second wave feminist classic The Dialectic of Sex. In a similar vein, it is also worth noting that for at least part of his youth Krohn was home-schooled in keeping with one of Firestone's other observations that contemporary schooling retards rather than promotes young peoples' development.)
As Krohn ages and continues to change ideologically and personally, perhaps he will realize that it wasn't a stark contrast between middle schoolers and the rest of us that gave rise to his political transformation as much as the fact that we are all in a lifelong state of flux regarding our beliefs, values, and personality. (When I was younger I used to think that by the time I was in my mid-twenties I would finally arrive at a stable place ideologically and that my previous state of flux was due to my immaturity. My subsequent life experiences have not borne this hypothesis out.) But I wouldn't count on it. After all, the impulse within our culture to discount and distance ourselves from the perspectives of our youth is hegemonic and serves a convenient set of political purposes in the context of a society largely based upon age apartheid and youth disempowerment. It is time for all of us to raise our respective consciousnesses about the manifest ways in which this phenomenon affects us individually and collectively. And when we do we might realize that when we were younger than we are today, we were not as different or as "other" as we are led to believe that we were.
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| Jonathan Krohn today at seventeen years old. |
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