An Open Letter to Deyjah Imani Harris

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
 
   
  

Denying Youth The Right To Public Space: A Growing Problem in American Society

   Recently a story has been making the rounds in the news media regarding an eight-year-old young woman whose mother had the police called on her and then had a Department of Children and Family Services investigation launched in reference to her, all at the behest of what sounds like a quite frankly imbalanced neighbor because the young person was walking her dog by herself on the streets of her suburban neighborhood. The mother ultimately had to hire an attorney to clear her name and the matter was put to rest in less than two weeks, but she was understandably outraged, disturbed, and somewhat traumatized by the incident. She explained to reporters that she rarely allowed her children to be unsupervised and that she felt "mom shamed" by this entire bizarre incident.

   First of all, one's heart does certainly go out to this mother who was doing nothing wrong and had to deal with an avalanche of legal harassment concerning her family. I find myself wishing that the person responsible for this family's nightmare was being publicly shamed in the same fashion as those individuals recently rightly publicly derided in the public sphere for calling the police on African-Americans simply going about their business while black. All of that being said, I find it somewhat problematic that the main focus of the media in reporting this story has been on the mother and not on the even greater problem which is ultimately linked to this mother's plight - the fact that increasingly in American society, young people are discouraged from occupying public space.

   The rationales given for attempting to keep youth from occupying public space tend to vary based upon the age of the youth and the nature of the space that an ageist is trying to deny a young person access to. For fairly young youth (such as Dorothy Widen, the eight-year-old young lady walking her gratuitously adorable white toy poodle in the aforementioned story) the rationales proffered by those who want to segregate youth from the rest of society and deny them all freedom of movement often come down to misdirected concerns about safety. Unsupervised children, we are told, will hurt themselves, hurt others, or be harmed by strange people with ill intentions. This is despite the fact that crime rates are actually far lower than they have been in years past when unsupervised children out and about were a more readily identifiable feature of urban, suburban, and rural life. Writing at the dawn of the second wave of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s (a much more laissez faire time in terms of youth being unsupervised compared to today), Shulamith Firestone, Richard Farson, and John Holt realized that calls for women to abandon themselves completely to mothering and supervise their children constantly were largely rooted in sexism dressed up as concern for children's welfare. Those who have subsequently written about the daycare ritual abuse and sexual molestation panics of the 1980s such as Richard Beck and Roger N. Lancaster have similarly noted that the mechanics of these modern day witch hunts were set in motion in large part due to increasing concerns within society about the fact that so many women were putting their children in the care of others while they worked outside of the home for the first time. Clearly, something other than an increase in actual dangers and risks to young people is driving these phenomena and a great deal of it has to do with the sexist notion that women belong in the home and should be watching and caring for their children at all times instead of occupying public space themselves.

   However, in the contemporary United States, while adult women do continue to suffer as a result of these problematic attitudes and the laws, policies, practices, and social norms that grow out of them, the greatest victims are in fact young people themselves. The fact that cultural anxieties about women's increasing independence from hearth and home present in the guise that they do speaks to the fact that very few people in America today are comfortable with openly stating that a woman's place is always and only in the home caring for her children and looking out for her husband. What we are comfortable with stating openly is that children need constant supervision. Young people should never be let out of an adult's sight. Curfews should be imposed to keep teenagers locked away after dark. Allowing a child the freedom to inhabit public space should be criminalized. Even supervised young people should be kept out of some public spaces just because some people don't want to see them. We as a society are increasingly comfortable with promulgating the notion that adults without children should see children out and about as little as possible and never on their own. While sexism may be fueling a great deal of this trend, anti-youth ageism is fanning the flames even further. And ultimately, young people are the biggest losers in this situation.

Remembering Shulamith Firestone and Carrying Forth Her Youth Rights Feminist Vision

   Shulamith Firestone, who died recently, did not use the words "youth rights feminism" to describe her worldview, but it was certainly the view of the world she presented in her second wave feminist class The Dialectic of Sex (published in 1970). Firestone was a radical who believed that what was natural was not necessarily human - she advocated for artificial reproductive technologies to free women from the burdens of biology and for contraception to give women more control over their bodies and their lives. (In particular, she supported the creation of artificial wombs and the abolition of pregnancy which she described as "barbaric.") She advocated for a classless society in which resources were distributed fairly. She spoke out against racism and called attention to the ways in which African-American men often failed to speak to the interests and realities of African-American women. She wrote about the ways in which women are conditioned to view culture through a male lens and thus lose the ability to authentically experience the world as women. But her most radical idea was probably the one that has been paid the least attention - that childhood in its current incarnation is oppressive to both children and women and must be radically reconstituted.

   In the space of the thirty pages of the fourth chapter of The Dialectic of Sex, entitled "Down with Childhood," Firestone begins by seeking to prove that childhood as we know it is a social construct designed to serve patriarchal ideals. Drawing heavily on the work of historian Philippe Aries, Firestone traces the advent of contemporary notions of childhood to the rise of schools and the nuclear family. She then lays out the case for children as an oppressed class - she decries the age segregation and repression of educational institutions, bemoans children's economic powerlessness, laments children's sexual repression, and lambasts the educators, psychologists, social workers, and other adults tasked with managing children and their lives. She sees children as an oppressed class - one whose oppression rests in both their physical limitations and their enforced subservience to adults. Finally, Firestone connects the oppression of children to the oppression of women. She attacks the ideology of motherhood which stipulates that children are delicate flowers in need of constant supervision and identifies this view as serving the interests of the patriarchy, not the interests of mothers or children. She contends that the supposedly special bond between women and children is "no more than shared oppression."

   Against the backdrop of a feminist landscape in which childfree feminists frequently resort to ageist attacks on children to justify their choices while other people tell women they're unfit mothers if they're not having natural births, breastfeeding for years at a time, and wholly giving themselves over physically and psychologically to their role as mothers, Shulamith Firestone's vision is needed now more than ever. In a world in which children are increasingly cut off from the rest of the world, where legislation and school zero tolerance policies affecting youth grow more restrictive and confining, and where the socially prescribed demands on mothers grow more onerous, where most American feminist activism on behalf of children both here and abroad is more concerned with paternalistically controlling young people than liberating them, Firestone's vision of an anti-sexist, anti-ageist society is a light in the darkness, showing us that there is a better way than the visions of childhood and the family presented to us by both the mainstream culture and the majority of third wave feminism.

   Because of her radical vision of freedom for children and women (as well as poor people and people of color) Firestone will always be someone I have the greatest respect and admiration for. She was a part of the generation of feminists who bequeathed a legacy of greater reproductive freedom, more opportunity in the workforce, and a less constraining image of what it means to be a woman to people of my generation. While that work is far from over, we have come a long way from where we were and Firestone and many of other women (and a few men) from that generation are the main reason why. But youth rights is the unfinished business on Firestone's agenda where we haven't come that far at all - in fact, in most ways we have gone backward and it hurts not only children but parents (especially mothers) as well. That is the agenda of this blog and the cause I am the most passionate about.

   On a personal note, Shulamith Firestone was one of the first thinkers on youth rights issues that I ever read. After encountering a number of misogynistic supposed youth rights supporters as well as many supposed feminists who were all too eager to deny the autonomy they cherished for themselves to those younger than they are, Firestone's work was a revelation. We've all seen the bumper stickers, buttons, and the like that say "Pro-Woman, Pro-Child, Pro-Choice." Firestone was truly all of these things in the most radical and liberating way possible. When I label myself and other pro-woman, pro-youth individuals as youth rights feminists, I see us as working in a tradition that starts with Shulamith Firestone. Rest in peace, radical sister.