[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?

YENKO NKOAA, by Eduwoji

 

This is my absolute favorite song from studying abroad in Ghana. I spent the month of April 2011 doing dance research in a small village near where this was filmed, Klikor-Agbozume. (You have to drive through Sogakope where this was filmed to get to Agbozume.) I spent the evenings of my research time drinking Star, a local beer, and dancing in the village "spot" (bar) whenever we had electricity for music. Yenko Nkoaa was on every night that we had electricity, usually several times during the night. I always wore handmade bright new dresses with African prints to go dancing with my translator, and never once wore a bra-- just like every other woman in the village. Klikor will always remain in my heart, and shape the way that I feel about my body.

[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?)