We’re going Hollywood!
And by that I mean, we are making a series of documentary shorts about individual men who trust women. Some of the people who have submitted to this tumblr have told amazing stories, and it’s my wish that we bring those stories to life in a way that allows them to reach and speak to as many people as possible. I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Alexandra Steinmetz, a young feminist filmmaker, to make that happen. A little bit about her:
Alexandra Steinmetz was a teenager when she realized two very important things. The first was that her path to glory was laid in celluloid (er…digital media rather), and the second was that every woman should have a right to make choices for their own bodies. These decisions are what led Alex to New York from the small town in Montana where she was raised. Alex received her degree in Political Science and Film Studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Prior to her current position as an associate producer at a small production company, Alex worked as a freelancer in productions ranging from commercial work, to features, to branded media.
In the next few months, we’ll be asking for your involvement in a couple of ways. We’ll be asking you for money, for one thing, because these things cost money. And though we’ll be doing things as shoestringingly as we can… well, these things still cost money.
But more importantly, we’ll be asking you for your stories. If you or anyone you know would like to be a part of this arm of the project, please let us know using the “Submit” button. As when you submit posts, your contact information will be kept entirely confidential.
I’m so excited about this next phase of the project, and I hope you are too. More to come soon,
-CA
My beliefs are fairly straightforward: the state does not have a right to mandate anything having to do with a person’s body to that person. Period. A woman shouldn’t be required to give birth because the idea of abortion offends someone else.
I wouldn’t say it’s a “trust” issue for me. Rather it’s a simple matter that women have the same fundamental rights as men. They should be free to choose what they will and won’t do with their bodies. I’m not sure why exactly we’re having this conversation. Ideology, religion, personal opinions, none of these things have any place in the conversation. Indeed, we shouldn’t need to have this conversation at all.
I trust women because I trust human beings, and —as absurd as it is that you have to tell some people this —women are human beings.
It is not, nor will it ever be, more complex than that simple fact.
“Let’s be clear here. Women are not an interest group… They are half of this country. They are perfectly capable of making decisions about their own health.”
Thanks, President Obama, for being a man who trusts women.
I’m not sure this is my battle because I’m not American. However, I have said this many times: do these (American, right wing) politicians realize that the rest of the world is laughing at them? Do they know how stupid, buffoonish, and hateful they are? The whole world (almost) can see this, and wonders what has happened to the United States. When did it stop being ‘the land of the free,’ and at what point did it sell out?
This is why it is my battle. Because in my country, Canada, we currently have a right wing government that refuses to act openly, that seeks to limit freedoms that hundred of thousands of Canadians have died for in wars we have been fortunate enough not to have fought on our soil. Because the odour of that same mistrust of, not just women, but people in general, is wafting throughout my country.
And because I know that if I don’t stand up for the rights of others, there will come a day when my rights will be gone, and I will wonder what happened. I will wonder when Canada stopped being the true north strong and free, and I will wonder when it sold out.
I don’t want that day to come. Ever.
So, yeah, I trust women. Just because. Because they are human. And because to deny them their rights and freedoms because they are women is nothing short of stupid.
I realized the importance of trusting women when I understood that everyone, everyone, is better off when we treat women equitably and equally. I realized it when I tried to imagine and feel what it would be like to be systemically marginalized in so many countless ways… and failed, leaving only a sick, poisonous feeling in the pit of my stomach. I realized it while I was growing up, reading Mercedes Lackey’s novels and seeing how strong, independent, and equal women are pretty much the best thing in the world.
I realized it, when I realized that not everyone else did.
I trust women with their own bodies because it would be a reprehensible caricature of humanity for me to be otherwise. I trust women with their own bodies because I thought we had gotten over this by now. I trust them because they are some of the most capable, intelligent, responsible, and outstanding people that I have ever met, and I refuse to contribute to the creation of a legislative incarceration of their bodies.
I trust them because it felt wrong when my partner thanked me for not oppressing her. It’s not something I should be thanked for.
They, we, and I are better than that.
It is appalling to me that the most reliable method of contraception available is a political football. I trust the women I know to coordinate with their physicians (usually their OB/GYNs), to find the right method of contraception for them, so that they can choose to have children when they feel that they are ready to do so. It’s no less appalling to me that religious leaders are trying to impose their views on a secular society: a panel of men of the cloth should not be testifying before Congress about women’s access to insurance-covered birth control. I trust women to make the right choice for them regarding birth control and family planning; I emphatically do not trust the government or the clergy to make that choice for them.
This is a photo of one of my family’s happiest days: the day I met my sister, when she was 31 and I was 16. (Yes, I was way into Everclear and posing funny in photos. It was 1996.) My mom got pregnant with my sister when she was still in high school; she was made to turn in her National Honor Society pin, and she had to put her baby up for adoption.
When I was ten, my mother told me I had a sister somewhere out there, and gave me a sanitized version of events. Since our family’s been reunited and I’ve heard more about it and the weeks that followed, every new detail has broken my heart again. Last year, my sister adopted a nine-year-old girl, my niece, and my sister and her husband pursued an open adoption with my new niece’s birth mother. If they hadn’t, my understanding is that my niece’s birth mom would have been in a similar position to my mom as a teen: her motherhood, the love that defines her life, would have been legally erased.
My mom, a longtime pro-choice advocate, taught me that the debate over reproductive rights is about whether to maintain a system that controls women. And through my sister, I’ve realized that even beyond contraception and abortion rights, motherhood never stops being a handle for the state to grab at — to twist at or to take away.
The state’s control over motherhood made it so that my sister’s first weeks of life were spent in some institutional crib with no one to hold her; she only found us in 1996 because a social worker bent the rules, we think, some social worker who trusted women. My niece and her birth mother might not be in each other’s lives if my sister and her husband didn’t trust women. I love my family, and I trust women.
