Trust no one

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."
-Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education

When I was in elementary school, my dad got involved in the movement to change the Cleveland Indians’ name and mascot. During baseball season, we attended demonstrations outside Jacobs Field.

I believed in the cause by default, but I hated the protests. They were cold and boring, and I had to watch thousands of fans disrespect us. Some laughed, some gave us the finger, and a few stopped to talk, but they often seemed inattentive (I now realize they might have been drunk).

In 1998, the Indians made it to the World Series. As a publicity stunt for the opening game, the activists burned an effigy of Chief Wahoo. I watched five of them, including my dad, arrested for “aggravated arson.” (They were detained overnight, but never prosecuted.) My brother videotaped the whole thing, and it made the news.

Inevitably, this came up at school. My fourth grade teacher wondered how many people had been arrested. I answered. She smiled, and asked how I knew this.

I was cornered, so I told the truth. The entire classroom gasped. I turned beet-red, and laughed, clinging to what I can only describe as the masochistic thrill of social martyrdom.

That year, my school established something called the Golden Rule Club.

This program was the brainchild of our assistant principal, who had become highly unpopular in her efforts to improve lunchtime discipline. She used to stalk the cafeteria looking for kids out of line. I guess one day she decided that there had to be a better way, consulted Stalin and Skinner, and came up with the GRC.

Any student could become a member of this club based on a points system. Points were earned through different activities, from putting a napkin on your lap during lunch (1 point) to various forms of menial labor (collecting trash from the playground, 15 points).

Every week, Vice Principal Stalin would announce the newest members and present them with blue and gold T-shirts. Every month, the entire club would wear these shirts to school, and receive a free meal catered by Taco Bell. You'd sit at a special table with a white tablecloth and "Golden Rule Club" signs, eat your taco, and be happy, because you won.

This is speculation. I was not in the GRC. From my perspective, it was just a wall of blue and smugness and Fire Sauce. At first I abstained out of laziness, but most kids will do anything for fast food. By Christmas, the majority of the fourth grade had joined, including the rest of the gifted program; some of my friends became high-ranking members, which was a recurring source of conflict ("Why don't you just join?" "Because it's retarded").

In the spring, Stalin finally pulled me aside. In retrospect, I don't blame her. It must have seemed odd that Hannah Watson, quiet kid, model student, would take issue with conformity.

"You know, you really should be wearing a napkin by now."

She had a point. It was the easiest thing in the GRC rulebook. But that's what I couldn't stand. It was so easy, and it didn't mean anything.

Clever and classless and free

Jeff Richmond: When we were first dating, some of the guys at Second City said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a hoot if we go over—’

Tina Fey: ‘—over to the Doll House. We’ll go to this strip club ironically.’ I was like, ‘The fuck you will…’

In 2008, erotic dancers in Minnesota were charging about $300 an hour, but I would only have to pay $20. It was my second year at Carleton, and a group of my friends had decided to hire a stripper as a surprise for a girl’s birthday.

I had some knee-jerk Asian discomfort about this, but I shrugged it off. After all, this was Carleton. We’d probably end up paying some bemused woman $300 to play Scrabble with us for 20 minutes, which was hilarious, and besides, we’d get to meet a real live stripper! How delightfully plebeian.

A week before the event, I got an email thread discussing the details. Did we want a blonde or a brunette? Piercings or tattoos? They did some research and attached pictures of our options.

After watching these photos circulate for a few days, I had to wonder. Did they feel good about stripping? Did they have other jobs, or families? The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed that I might actually watch one take off her clothes for money and pretend to enjoy it.

I had no objections to sexual freedom. At women’s college, it had been everywhere – naked people laying out in the sun, transsexual people on my sports team, people who had sex in public bathrooms talking about it at dinner.

But this was entirely different. Just for the hell of it, we were about to hire an actual sex worker.

If you asked Carleton students to consider stripping, I’m sure the vast majority would decline. Our culture is based on shyness. We have trouble going on dates without the aid of student government (i.e. Screw Your Roommate), we can’t appear naked in public without sprinting (i.e. streaking), and most of us can’t even dance fully clothed in front of an audience without getting hammered first (i.e. Ebony).

None of this is bad on its own. People tend to be guarded about their sexuality because it’s important to them, as it should be. But everyone deserves this. When you pay a stripper to do something you’d never do yourself, you accept that her sexuality is less valuable than yours. Outside of Carleton, I know people (male and female) who’ve had sex for money; none liked how it felt.

College should be fun. But once your choices involve other people, you have to remember that the things you do are the things you actually do. Hiring a stripper as a joke is still supporting an industry that exploits people in atrocious ways. We live in a world where human trafficking is a massive and fast-growing trade.

We also live on a campus where sexual assault happens.

When Carleton’s revised Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response policy showed up in my mailbox a few weeks ago, this was all I could think about. Despite their laudable efforts to streamline the process, no amount of re-wording and re-structuring could change the atmosphere that caused people to stay silent.

But this atmosphere is nothing more than the sum of many individual attitudes towards sex.

Today, I honestly can’t remember whether or not my friends went through with their plan. Does it really matter? Maybe not. Maybe injustice anywhere isn’t a threat to justice everywhere. Maybe I just need to lighten up and have a better sense of humor. Then again, maybe even the funniest woman in America would have felt the same way.

…I love to play strippers and to imitate them. I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that.
-Vanity Fair, January 2009