[cranky] the boy's club that is my job

I've worked in the theatre production business since before I could legally be paid to be there. I started in community theatre, worked on every middle and high school production I could get my hands on, and created my own major in college to continue this work. Primarily, I'm a theatre electrician and lighting designer. Occasionally I work as a production manager, and previously as a stage manager. Since it's been over ten years I can do a little bit of everything, and I've even taught professional development classes for middle and high school teachers. I've done lighting design for local professional dance companies, symphonies, musicals, and graduations, as well as college musicals. Six years ago the minimum I was ever paid was $15 an hour. Right now I'm thrilled to get any gig working for less pay.


There is an international theatre union, IATSE (declining to share my local’s number and rat myself out…). While I live in a right to work state, we follow most union rules and are all treated the same. Except that I've discovered that the "girls get less work calls" rumor is actually the truth. Guys with years less experience than me are getting more work offers than I am. Guys with a much smaller knowledge base are getting more work than I am. Therefore, they do make more money than me.


Recently I found out that there was a huge work call at my local arena for a famous rapper on tour. A friend of mine that I helped get into my city's theatres was asked to do the show, so he dropped a previous commitment I helped him get so he could go do the union-run concert with "his boys" (his words). So not only was I embarrassed, I found out that the union preference is having a penis over having the most experience or hardest work ethic. What other evenings am I at home, bored, ready and eager to work, and not getting a call because I have a vagina and can't grow a caveman beard?

[cranky] let me work

I've worked in the theatre production business since before I could legally be paid to be there. I started in community theatre, worked on every middle and high school production I could get my hands on, and created my own major in college to continue this work. Primarily, I'm a theatre electrician and lighting designer. Occassionally I work as a production manager, and previously as a stage manager. Since it's been over ten years I can do a little bit of everything, and I've even taught professional development classes for middle and high school teachers. I've done lighting design for local professional dance companies, symphonies, musicals, and graduations. Six years ago the minimum I was ever paid was $15 an hour. Right now I'm thrilled to get any gig working for less pay.

There is a local theatre union in my city, IATSE. While I live in a right to work state, we follow most union rules and are all treated the same. Except that I've discovered that the "girls get less work calls" rumor is actually the truth. Guys with years less experience than me are getting more work offers than I am. Guys with a much smaller knowledge base are getting more work than I am. Therefore, they do make more money than I do.

Recently I found out that there was a huge work call for a famous rapper on tour. A friend of mine that I helped get into my city's theatres was asked to do the show, so he dropped a previous commitment I helped him get so he could go do the union-run concert with "his boys" (his words). So not only was I embarassed, I found out that the union preference is having a penis over having the most experience or hardest work ethic. What other evenings am I at home, bored, ready and eager to work, and not getting a call because I have a vagina and can't grow a caveman beard?

[feminist] confession

Question: Why are you so passionate about women's rights, sexual victim's rights, and reproductive rights? You've never been raped or assaulted, you've never had an abortion, you've never been abused.

I have three best girlfriends. Among the three there have been two abortions, and two miscarriages. Today, two are married, one has two children and the other is expecting her first in a few weeks. The other is now happily single. I was the secret-keeper, the advice-giver, the voice and body of control and compassion. I've waited impatiently for pregnancy test results to show up in the tiny ambiguous window, I've seen how heart-wrenching the choice to have an abortion can be, I've seen how painful and confusing a miscarriage is.

My little sister was fourteen (I was nearly seventeen) when she was suddenly delivered home one Sunday afternoon by her then-best friend and her mother-- they pulled up in front of our house after calling to say she was sick, they opened the sliding side door of the mini-van, and my father and I pulled out a limp, wet, stinking child in a bikini. My father and I carried her up the stairs into the front yard as my mother called doctors to see why she was foaming at the mouth. I held my sister as she half-consciously rested against a tree, making sure she vomited to the side and not on herself, as my father went back down to the van to find out what had happened. The only answer they could give was that the bff and my sister had been at a guy's house, my sister had been drinking, and all of a sudden when they left she began puking. We live in a corner house, so we moved my sister around to the backyard, trying not to be seen as her breasts hung out of the bikini and she slipped in and out of consciousness. Eventually we laid her in a reclining pool chair that we had found a few weeks before on the side of the road, and hosed her down. She rambled on and on incoherently while smelling like a distillery.

Sometimes its really hard for me to forgive her stupidity, her choice of friends, her bad decisions. But she never in a million years deserved to have her drink spiked, her best friend turn her back on her, and to be drug up a flight of stairs and locked in a boy's bedroom while she was in and out of consciousness, and then to be slid back down the stairs and drug down the street to another house where my parents were called. What a sick power play, that this same boy has done many times over in our city since then-- his family has a great lawyer, and he has never even been brought into the courthouse for questioning, much less prosecution.

The evening after, my parents sat my sister down in the living room for a talk, and I was sent into the backyard. A bit later one of them came out and announced they were going to the ER and I couldn't come. They were gone about six hours, during which my sister had an incredibly painful and invasive rape kit that was never analyzed. She was questioned by several police officers who talked down to her. The doctors said that she definitely had something fucked up in her drink (how else could you foam at the mouth like a rabid dog?), but that it had already left her system and there was nothing they could do.

Since there was no stray hair, no sperm, no sexual evidence, there was no "proof" that she had been raped.

Since we didn't realize she had been raped when she arrived home that afternoon, and she was incapable of telling us, we didn't get her tested for drugs in time for there to be "proof" of that either.

When my father was five his father died of a heart attack. His older brother began sexually abusing him as a form of power... by the age of ten my father was able to fight back, and he turned on their little sister. When my sister was raped, my father nearly lost his mind. 

Who gets to dictate what is rape, who gets to dictate when and why women have abortions? Why is this a political topic of discussion? These are lifelong traumas, lifelong decisions-- these are personal traumas, personal decisions. I chose to run away from the south to go to school in the mid-west. But you can't run away from your past. So I am fighting for my future-- to keep my personal decisions, my personal traumas, personal. So that it can be my decision to press charges, my decision to have an abortion, and not someone else's.

[feminist] mass produced bras and my breast reduction surgery

In response to:

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. “Breast Buds and the ‘Training’ Bra.” 1977. Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings, 4^th edition. 249-254.

Before reading this I had no idea that the first bra was created in 1913, “designed simply to flatten,” and that the more current/modern bra came about in the 1930’s (Brumberg 250). The concept of the bra is so new yet so universal now. Mass production and mass media are so influential in society, and the bra is a prime example. With mass production came sizing—A, B, C, D, the infamous DD, and the realm of un-tamed breasts even larger. (As a person who once wore the “more than a DD,” I know firsthand the impossibility of buying a bra in a department store that will be the correct size.) I was still in middle school when I made the transition to “larger than my mother” and up to DD, and had to face the realization that I wasn’t just larger than normal, larger than my peers, but I was freakishly, abnormally larger than society as a whole. For years I wore two minimizer bras at a time in an effort to “tame” my breasts even more, as they continued to grow. I was known as “jugs” for years in high school before I had breast reduction surgery, after which I spent my final year in baggy shirts so that no one would I know that I had “gotten my tits cut off.”  (which to this day people perceive as a “tragedy” despite the fact that it was practically a medical necessity)

The physical pain I had from wearing underwire bras aimed at “taming” my breasts has always led me to wonder why anyone would wear a AAA or AA (or even an A) bra when to me they so obviously don’t need one. But with stores and brands like Victoria’s Secret a AAA girl can wear a bra that makes her look like she has real B-size breasts. (I’ve always wondered how disappointed the boyfriend is once the bra comes off?)