Heroines (1999) Documentary

I *love love love love* documentaries. I could, and have, watch documentaries all day and all night until I pass out from the inability to keep my eyes open. I’ve watched some incredibly amazing ones, some really ridiculous ones, and a few terribly made ones. Why do I love documentaries so much? They are a reflection of a reality lived, a tale about life with points of view and story lines that are neither strictly fact nor fiction, just like life is neither strictly fact or fiction. A story about life and a life lived is different from living life and reality because the camera puts an interpretation to the reality. Anyone who claims that documentaries are objective doesn’t really understand the nature of reality and the stories we tell about ourselves, our lives, and the lives about other people. When a spider webs his web, he is not the web. But the web came from him, and he can crawl around on the web. A documentary is like a spider’s web, it comes from a subject, from their very being, but it is not the subject themselves.

“Heroines” is one of the most powerful and introspective documentaries I have ever seen.

The film starts out with the line “You’re beautiful” voiced over a photograph of one of the subjects. This statement is on that the subjects of the film probably hardly ever hear. The subjects of the film are heroin addicts and prostitutes, a lethal and dangerous combination. These are the women in the shadows, behind the societal stage, in the background, you see them everywhere but you never remember. The cultural idea that these women are worthless, expendable, and morally bankrupt for their personal decisions reflects how our society bases worth on financial measure rather than one that recognizes the inherent intrinsic worth of a human being based on the fact that they are a human being. One of the women in the film laments this, repeating “I’m not a bad person, I’m a drug addict” in a faded yet strong voice.

Lincoln Clarke, the maker of this documentary, is a successful photographer who has held his own in the fashion world, a difficult field to break into for a photographer. It must take a tremendous amount of talent and stamina to be a fashion photographer, to capture the aesthetic of a creator and deal with the insanity of the fashion world. Lincoln says that he got encapsulated in that world, but some of his photographic aesthetic echos the lived reality of the downtrodden. Indeed, several photos of his shown in the film, including one of Debby Harry, reflect this. American society has a fascination with the underworld, what goes on behind the shadows of the streets. This world is well hidden for very good reasons, it is dangerous and potentially deadly. But dangerous and potentially deadly is sexy, in a weird way. It is forbidden, its like getting cut and seeing the rush of blood. Some people play with fire in an effort to see if they will not get burned. Or, they don’t care about getting burned.

Lincoln finds these women in the streets, and gains their trust by being an honest and caring person. The subjects of the film recognize that he doesn’t want anything from them except for them to be their selves, something that is probably a rare occurrence in their world. He observes about his subjects that “What they need is just some real, unconditional love. Then if they had that, heroin wouldn’t be such a big pursuit, in such hot demand”.  One of the most moving segments is the scene with Lincoln reciting an observation about what heroin means to these women over a scene of one of the subjects shooting up, “Heroin is like a warm blanket, heroin is a lover that is always there for them. Its something they can believe in, someone they can be close to,  somebody they can hold, and its not even anybody its just a little bit of powder.” The woman shooting up says “It helps to numb, it helps to numb all the other pieces that are too much to deal with. And, its something to live for its something thats there for you”. This immediately cuts to a huge reason why people become involved in hardcore narcotics: a feeling of a lack of love. Having known several heroin addicts, all of them had in common a knowledge of severe hurt, pain, and lack of love. Having done opiates myself, I know the rush of warmth, artificial happiness, and comfort that opiates give a person. Heroin must feel like the answer to all the problems of a pained psyche, a bandage for a mind bleeding with pain.

The female heroin addicts of the film have reached what most people would consider the rock bottom. The hardcore streets are swallowing them whole, there is no safe place, there is only chaos and vibrant danger. But this does not mean that they are without worth. These women are important, their stories are significant, yet their place within society is lost upon most people. These women stand alive to represent the incredible power of love.

Without love, these women have fallen into what druggies call “chasing the dragon”. The phrase “chasing the dragon” refers to the constant sought after high that a person deep cannot achieve because their tolerance has built to not chemically allow that sought after high, or that high will simply never be achieved because nothing is ever like it was the first time. The first time they shot up heroin, they probably fell into the clouds and heard angels sing. Why that can’t be everyday life is basically one of the very essential questions of human existence. To a degree, everyone is chasing a dragon, wanting to get back to a beautiful moment in life that has passed into the dust of memory. But these women have heroin, a repetitive pattern of using something to achieve an artificial happiness, a happiness that is not even happy but crying with sorrow.

Drug addicts are not bad people solely based on the fact that they are drug addicts. Prostitutes are not bad people solely based on the fact that they are prostitutes. Society wants to deem these people trash, because they represent something dangerous to us. They represent not giving a fuck, truly being trapped in the moment of life, a frantic attempt to escape the inescapable, and nakedly flirting with death. They are worthless to society because they do not generate financial gain, and they live on practically nothing. This is why they are valuable: they live in the space of our nightmares.

“A photograph is a secret about a secret” is perhaps the best line in the film. The details of the lives most of these heroin-addicted women live will forever remain a secret because of how hidden they are. Clearly, keeping heroin addiction one of life’s secrets is doing these women and greater society a disservice. Addiction knows no bounds, no financial, racial, religious, or intellectual boundaries can protect a person from the risk of becoming an addict. It is easy to blame these women for their circumstances, but it takes great insight to see that these women were lead to a logical conclusion. Cessation of pain is a basic human desire. The secret the women found in “Heroines” was the attempt of cessation of all pain results in a different, mutant type of pain. Absolutely, the film is moving and important.

Rape in A Man’s World

We live in a patriarchal, male dominated society. This is a fact. Children typically receive the last names of their fathers, not mothers, and it is clear to anyone with eyes and a sense of reality that men are at a more advantageous position in this society (as far as I know, relatively few people lobby for the erasure of men’s reproductive rights). However, this is America, and we live better off as a whole than many, many places in the world. Indeed, from what we can gather about the state of discourse about rape and the lived reality of threats and perpetration of rape in India, there are far, far worse places for women to live.

Today I opened up Gawker.com, scrolled around, and arrived at this article, “Thousands-Large Mob Seized Prisoner Accused of Rape, Beat Him to Death”. Slightly sleepy, I thought, “Holy jesus, what the fuck is going on in India?”. There was also a piece on the New York Times about government action preventing broadcast of a documentary about gang rape, and an article on Vice.com about the denial of a visa from the Indian government for a white American woman named Sabrina Buckwalter looking to write about the reality of rape in India. “Good lord,” I thought, “I must write about this immediately”. As a Buddhist, it saddens me that the land from which the founder of my religion hails, a man named Siddhartha Gautama, is having such a disturbing problem dealing with the dark and horrific reality of rape. Two of the world’s greatest religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, come from India. I speculate this is because of the incredibly harsh nature of Indian society that has existed as long as the civilization; the incredible discrepancy between poor and rich, the decrepit nature of the slums, the generational poverty, the danger of wildlife, all of which has essentially great insight that has come from the harsh conditions humans have endured in this part of the world.

As a Buddhist, I view rape as a deplorable crime by which a person’s safety, physical integrity, relaxation of mind, and personal control is obliterated. A perpetrator of rape is a traitor of all humanity. As a woman, I live in fear of rape because I can be a victim at any age, under any circumstances, and at any time.

As an American, I am ashamed of how our country has dealt with the reality of rape. In the military, rape appears to be viewed as a perk for the men of the military and a thing to be endured by the women. In college, “date rape” is normalized, and forced unwanted sexual contact is a somewhat regular occurrence. However, there is no difference between “college rape”, “date rape”, and rape that happens in the military. For some reason, here in America, we want to differentiate degrees of rape and explain the circumstances. It is taking away a woman’s humanity and giving power to the perpetrators. The way we talk about rape here in America contributes to global rape culture.

However, it isn’t just women who are at risk for experiencing sexual assault. I was watching “Sons of Anarchy” this weekend, or the most ultimate male soap opera in the history of ass-kicking television, and the opening scene of the start of season six is a male-on male rape scene. I was not expecting this and was jolted. I found it more brutal than the scenes of rape that we are somewhat accustomed seeing on television and in movies where the victim is female. I believe that that reaction is two-fold. First, the idea of being rectally raped is absolutely horrifying for any person, male or female. I would not say that I would prefer to be raped vaginally, however, I absolutely certainly do not ever want to experience a rectal rape. Secondly, when watching a male being raped, the viewer is also watching a man’s masculinity being taken away within the context of what our society has deemed masculinity to be. In our society’s sexual narrative, men are not penetrated, they do the penetrating. This folds into the homophobic narrative of men who enjoy receiving anal sex to be feminine, not really men, or “bitches”. This view is an out and out product of rape culture, as is the idea that a raped man has lost part of his masculinity. A raped man is no less masculine than a man who has never experienced that sort of assault, however, we look at him differently afterword.

If a man looses part of his masculinity after rape, what does a woman loose? In India, a more traditionalist society than America, it can be losing a reputation of femininity and propriety, becoming reduced instead to the assault perpetrated against you. She may no longer be a woman, but instead a different being, a raped woman. In parts of the Middle East, it can mean the woman’s life. In America, it means the safety of soundness of mind because now there is a “before”, and an “after” in life.

If rape in India is so prevalent, why was this man captured from a police station, dragged into the street, and murdered? If there is so much rape in India, doesn’t that mean that rape is accepted there? No. This is another thing that I gathered from watching so much “Sons of Anarchy”. Within the world of “Sons”, there are a lot of women who choose sex work and thus are at risk for experiencing rape. The members of the Sons of Anarchy take to protecting these women and beating up the men who rape or assault them. This is because the women raped are their mothers, lovers, cousins, friends, sisters of friends, etc. They are people the men in Sons of Anarchy care about. People who systematically rape or endorse rape as a legitimate thing to do are bad people, quite simply put. Unfortunately, there can be a high concentration of very bad people in one place if the conditions are conducive to creating unstable environments leading to unstable human behavior.

Just because there are a lot of bad people in one area does not mean all the people in that area are bad.

Many people are effected when a bad thing happens to a person that is loved. When the prevalence of rape occurs, many men are effected even if they are not the ones to experience the rape. Entire families experience the pain of rape. In India, this rage caused a man to loose his life. Rape culture breeds violence because it is one of the most violent things to do to a human being.

I feel it is time for the United States to intervene in some sort of humanitarian orientated manner with regards to the problem of widespread and systematic rape in India. In terms of policy, I am unsure of what this would look like. However, in order for this to be properly achieved, the United States must get rid of it’s own rape culture thinking. The women in the military must be treated with equal respect for their service to America as the men receive, and must stop having to endure sexual assault in their workplace. College women must be viewed as sexually independent individual’s whose assaults must be taken as crimes instead of campus incidents between two or more students. People must realize that when a man is raped, he is not less masculine because of his experience.

I can only hope, as a human being, that this can happen within my lifetime.

After Trans Teen Leelah Alcorn’s Suicide, We All Must Do Better

Intimate Portraits of Young People Who Identify as Non-Gendered

Portrait series exploring genderqueer or “non-gendered” persons

I’m a Queerist, and That’s Not a “Thing” (Yet!)

I *love* the1janitor on Youtube.com. He’s a social commentator known for witty remarks and wise insights. I think he is hilarious as a human and a cute dude. Often entertaining, he provides solid observations into things people might get too excited about to otherwise be articulate about. On this video, he talks about how the gender binary “isn’t a thing”.

“____ is not a thing” is a figure of speech coined by millenials, people of my generation, to illustrate the point that a commonly thought of phenemeon does not exist, and is sometimes asked as a question like “I got to Binghamton University the bearcats are our mascot. Are bearcats a thing?” (Yes they are!) Contrary to popular belief, the gender binary, or the thought that there are only two sexes, those being male and female, is not really a thing.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT is often a reaction to this assertion. Maybe not as much in 2014, now that Facebook gives the option to define one’s gender beyond “male” or “female”, and that the non-heterosexual social movement of the early millennia has had such success.

Several years ago, I composed an academic paper about the atrocities intersexed and transgendered people have historically faced as a result of the medical institution’s endorsement that the gender binary “is a thing”. Did you know that often, when an intersexed baby is born, that baby does not actually have life threatening condition simply for being intersexed? It is actually better for that baby to grow up and choose what identity they will live under, and receive proper medical care for intersexed persons, not for persons born of normative male/female characteristics. Yet it is the norm that doctors make intersexuality out to be dangerous to the health of the baby to vulnerable parents, convincing them their child has a life threatening condition and that they must choose a sex, either male or female, for that baby right now and then authorize immediate surgery to make the baby “normal”. This can have devastating consequences for intersexed individuals both medically and in their identities as people.

My paper was called “Medical Ethics and the Transgender/Intersexed Communities: A Plea for Understanding and Reconciliation” and focused on how heteronormative gender codes have caused medical ethics to compromise the integrity of legitimate identities of transgendered/intersexed peoples and suggest harmful courses of medical actions. My plea for “reconciliation” in this paper focused on how the vast troves of power the medical community possesses could change the perception that the gender binary is “a thing” and cause recognition that gender and sex identities that run contrary to the male/female binary are legitimate identities. Some people aren’t intersexed nor trans. They decide to be “genderqueer”, or a combination of male/female features and characteristics. They are both male AND female while being neither male nor female. If you have a hard time comprehending juxtapositions or paradoxes, their existence will probably infuriate you. Please try to not let their existence make your head explode, and maybe try to work on your critical thinking skills.

In order to do this paper properly, I had to read a lot of feminist literature. Feminism, by definition, endorses the gender binary. You can try to argue with me about this if you would like, but you will lose (please try, though! I love a good, spirited debate). Historically, feminism has been very hostile in many cases to intersexuals and transgenders. Some of this literature was so hateful that I actually cried while reading it despite the fact that I am neither intersexed nor transgendered. I suppose maybe the tears came from the feeling and knowledge that my former feminist identity was being hatefully ripped to shreds by these really fucking mean women. I could not, in good conscious, continue to be a feminist knowing that this was a large part of the history of the movement. In modern feminism, I have not found this issue to be resolved or even of particular concern to many feminists. People having freedom to choose their identities and express themselves with liberty is a big concern of mine, it is part of my identity, and I had to let the label of “feminist” go.

So I invented something called “Queerism” or being a “Queerist”. In high school I defined as “bisexual” because I knew I liked boys and girls. Then, in college for about a year I labelled as a lesbian, but after awhile started having sexual relationships and then again romantic relationships with men. I could have gone back to the bisexual label, but one of the men I became involved with men was a pre-op transman, or a person born into a female body but who defined as a male and assumed the appearance of a male but had not undergone any surgery to physically alter his body. He did not fit the gender binary. I started to get to know things about the world and have experiences of all the worldly things that are complex and wonderful that make us individuals, and during the course of these worldy experiences that I discovered that sometimes I am attracted to people who do not fit the gender binary. This coincided with the semester I wrote the medical ethics paper on transgendered and intersexed people, so with all this knowledge I took on the queer label, instead of reassuming the bisexual label.

I have since come to know many non-normatively gendered people I have in my life. But many people wouldn’t see my former lover, or my family member, or several other of my friends as beautiful. They would see those people as disturbing, immoral, wrong, something to be destroyed. HBO currently has on demand one of the most heart-wretching documentaries I have ever seen (I’m a huge documentary junkie, I would definitely qualify myself as an authority on documentaries and this one was very well made, as most HBO docs are). It is titled “Valentine Road” about the murder of a teenage genderqueer boy. Non-normative gendered persons are staggeringly more vulnerable to being murder victims, a social fact that is found far less disturbing than it should be. I believe that queerism, as opposed to feminism, is needed as a national discourse because the recognition of genders and sexes other than the male/female binary will literally, quantifiably result in less violence in our society and lead to a more authentic, liberated identity expression that is actually more in align with what is natural, contrary to how we have been conditioned to recognize as true. For some people, a queerist movement is a matter of life or death.

If you think that the gender binary is “not a thing” and that genderqueer, intersexed, and transpeople should be able to live in the world with their full identities not only recognized but viewed as legitimate, then join me, friends, in making Queerism “a thing”.