Dressember is the brainchild of Blythe Hill, who combined a personal fashion challenge with a desire to fight human trafficking, particularly in the sex industry. The idea is simple: women commit to wearing a dress every day during December. Exceptions may be made for work uniforms, exercise, cleaning, and sleeping. Participants use their commitment both to generate awareness of human trafficking and to raise funds to fight it. The Dressember Foundation gives 80% of the money raised to its partner organizations. This year, those organizations are International Justice Mission, A21, and McMahon/Ryan Child Advocacy Center.
Yes, it would be more effective to donate money directly to Dressember Foundation’s partner organizations. Yes, there are many ways you can raise awareness of human trafficking. So why participate in Dressember?
First, it helps you make a month-long commitment to actually fight human trafficking, instead of simply putting it on your to-do list.
Second, people respond to activities like this. You could donate money to an anti-trafficking organization and ask your friends to do the same. But there’s something about saying, “I will do x for organization y. Will you contribute money to support that organization?” Perhaps we feel more comfortable asking people to make contributions when we’re willing to do something to demonstrate our own commitment. Perhaps people are more willing to give in those circumstances. Whatever the reason, these things work. I’d be willing to bet that Dressember could be particularly effective if you don’t normally wear a dress.
Also, while you can collect money from friends and mail it directly to an anti-trafficking organization, you and your friends may feel more comfortable if you set up a fundraising page through an organization like Dressember. It allows each contributor to get a receipt for their donation, and it removes the trust issues that might be involved if they sent the money to you.
Although Dressember is geared toward women, men are welcome to participate. One pastor wore a dress for a day, but men may feel more comfortable committing to wearing a bow tie, suspenders, or some other distinctive piece of clothing.
Essentially, Dressember can be an effective, easy way to fight human trafficking. If it appeals to you, why not give it a try?
Okay, I’m embarrassed. This is just one pile of the books I’ve checked out since reading The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen. Yes, I have a book problem.
When a friend offered to loan me The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters From Comic Book History, my response was “Heck, yeah!” After all, Wonder Woman was featured prominently on the cover.
It wasn’t what I expected. But I still thought it was wonderful.
It was, perhaps, unfair for me to expect this to be a book about female superheroes. Author Hope Nicholson said in the introduction that the book would be a decade-by-decade exploration of “the weirdest, coolest, most of-their-time female characters in comics — for better or for worse.” And that’s pretty much what she delivered. But from the title and the cover, I had decided I’d be encountering more women like Wonder Woman — heroic figures. Instead, I was introduced to women in all their complexity. Some sounded like great role models; others… not so much.
The author definitely picked some weird women for her book. I recognized few of the characters she featured beyond the iconic figures she picked for each decade (and even a couple of those were new to me). Some of the “superwomen” she mentioned only appeared in one or two issues of a comic. Many are hard to find now, though there are still plenty of accessible books out there.
The women are products of their decades. The ’30s gave us strong female characters, but some originated in men’s pulp magazines, so they weren’t always fully clothed. On the other hand, I was a little depressed by the chapter on the ’50s. The representatives of the decade, like “Lucy the Real Gone Gal” and “Man Huntin’ Minnie of Delta Pu,” seemed shallow compared to the women who came before them. Nicholson still managed to see something good in each of them. Lucy, for instance, was a “spoiled girl whose focus is on the latest fashions and the cutest boys.” Despite that, Nicholson seemed to enjoy her, writing, “it’s pretty refreshing to see a teenager acting like a real teenager, full of hormones and misplaced rage.” The author did her best with what was available, and she certainly unearthed some interesting characters.
I didn’t always understand why Nicholson picked the characters she included in the book. Why did she choose two characters from the Elfquest universe but only one of the X-Men? And why, of all the X-Men, did she pick Dazzler? I also keenly felt the absence of some recent characters, such as Adrienne Ashe from Princeless and Alana from Saga. Nicholson gave a nod to Saga in her introduction to the current decade, but no characters from the series were included.
Many characters and comics didn’t appeal to me as I read about them. Some came across as poor role models, like Lucy. Others seemed to exist primarily as vehicles for porn. But when I finished the book, I still had a long list of comics I wanted to read. Since I finished Nicholson’s volume, I’ve read Rose (a Bone prequel), a volume of iZombie, and a volume of Squirrel Girl. I found all of them enjoyable — even iZombie, and I swear I really am not into zombies.
Despite my criticisms, I was impressed by the sheer number of unusual female characters Nicholson managed to dig up. She clearly knows her stuff. And while this isn’t the sort of book in which I’d expect poetic descriptions, it’s well-written. Every once in a while Nicholson delivers an absolutely beautiful bit of writing, such as when she described the women Johnnie Christmas created for Firebug: “their weight lies on their bones as it would in real life.”
If you enjoy comics or are interested in how women have been portrayed in pop culture over time, I highly recommend The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen. You’ll almost certainly close the book with a list of comics you’ll want to track down.
This week I encountered two articles about privilege. One was a series of photos that visually explain privilege by flipping what we expect to see. The other was a thoughtful article about privilege from a conservative point of view. Privilege has been on my list of potential blog topics. The articles were the nudge I needed to write about it.
“Privilege” essentially means that you are born into a world where certain advantages, power among them, tend to come with being in a group or groups to which you belong. Powerful people are more often like you than not. Desirable goods and services are geared toward people like you. You don’t need to worry that if an Airbnb host tells you they cannot accommodate you, it’s because of who you are.
Privilege is often talked about in terms of race. Indeed, it’s very important to acknowledge the existence of white privilege and racism. But privilege can be tied to other things, such as financial status, gender, and religion. When we are willing to acknowledge privilege exists, we can take steps toward a world where equal opportunities for different people really exist.
There’s a lot that can be said about privilege. I want to tackle just a few things here. First, I want to talk about why people may deny that they are in a privileged group, because I think that’s the biggest obstacle to dismantling a system that favors certain groups over others. Then I want to address privilege from two perspectives: that of a Christian and that of a geek.
Why won’t we acknowledge our privilege?
We’ll never address the problems of privilege if we don’t acknowledge privilege exists. So why don’t we?
Conservatives often see privilege as a liberal idea, and therefore one they must reject. This is why I am so moved by David Marcus’ article in The Weekly Standard. While he disagrees with some of the ways he sees privilege treated by people on the left, he makes the straightforward statement “[White privilege] absolutely describes an actual phenomenon.” I often worry about the gap between liberals and conservatives. It’s one thing to have different approaches to tackling a problem and another to not even agree whether or not a problem exists. People like Marcus give me hope.
We don’t feel privileged. The world is a scary place, and the problems we face just seem to be getting worse. Wages have been largely stagnant for decades. Good jobs seem scarce. If you feel like you are constantly struggling to stay afloat, if you are worried about retaining your value in a tight job market, you certainly don’t think of yourself as privileged. Likewise, Christians are quick to deny Christian privilege, because we live an increasingly post-Christian society. We fail to acknowledge that Western culture mostly has been based on Christian culture for nearly 2,000 years. Even as we move into a post-Christian society, the advantages of being a Christian still linger. One example? While many people do not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, Christians did such a great job of establishing it as a major holiday that schools close around Christmas for winter break, and many people (though not all) get the day off work. As a Christian, I confess I love having Christmas off. But let’s face it — most of us don’t expect our employer to close for Rosh Hashanah or Eid Al-Fitr.
We can’t see the forest for the trees. This is related to the point above. We may use things like instances of ridicule directed against us as evidence that we are not, in fact, privileged. Similarly, if we fail to “win” something, such as a job, and we see someone from a traditionally underprivileged group get what we wanted, we many conclude we aren’t privileged after all. For decades, white people have used the existence of affirmative action to argue that minority groups are actually privileged, but when so few people of color hold leadership roles, that argument doesn’t hold water. We need to look at the big picture rather than focusing on instances in which we didn’t benefit from privilege.
We think that people who want us to acknowledge our privileges just want us to feel guilty and ashamed. I’m sure there are people who want just that. There are people who seem to derive great joy from shaming others about all sorts of things. They may be the Eeyores in our life, people who say things like, “Don’t mind me. My birthday doesn’t matter. You just go along and have your fun.” They may be people who delight in leaving nasty letters about things that are none of their business. I have no doubt that there are people whose goal is to make you feel guilty about belonging to a privileged group. But just because people like that exist doesn’t mean you should deny your privilege. Acknowledging privilege isn’t about living a shame-filled life. It’s about working toward a world of equal opportunities.
We believe that privilege will always exist with one group or another. Maybe it really does rest with us now, but if we change things, it will just go to another group. At any rate, it will always be here. It’s part of human nature. So why bother thinking about it? I actually do believe that there will always be privileged groups this side of heaven. It is, indeed, part of human nature. So are things like murder, rape, and child abuse. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight those things. They are wrong, and it is our job to take a stand against what’s wrong.
We don’t want to give up our privilege. When life seems to exist to favor people like you, it can be a very scary thing to actively work toward changing things, thus giving up the advantages you were born with. But that brings me to the section of my post that tackles privilege from a specifically Christian point of view…
God’s kingdom is about giving up privilege.
The Bible is subversive. Christians worship a God who “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:7-8) If we call ourselves Christians, we are supposed to imitate Jesus. What does this look like?
Jesus was born into poverty and died the death of a criminal — exhibiting powerlessness in birth and death.
He hung out with rejects, such as tax collectors; welcomed the powerless, such as children; and told stories in which the respectable came out looking bad and the role of the hero was played by someone unexpected, like the Good Samaritan.
Jesus preached about an upside-down kingdom in which the first are last and the last are first. He spoke of a day when the hungry would be satisfied, and the well-fed would go hungry. In God’s kingdom, power structures are reversed.
It’s not always easy to figure out how to faithfully follow Jesus in the modern world. What is clear is that it requires willingness to give up power rather than grasp it. As for Christian organizations, wouldn’t be amazing if their leadership looked less like Fortune 500 companies and more like God’s kingdom?
Shedding privilege is an adventure.
If you’ve dreamed of getting an acceptance letter to Hogwarts or having the Doctor offer to take you anywhere in time and space, you’ve felt the pull of adventure. Alas, these daydreams will never come to pass, but there are real-life adventures we can pursue. One of those is the willingness to shed our privileges. If you belong to a privileged group, imagine living in a world that did not accommodate people like you. If you’re a geek, you may have had times when you felt like an outsider. Jump in and embrace that feeling! Shedding privilege is uncomfortable, but as Bilbo learned, adventures aren’t comfortable… but they change life for the better.
I’m short on specifics about how to go about this, because I myself have taken mere baby steps on this adventure. I’ve become aware of my privileges, and I try to think from the perspective of those who do not have them. If I’m donating food to a food shelf, am I including foods that might especially appeal to the immigrants who live in my community? Am I in a position to recommend a talented person from a disadvantaged group for a position of power, so that they can gain experiences that previously may have been denied to them?
Outside of considering the perspectives of people who don’t share my privileges, I need to be willing to become uncomfortable. How do I feel going into a space where I am the minority? How do I feel about accepting leadership from someone who has less privilege than I do?
These are only small steps on the adventure of shedding privilege, but they are steps. What can you do today to notice the privileges you have, and how can you let go of those privileges for the good of others?
Poster from Teslacon. Yes, the image is crooked. Your blogger is exhausted after a long weekend, so this is the best she can do. 🙂
I learned about Michael Zahs at Teslacon, a steampunk convention which itself could be worthy of a “something wonderful” post. I almost missed his movie showing, and I’m very glad I didn’t. Listed on the con’s schedule was this simple entry: “An Afternoon with Michael Zahs & the Films of the Britton [sic] Collection. PART II. Join Film restoration expert Michael Zahs as he takes us into the world of the first films. After years of locating, finding and finally restoring these priceless films he once again shows them to a base of fans that will enjoy every minute of fantasy and adventure they offer.” That doesn’t begin to describe the experience of listening to Zahs talk about the Brintons and the films in their collection. Fortunately, I ran into a friend prior to the showing, and she urged me to attend. It was my favorite part of the convention.
Zahs began his presentation by telling us a bit about W. Frank and Indiana Putman Brinton. From the late 1800s through the early 1900s, Frank and his wife, Indiana, traveled from Texas to Minnesota, entertaining people with magic lantern shows and some of the earliest movies. They were meticulous record keepers who saved everything, such as film catalogs (including possibly the only English translations of a Georges Méliès catalog) and old films. When Zahs ran across the Brintons’ collection at an estate sale, he knew he’d found a treasure. For more than 30 years, he has worked to archive what he found, including digitizing old films.
Although Zahs’ finds included more than films, they are the jewels of the collection. Among the movies the Brintons saved were two Méliès films that have never been found anywhere else: The Wonderful Rose Tree and The Triple-Headed Lady. The former is a very short story, in which a magician, assisted by a woman who loves him, grows a magic rose tree. When the roses are gathered, they become a woman who entrances the magician, to the disappointment of his assistant. When he pursues the magical woman, she turns back into roses, and the tree disappears, leaving the magician alone. The Triple-Headed Lady involves a favorite Méliès special effect: the removal of heads.
In addition to the two missing films, the Brintons saved more Méliès films, at least one film by Thomas Edison, some early color films (hand-painted), footage of San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake, the first film footage of a president (Woodrow Wilson), and many more movies made between 1895 and 1908. Zahs showed several at Teslacon, accompanying them with humorous narration. (He pointed out that silent films were never, in fact, silent. Theaters always would provide music or narration.) I would love to be able to embed just one of the short films we saw in this post, but if any of them are available online, I can’t locate them. And even if I could find them, Zahs’ narration added something that cannot be replaced.
Because of his dedication to preserving this rare collection of some of the earliest films in existence, Zahs has recently been made the subject of a documentary: Saving Brinton. Unfortunately, since I was completely unaware of Zahs or the Brintons until a few days ago, I didn’t know to look for the movie, which has already been to my city. If you are in New York, it will premiere there on Nov. 13 and 14. The rest of us will have to wait until it is released on video. (Perhaps it will be shown in more theaters if it wins an Oscar?)
Zahs is a different kind of hero, but I think historians and film buffs will agree that he is just that. Do all you can to learn about the collection he’s preserving.
