ownership

So, I'd like to talk about my job a little bit. I've been working at a domestic violence shelter for two weeks now, after nearly two months of being unemployed. Despite knowing going in that I'd have to get a second job because the pay is too low to cover my bills and that I wouldn't be receiving any benefits, I was incredibly excited when they hired me. Hopefully it goes without saying that I'm interested in working with women to help them improve their lives in any way I can.

After two weeks though, I'm not longer looking for a part-time job, I'm looking for a new one. I wanted to help empower women, to offer support as they made difficult transitions. Instead my responsibilities include reminding adult women that they are not allowed to eat in the living room and monitoring what time they get up in the morning. Nearly every one of my coworkers has compared this job to babysitting and that's exactly what it feels like.

“The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.” - Freda Adler

Yours truly apologizes for her absence, and offers up an explanation involving pain, sickness, jubilation, overdrafts, and tiny electrical impulses. But first!

The title of this entry is “taboo”, and it was thus chosen because in my fevered, nausea-hazed exploration of the should-I-laugh-or-cry Logo channel, I began to notice a pattern within the more mainstream-popular shows that they aired (such as Queer as Folk) and other media I had observed in the past. This pattern is simply: It is more taboo to show lesbian women *in a serious context* than it is to show gay men.