The Fight About Feminism and Motherhood That Isn’t

Posted on May 1, 2012 by lisa

Motherhood vs. Feminism? Give me a break. The New York Times recent forum with that title is just another example of the mainstream media ginning up a false dichotomy and presenting two ideas as opposing when they aren’t even mutually exclusive. And for the writers in this false “war” to state that motherhood issues pose an end to feminism shows a frightening but clear ignorance of what feminism was and is and a very strange idea about what motherhood means.

The young blogger LaShaun Williams included in the group of opinion makers. actually gleefully proclaims the end of feminism and speaks the oft spoke lie that feminism forced women out of the house and into the work place, but she isn’t the least of it, although allowing her reactionary attitude into the mix is a surefire way of hitting below the belt. She probably doesn’t even realize that she wouldn’t be featured in the Times if it weren’t for her feminist sisters before her. On the other side, Heather McDonald thinks she is being amusing when she “admits” that she didn’t want to nurse. And then there is Pauline Druckerman’s regurgitating her whole mother/ martyr myth. All of the women writing seem to be pushing back at the idea of perfect motherhood when perfection has never been a reality for any mother. Didn’t Ayelet Waldman put that to rest already?

It may not always be easy to be a working mother. But we now know that if at one time in one’s life or another, motherhood needs to be delayed due to work or work needs to be delayed due to motherhood, it is still perfectly reasonable, possible and desirable to be both a feminist and a mother. At the same time. It is also perfectly plausible to be a mother who denounces feminism even as she benefits from the way it has pushed for women’s equality. But it is not even slightly credible to use the platform of a major newspaper of record to discuss whether it is true that motherhood has put an end to feminism or its opposite is true.

In addition, while The New York Times, Washington Post and other news outlets of record can do a fine job of serious investigative reporting, when they and other mainstream media report begin to write about trends you can be sure those trends have already entered the mainstream, been discussed and often dismissed and that those writing about them currently are way behind the curve. Motherhood and feminism have been both practiced and talked about since feminism began as a movement over a hundred years ago (and likely well before that, if covertly) and there is no more a battle between them now than there ever was. What there is is a need for continued discussion about how to make it possible for our society to support women who wish to work and have a family—which includes legislation making it feasible—and an additional need to allow women who choose to stay home to raise their children (and who have been able to manage the resources to do it) to make that choice without forcing them out of feminism. But that isn’t a fight. It’s a discussion.

In 1995 before the ubiquity of the internet and the way we can now connect with each other, a woman named Ann Allen began a listserve called Feminist Mothers at Home. I had a 7-year-old and a 2-year-old old and I found it a place where women who had worked and would work again could come to discuss how it felt to be both a feminist and a stay-at-home mother. I joined that group, although at the time I considered myself both a full-time mother and a full-time writer. I did not, however, work outside the home. But even before that group, twenty five years ago when I gave birth to my son the same kinds of discussions that are being had now were being had then: breast or bottle, cloth or paper diapers, attachment parenting or helping children learn to sleep alone. There was much discussion over whether it was a good idea to let a baby cry himself to sleep or soothe him. My fellow mothers and I talked about expressing milk, making homemade baby food or feeding from a jar, organic milk or regular, whether slings were a good idea or a bad one. We varied in the ways we disciplined our kids, how we fed them, when and how we put them to bed, when to put them in school, how much to be involved in their activities.

Sound familiar?

The mother who raised me in the 50s and 60s had no one to talk to about those kinds of things, but for the past 40 plus years, at the least, since feminism finally gave women more of a voice in their own lives, none of what is being discussed today is in any way really new.

And pretending it is is manufacturing a fight that serves no one.

Yes, the feminist movement in its early Sixties and Seventies incarnation was angry. It railed against the June Cleaver model. It did not include enough talk about the idea of taking care of the kids while mom worked; it did not embrace women of color and it did not always do a good job of supporting women who were not middle class. It was a hard-hitting idea whose time had long since come: that women needed to be treated fairly, equally, with respect and with decency, and if in the throes of fury some women were not as supportive of each other as they should have been, might have been, that is water under the bridge.

There is no need to recall what we might or might have done better and there is absolutely no reason to make a fight out of motherhood vs feminism,except to excite the masses and deflect from now what is a clear on assault on the rights that women fought so hard for forty years ago; there is no reason for women to bitch slap each other for the pleasure of the men who are just aching to take away what small rights women have been able to hold on to.

With very few exceptions the women I have known have taught me about love, life, sex, work, and how to deal with pain and loss. They have been with me through the traumas that affected us all. I have watched friends die, watched them deal with handicapped children, watch them choose not to have children at all. They have seen me through two marriages, through success and failure. They have had my back and I have had theirs.

So what if we don’t always agree about which is the right way to parent? So what if we make choices that sometimes come back to hit us in the face. So what if our children question the decisions we make? It has been and will always be thus. But the mistakes we made as women, as mothers, as feminists, are our own mistakes and we have to live with them, no matter what choices we make, and every woman I know is at least willing to discuss the repercussions of her decisions and to realize that she may not have all the answers.

You want to sleep with your kid until he is six? Go ahead. You want to go back to work when your baby is a week old? Do that, too. It matters not to me. We make our own decisions with our partners, if we have them, alone if we do not, and we must be willing to bear the consequences. Most of the kids will turn out fine. Some won’t. The best thing we can do is learn when to let go and let them take responsibility for their own paths.

But setting up false dichotomies, false equivalences, fake arguments, and making those all about whether or not feminism is a success or a failure is the king of false dichotomies. Feminism, like any civil rights movement, is supposed to allow us to be equal partners in our work lives, our home lives, our love lives, our sex lives. It is supposed to give us the freedom to choose, not narrow our choices. There is a real war on women being waged by men (and some women) to take back the strides we have made. Wouldn’t it be a shame if a fight among ourselves, a useless, wasteful, shameful fight was the thing that finally undid us all?

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Motherhood: The Fear Factor

Posted on April 6, 2012 by lisa

After six hours of hard labor, I was told my son’s heartbeat was slowing. “Get him out,” I screamed. And they did, slitting me from top to bottom in an emergency C-section. I wasn’t at the hospital or with the doctor where I had received my pregnancy care. A torrential downpour at midnight just as I started my contractions (two weeks early by the doc but right on time by me) and they got faster and faster, precluded an hour- and- a-half drive over the mountains. We raced to the little local hospital and were cared for by a new young doctor who seemed as frightened as I was.

The boy was fine. I was a wreck.

Six years later, my four-month-old daughter developed what turned out to be whooping cough (she had had two of her three vaccines) and after two trips to her doctor and one to the emergency room where I was told she had a “cold,” I drove an hour and a half to see a specialist who diagnosed the disease correctly and treated her (and my entire family) with antibiotics. For three week my daughter slept beside me in the bed so that I could hear her troubling cough and stop her from choking to death.

During the six years between the birth of my son and the birth of my daughter I visited the emergency room four times with my boy, who had a propensity for injuries requiring stitches. (I was afraid I would be reported to social services). Later, at age 13, he was hit in the eye by a pop fly and had a broken nose and a black-and-blue face which we lovingly captured on camera. For three years he grew so quickly that his bones lite*rally ached. Growing pains, I found out, were real.

The thing is, as scary as it is being a parent, it is the kids themselves who will do the things that really terrify you.

And all those physical injuries were actually the easy part. As my kids entered the fullness of their teenage years they frightened me in ways I might should have expected but somehow didn’t. They took drugs they shouldn’t have (convinced as teens are of their own invincibility), they snuck out of the house many more times than those I found out about. They took up with crazy girlfriends and unsuitable boyfriends.

Hell, just seeing them get into a car and drive off was nearly enough to give me a heart-attack.

Seeing them get into a car with a person I did not know was enough to give me a heart attack.

I can’t even describe the fear I felt when each of them went off to days-long music festivals.

I realize, as open and honest a relationship I have with my kids, now that they are 19 and 24. I am sure I missed, even with my incredible radar, all manner of things. In fact, during spring break with both of my children, my son decided to tell me some of the things he had done that I didn’t know about. At more than one point, as curious as I was about what I had missed, I wanted to yell at him: Stop, Stop. I really do not want to know this.

But I kept listening because I had a mother who truly thought that what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. I had a mother to whom my sisters and I could tell nothing, a mother to whom we had to lie about mostly everything for our entire lives.

I don’t necessarily condone full disclosure, but in an odd way it helps. Before you become a parent you can think of everything your child might to do get hurt so you baby proof your houses, you cut up their food into non-chokeable sizes, you watch them like hawks on the playground, when they learn to ride a bike, every time they head out onto the sports field. You teach them not to talk to strangers, you give them the lecture about how it doesn’t matter how good a driver they are because there are crazy people driving on the road beside them. You give them the information on safe sex, drinking and driving, drugs and driving, texting and driving, talking on the phone and driving.

Because even with all this advice, they will more than likely want to talk about things that you might not even have imagine; and at the same time you dispense advice, you really do want to open up a dialogue so that your kids feel comfortable coming to you with issues, questions, problems.

The other thing that parenting a baby or a toddler doesn’t prepare you for is the pain your children will suffer at the hands of others: they may be tormented, bullied, have their hearts callously broken. And here is something perhaps even worse: their friends will die, of suicide or accident, gunshot. And you will have to help them mourn while you are thanking God that you are not the parent of that poor dead child

**************

I know dear friends whose bright, beautiful children have self-destructed, resurrected themselves and done it all again. I hear from friends whose children have suffered from unspeakable tragedy, whose children have run away, gotten pregnant, joined the Army. I know that even when the best and brightest of kids go off to college anything can happen. Every time I hear about a college student disappearing I want to throw up. I text my daughter furiously: I love you, are you okay?

This is nothing like being a helicopter parent, and yes, my parents, the parents of boomers, were pretty, well, casual, and most of us managed to make it to adulthood mostly intact. But I also remember the memorial pages in my high school year book, black bordered pages signifying a life ended too soon. And yes, my generation did its share of crazy things, we took some extraordinary risks. Those experiences should prepare us for what our kids will throw at us, but somehow, even though we know what may be coming, the fact of it is always a blow.

The thing is, the trouble your children can get into as babies, toddlers, young children, is nothing like the trouble they can get in for the rest of their lives. And the vigilance you practiced as you kept an eye on your babies while they crawled around the living room is the same vigilance you need to practice for the rest of your life. Because your kids will do things that terrify you for the rest of their lives. Your kids will have terrible things done to them for the rest of their lives. FOREVER. You can take that advice to the bank.

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The South Can Rise Again, But Not Like You Think

Posted on March 26, 2012 by lisa

A video depicting residents of Mississippi and Alabama as toothless, ignorant bigots is making its way around the country and, perhaps, the world. That video and the fact that several southern states have gone for Santorum and Gingrich in the Republican primaries has, it seems, confirmed the notion that the South, as a whole, is woefully stupid and racist. As a woman born and raised in the South who has lived in three different southern states, only one of which, admittedly, by choice (my current home in Savannah, Georgia), I want to defend the South. I really want to, as hard as it may be sometimes, because I think buying into that viewpoint is like buying into any other stereotype: Jews are rich and smart, Black men are criminals and the women are welfare queens, feminists hate men… you name it. It’s easy to dismiss a whole culture, a whole religion, an entire gender, with such facile descriptions.

Easy, the operating word being easy.

What passes for conversation these days is often, to say the least, inadequate. People of all genders, religions, regions and races have a tendency in these polarized times to seek out information that confirms their beliefs and to spend time with friends with whom they can share their outrage over whatever it is that outrages them. Rather than looking for information to inform or challenge their assumptions and prejudices, rather than think and read and wonder, too many Americans hold fast to their “opinions,” even if those opinions are not based on one single supportive fact. But it isn’t just southerners who should end up holding the bag of stupidity, there’s enough guilt to go around. The same people who easily dismiss southerners as idiots would do well do check their own prejudices at the door.

Yes, the truth is that a huge number of Republican voters in Mississippi and Alabama think President Obama is a Muslim, don’t believe in evolution, and hold other ephemeral convictions. That truth does not serve the South well. But those people should not be the region’s only spokespeople. Just like the stuck-in-the-mud Kansans of Thomas Frank’s book should not represent the entire Midwest, and just like the more conservative Jews who support Netanyahu’s belligerence should not speak for all American Jews.

There is a large and growing number of progressives, liberals and democrats in the South and, as if to put to rest Lyndon Johnson’s statement that with civil rights legislation the South would be lost to the Democrats for a hundred years, they are happily working and living in many southern states. If the baby boom exodus from the north and Midwest to North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida continues, there will be many more. Already Savannah, Georgia, where I now live is seeing huge changes from recent residents.

I grew up in the South of east Tennessee, deep in Appalachia, in a small factory town. My parents were transplanted New England Jews and first generation Americans. I was subjected on many occasions to virulent anti-Semitism, some of it so casually couched that I knew those spewing it had no idea what it was they were saying. My father, a small businessman, was constantly confronted by customers who told him not to Jew him down. Some of the people with whom I went to school can’t to this day even admit the prejudice with which they viewed Jews. Like many other evangelical Christians they seem to think their desire to “save” people of my religion is laudable. Their support of Israel is tainted, too, by the Biblical imperative of the Rapture and its aftermath. Their minds are impossible to open, never mind change. Against the backdrop of institutionalized prejudice (there was prayer in the schools through junior high; the schools in general were not integrated until I was in the fourth grade) I had to figure out, at an early age who I was and what I would stand for. It seemed obvious to me that education and a worldview outside my town was essential and so I pushed to get out and go Up North.

But when I went to college in Rhode Island I experienced another kind of prejudice. There many students made fun of my mild southern accent and rural roots; they needed convincing that I was as smart as they were. And so I had to prove myself in a different way. Once again, I made my mark by paying attention, reading, listening, and opening up my own mind. Once again I met challenge head on and was molded by it. It saddens me that so many of my countrymen and women seem to think that they just don’t have the time to explore beliefs counter to their own or even to search out the facts behind some of the more outrageous statements made by political candidates and a number of “news” organization.

But that ignorance, that unwillingness to be open and tolerant and educated, is not just a Southern problem. I am quite certain that had the camera been turned on men and women in Maine or Oklahoma or Idaho and Arizona similar comments would be heard, identical viewpoints would be expressed. Ignorance does not stop when one crosses the Mason Dixon line and it is arrogant to think it does.

The South has its issues, as does every region of this country. Some say the weather makes people indolent, others think poverty is the sharpest shaper of worldview. There is still a strong undercurrent of prejudice of a multitude of varieties. But many southerners, by birth or choice, live in quiet harmony with each other, and a large number of southerners work for change every day of their lives. There is a long and wonderful history of the southern liberal and his/her work for civil rights, voting rights and equality for everyone. The first white child born in Georgia was a Jewish boy; Jews have lived and worked in the South and deep South since before we became a nation. The overthrow of Jim Crow laws in the South made a difference everywhere in America and black men and women worked together with white men and women, often in danger of their lives, to effect change that was overdue and necessary. I don’t share the South Will Rise Again mentality of the confederate apologists but I do believe that the South will continue its transformation into a place that discourages prejudice of all types. In that good way it can and will rise.

I had a wonderful professor in college who said to my class one day, “Some lies are so damn good a man would be a fool not to believe them.” That statement is true of our political process today as the memes and lies build on themselves and convince far too many voters of their truth. But I will continue to urge the rest of the country not to dismiss the South on the basis of the ugly statements of the ignorant and uneducated. Not to dismiss all of us because some of us believe those hard lies. No area of the country is without its unenlightened. And it will be always thus.

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Being Fucked by Republicans. Fun? Not So Much

Posted on March 10, 2012 by lisa

(This post originally appeared on doesthismakesense.com)

I’m writing this when I should be vacuuming. In pearls and heels and nothing else; well, maybe an apron, just an apron covering my front so that my ass hangs out, tantalizingly. In the hope, of course, that my husband, the only man with whom I have ever had sex, will come home and take me, there, in the living room, throwing caution (and the vacuum) to the winds. We will have sex without birth control so that, perhaps, if he and I are lucky, we will conceive yet another child to add to the many others who have been so thusly conceived: my husband, the only man with whom I have had sex, so lustily turned on by the image of me doing housework in heels and pearls and, perhaps, an apron.

Or perhaps, Total Woman-like (for those of who you don’t get the reference: look it up) I will put down my cleaning tools and, wrapped only in Saran Wrap, greet said husband at the door

And so it goes.

One hundred and sixty four years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton started fighting for women’s rights, ninety two years after women got the vote, thirty nine years after Roe v Wade, and millions of hours of fighting for our rights in the workplace, the home, the battlefield, and in the political arena, I have only one question: Who is it Republican men are fucking?

Besides the country as a whole, metaphorically speaking, of course.

Okay, some Republican men are fucking other Republican men. Those, that is, who fight most against gay rights and are the most virulently homophobic and have been outed over the past few years for man on man action, despite their protestations to the contrary. But not every Republican man is a closeted homosexual. Right? So who are they fucking? It isn’t women. It can’t be.

Because women must be held down, held accountable for their sexuality, and held back from living lives as free women; they can’t be allowed to ask their insurance companies for birth control; they can’t get abortions if they fall pregnant; and if they do have a child, they can’t get any help from anyone in the government. And they shouldn’t even dare and ask for child support, right guys? So it stands to reason that Republican men who wish to impose those draconian measures must be holding themselves to some fine chaste state, too. Right? Or else they are all breaking the law by going to real women of the street and paying for sex. While they call women who have sex outside of marriage whores.

Rick Santorum doesn’t believe women should use birth control. His wife apparently agrees. But she isn’t in the 99% of all women who have used birth control at some time in their lives. 99%. That number sounds suspiciously familiar. Mitt Romney (of the Mormons who are busily baptizing dead Jews) supported the recently barely defeated Blunt Amendment, which would have allowed companies to deny certain health insurance benefits, specifically birth control (but extrapolated to any number of other things), after, of course, he said he didn’t support it. ALL the Republicans in the Senate (save for the soon-to-retire Olympia Snowe) voted for the amendment. I don’t know what Newt Gingrich thought, but his position on fucking is abundantly clear. He believes in it whole-heartedly, both inside and outside of marriage and I have to believe that as his second and third wives bore him no offspring, someone in those marriages is using birth control But other than Rick and his wife and Mitt and his, and Newt and all of his wives, who are the other Republicans fucking?

Can it possibly be that all the Republicans members of the Senate (and all the countless other Republican toadies who accepted the concept of the Blunt Amendment) have never had sex with anyone but their current wives, and only AFTER the weddings? And if that’s so, then why the need for transvaginal ultrasounds and abortions at all? At least not for Republicans. Because they aren’t doing any of the kind of fucking that would necessitate either service.

I find it very hard to believe that discussions about limiting women’s health services are even under discussion in the 21st century. I find it appalling that women who wish to use birth control rather than get pregnant are still being called sluts. But then I find it equally appalling that women still don’t get equal pay for equal work and that women can still be called to task for the clothing they wear and be held accountable for their own rape, among a multitude of other indignities. But that’s just because I am one of those radical feminazis who actually believes in equal rights for all, in every arena, even sexual intercourse. Obviously, I am not a Republican.

And even though I’ve done a considerable amount of fucking inside both my marriages and before and after them, too, I have never had to get an abortion. Probably because I was pretty conscientious about using that birth control that the Republicans sneer at and hate the idea of insurance companies paying for. But, also, because I was just damned lucky.

Here’s the thing: retro is cool in fashion, design, maybe even movies. But it is not cool in sexual politics. Just find me a woman who is willing to return to the days and mores of yesteryear, really, with all that entails; I don’t think you can. I don’t think she exists. I don’t believe the wives of the current crop of candidates want to be the women the rest of the party seems determined to craft either. Because the implications are pretty profound. Rick’s wife could be one of the few exceptions ( I don’t have a bead on her), but the fact that Ann urged Mitt to run and Callista was Newt’s mistress means they are no shrinking violets. They are their husbands’ partners. But you can’t be a partner without the same rights, and some of those rights include the right to control what happens to our bodies. That shouldn’t even be debated.

You can’t have it both ways: a partner and helpmeet who is under the thumb of her man. Those two ideas cannot exist simultaneously.

So, I am willing to offer a compromise. How about we limit birth control and abortion services, STD testing and breast, cervical and uterine cancer screenings only to those women who can prove that they are not registered Republicans? That way, no one has to worry about operating outside his or her “morality,” either sincerely, or, say, like too many others, hypocritically. And that way, everybody wins.

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WHY Must We Constantly Re-Invent Ourselves?

Posted on February 1, 2012 by lisa

I am feeling very inadequate. While I have recently, at the age of 55, moved to a new city and a house, completed a new novel, and said good-bye to my last child as she heads off the college; while I have, in the past six years ended two marriages and started a new relationship, I have not, for example: climbed a mountain, alone, started a cupcake business, left my job and devoted myself to volunteer work. Nor have I overcome a huge and debilitating illness. I have not moved to a foreign country, gone back for another degree or begun a clothing line.
I used to like More magazine. It had models over 40 on the cover (even if they were, still, airbrushed) and it had a good amount of decent reading for those of us not permanently in our twenties or early thirties. But lately I sigh every time I pick up that magazine. It is constantly exhorting me to re-invent myself and, frankly, I am rather exhausted.
I know women’s magazines have no real relationship to life as most of us live it, while I am aware that those tomes often give the most bizarre sex advice (Nerve magazine does a superb job of skewering the sex advice in both women’s and men’s magazines)—all the while showcasing sex on the cover, because sex sells. I realize quite well that the editorial tries hard to take something ordinary and, well, turn it into a service piece (one recent article was on how to take a relaxing bath: apparently you dim the lights and use soothing bubble bath. Well, what a shock!) I am more than aware that everything that can be photo-shopped is photo-shopped. I am not quite sure what even draws me to those magazines, aside from the fact that, yes, I am an admitted addict to even the idea of anything that can make my skin look “younger” (this side of surgery). BUT….
I am really really weary of the constant push for us women to re-invent ourselves.
I am simply sick of the word itself.
We are supposed to re-invent our home décor, our relationships, our marriages, our work lives. We are supposed to re-think our hairstyles and makeup and even our purchases—combining inexpensive trendy pieces with the expensive long-term purchase so that our wardrobe can be re-invented. We are pushed to re-examine everything, all the time, each month, with new examples of women who have gone out on a very thin limb and survived to tell the tale.
Those women, while admirable, are as foreign to most of us as an alien landing would be. There is simply no way possible for most women I know to jettison their old lives and embark on a completely new one—not that most of us would really even want to.
I have a good friend struggling to live with Stage 4 cancer. I have another who has recently married and inherited an instant family of two young children; still another woman I know left her marriage and her town and started a new job in a big city. Other friends are struggling with long-term marriages and kids leaving home and unemployment and, especially for so many of us, aging parents who need our care. I can’t think of a woman I know in her forties, fifties or sixties who isn’t overloaded with the stuff of ordinary life and, despite that, doing a bang-up job of coping and even thriving.
Women are amazingly flexible. We can take a licking and keep on ticking, as the old Timex commercial had it. We can bob and weave with every blow and still land a punch or two ourselves. And, most importantly, remain on our feet, as shaky as they may be sometimes. But this push to make us feel that what we are doing is never enough makes me nuts. For years we were not thin enough, not pretty enough, not pliable enough. For the past twenty years we have seen women of our generation remake themselves physically with implants and liposuction and injections. It seems like each day a new face cream or serum promises us eternal youth. And then, as we grow ever older we are beset by examples of women who have chucked everything and gone for the gold.
I think that most women spend a lot of their lives re-inventing themselves every day: each new challenge, each new trauma, each new joy, they all mean that we have to re-think are values, our coping mechanisms, our reactions. Feminism is still evolving, we are still being pitted against each other for the decisions we make, the way we choose to live. So is it any wonder that we must confront our own selves on a regular basis? But is that any less transforming than the complete life reinventions profiled in magazines?
Just today I got an email that tells me how to transform my body. I don’t think so: at 56 my body is beyond transformation, unless I go under the knife. Yes, I exercise and watch what I eat, but I am not deluded that I can have the body of a thirty year old, or even, without two-hour-a-day workouts, one resembling 65-year-old role model Helen Mirren.
None of the women I know are lazy in any description of the word but the constant call to re-invent ourselves from top to bottom and inside and out can make us feel that no matter what we do it is never enough. What is enough, however, is the siren call to transform. I call for a moratorium on the word re-invention, especially for women. We are doing more than enough as it is.

(This article originally appeared in

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What You May Not Know About Health Care

Posted on January 26, 2012 by lisa

When in the early nineties I lived in Oxford , England, as the new mother of a six-month old, nurses regularly came to our flat for well baby check-ups. All of my medications and doctors’ visits and all those for my child were free for the first year of her life. My prescriptions averaged around ten dollars each, no matter how expensive they were. And I was only a temporary resident.

When I lived in France for two years about ten years ago, my prescriptions were uniformly 7 Euros each, which at that time was about the same in dollars; even the medication that costs close to three hundred dollars here in the United States. In both countries I received health care as good or better as I have ever received here. In France, I broke my foot and the treatment there was remarkable in how fast it got me, literally, back on my feet.

Now, back here in the United States where I have had health insurance for the past 27 years in the state of Virginia I haven’t been able, so far, to qualify for health insurance in the state of Georgia, to which I have recently moved. I am being denied due to the number of medications I take, a factor which I really didn’t consider when deciding to move, ignorant, as I was, that I would have to apply and be medically underwritten for insurance all over again.

Because health insurance does not transfer. Did you know that? I didn’t. Even if the company writes under the same name. Blue Cross of Georgia has no obligation to cover me even though Blue Cross of Virginia has covered me for years. Other companies I have contacted have given me the same answer. I may yet get coverage (the jury is still out) from one company although they will require a rider which will exclude the most expensive of my medications, an inhaler which I take for life-long asthma and which costs nearly $300 a month. That same inhaler, I might add, which was less than 7 dollars in France, and which, even with my current co-pay costs me $90 a month out of pocket. The individual policy I currently have, has a large deductible, too, and still costs me close to $600 a month. I have a friend who has cancer and whose husband had a stroke and they pay almost $3000 a month. Yet health insurance companies run as for-profit enterprises and fat-cat CEOs are banking millions off the checks of people who are betting against themselves, and millions more because they won’t insure anyone who might be a risk. None of the executives of large insurance companies makes less than $3 million a year and most of the big guys make far, far more than that.

I suppose I am lucky, though, that I have none of the conditions which would have excluded me from even applying for insurance. Although, supposedly children under 19 born with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied insurance, that doesn’t count for those over that age. If you look at the applications you will find that people with Down’s syndrome, those who have a history of bi-polar syndrome, anyone who has had a stroke or heart attack needn’t apply. If you have multiple sclerosis or other nerve diseases you cannot get coverage. If you suffer from fibromyalgia you cannot get insurance. If you have emphysema or COPD you cannot get coverage. If you have ever had a drug or alcohol problem, don’t apply. And of course if you take more than three medications, your chances are pretty slim. In fact, if you think you might be the kind of person who might need insurance, you are out of luck. Best be young and healthy and insurance companies are happy to take your money and — until the Affordable Care Act goes into effect — dropping or denying you should you actually need medical care. Yet medical bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States, and a huge majority of those who do file had some sort of insurance.

Yet the Affordable Care Act which invokes the ire of Republicans leaves much out and even its best provisions do not even come close to approximating universal health care as can be found in much of Europe and Canada. Though it states that “For most plans starting on or after September 23, these rules stop insurance companies from imposing pre-existing condition exclusions on your children; prohibit insurers from rescinding or taking away your coverage based on an unintentional mistake on an application; ban insurers from setting lifetime limits on your coverage; and restrict their use of annual limits on coverage,” there is no provision that covers people like me who wish to get individual insurance in another state. While banks ran wild with derivatives, we financed two wars on credit and still we spend billions on those wars and billions more on subsidies for huge corporations and tax cuts for everyone, including the very wealthy, we still are unable to “afford” to do anything about insuring all of our citizens.

People, like me, self-employed, whose health care is not provided by an employer, and the many unemployed are still on their own to cobble together what they can afford, or go without. Under the Affordable Care Act, anyone with a pre-existing condition (which basically means anyone with any kind of serious illness or anyone who takes more than three medications) can qualify for a good policy through the government but only after he or she has gone without health insurance of any kind of six months. That means I would have to drop my Virginia policy and go uninsured — paying out of pocket for all my medications and praying that I don’t have an accident or come down with some horrible disease — before I can qualify. The clause that forces insurance companies to take those with pre-existing conditions won’t kick in until 2014. Until then I, along with many others, am out of luck.

I am not particularly unusual. I am a relatively healthy 55 year old woman. In fact, a doctor quite recently pronounced me in good shape. I eat properly and I exercise regularly. Nothing catastrophic has happened to me. Yet. (I need to knock wood on this, as my grandmother would say: “God willing.”) But because of my medications I am now just about uninsurable in a new state, despite my past insurance history. For twenty years, I had insurance through my husband’s employment; when we separated and divorced he was allowed to carry me for three years. Four years ago I applied for my own insurance through his same company and was given a policy (which, incidentally has gone up by nearly fifty percent). Two of the conditions I have now I had then. But I now take two other medications and that is two too many for an insurance company. I think it is a great irony that the top executives of the afore-mentioned insurance companies are, with one exception my age or older and, I suspect, take medications or have conditions that might make them uninsurable, too. In another universe. The universe of the ordinary man. Yet while Blue Cross CEOs’ pay goes up and up, their pool goes down and down. (This may change, in the future, now that insurance companies are supposed to use at least 80 percent of their monies to provide health care, but only time will tell.) I was told by one broker that Blue Cross routinely denies coverage to sixty percent of people who apply.

When I began applying for new coverage I was inundated with sales reps and emails touting their “affordable” coverage. Blue Cross sold me hard and assured me, on the phone, even after taking down my medical history, that I would get coverage. I was denied in an impersonal letter which came in the mail days after I had called about my status and told that they would not cover me. I still get emails pushing insurance but now I am smarter. I finally found a broker who seems to know her business (after two brokers told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was completely uninsurable) who may have steered me to a reputable company which, as I said, may cover me. This is after hours and hours of filling out essentially useless applications to companies who did not have the decency to inform me that they were mere salespeople and that the underwriters had all the power. And, according to my most recent broker, it doesn’t look good that I have been denied coverage. It’s a black mark that I have to disclose on all future applications.

This self-described “greatest country in the world” has a lot to answer for when its citizens can either not qualify for health insurance or can’t afford it if they can. The Affordable Care Act made some tiny inroads into a deeply broken system, and even those inroads the Republicans wish to repeal. Meanwhile, millions of uninsured people go to bed each night hoping nothing serious will happen to them, and millions more have to choose between paying for their medicines or paying for food. And millions of others are filing for bankruptcy to pay for past and present medical bills.

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Surfacing (with a nod to Margaret Atwood)

Posted on December 29, 2011 by lisa

I’m living in an alternate universe. Here I have no water view; it is cold and damp outside and not warm enough inside. There are dogs to be let in and out, dogs that make me wheeze. The cat doesn’t cuddle up to me like mine does. I sit and try to work on a small kitchen table where I can’t spread out my stuff because we will be using it for dinner later. In this alternate reality there is a 14-year-old girl who, even after 18 months isn’t sure she wants her dad seeing anyone, including (especially?) me.

After visits to friends and family on the way, I am here, to celebrate a holiday I don’t care about. There is a tree. This is not unusual—I have long been subjected to Christmas trees as none of the men to whom I was married were Jewish—but there have been several years without the fuss and bother of putting it up and taking it down. I have been on the road for more than ten days and I am weary and I miss the sunshine and the water and the view I have longed and fought hard for.

But this alternate reality is one in to which I have bought. And only sometimes does it jar and rankle. In the evenings, after work is done for both of us and we make a meal and share some wine and sit and watch an old television series about the end of the world as we know it this alternate reality seems very fine.

I guess I have often and always inhabited alternate realities. From the time I opened an abridged edition of The Little Princess and joined Sara Crewe on the streets as she bought a hot bun for a starving child, I have lived in worlds others have built. Maybe even before that, as I remember the writing of Lois Lenski and how I felt a shiver of familiar kinship with the Strawberry Girl. Most recently I have been deep in the America of the late 1950s with Stephen King, who, better than almost any writer I know, captures you whole and takes you wherever he wishes. And you willingly follow, not even bothering to pretend you are suspending disbelief.

I have created my own alternate realities, too. From the time I was a child of eight and attempted my first novel to the countless short stories that fell first from pen and paper, later typewriter and word processor where I tried to tell tales that were like my own but better or worse, depending on the demands of the tale. I have written memoir and I have spoken out about politics, and all of those pieces of writing have formed yet another place other than my own.

In my very fertile and sometimes overactive imagination I have had long conversations with people who have done me wrong , tried to soothe hurts, found the right thing to say hours, perhaps days, after the incident which sparked the mind’s dialogue. And too, I create alternate realities by waiting for things to happen: good and bad. I rearrange my life to accommodate visits from my children, which though brief now that they are grown and gone, necessitate a stopping, a re-starting, a slowing down to cherish the few days or hours I have with them.

What encompasses my everyday life is a series of slipping in and out of alternate realities. Perhaps that is why I am so fascinated by the possibility of them, by what King calls the strings that slip around the past, present and future, each of them elongated by each decision we make: who we choose to love, how we choose to spend our days, what meaning there is in what we say, even, perhaps, the mere way we step out onto the street.

In some of my other worlds, I am not a woman in my fifties with grown children who still struggles with each word she puts to paper. My children are babies still growing inside me with all the joy that is yet to come. In some of my other worlds I am not the daughter of a father who is dead and a mother who is crippled by dementia. My parents are still alive and healthy and I have been able to show them who I am and they have rejoiced in that. In some other worlds I am not even divorced. The marriage that began with such hope did not crumble into incoherence. In some other worlds still the people who I loved and who have died are just on the other end of a phone call. In others, I am more, or less, content. In some I have all the answers to all my questions.

I make up worlds because that is the only thing I know how to do well. And because it is the only thing that makes the reality of my own lovely universe make sense. I see the alternate realities around me as part of the fiction that is life itself. Parsing it is painful but necessary.

Leaving a novel is like leaving a place where you were whoever the author wished you to be. You buy into the vision and you are taken for the ride of your life, if only for a few days. For those days you stay up far later than is wise, snuggled deep beneath the covers, the light over your shoulders your only connection to the reality that is outside the world a writer has created for you. Coming out of that world is like surfacing from the deep. You gasp for air, you look around, and yes, there are the dogs clamoring for attention, the dinner to be made, the evening to be spent and the small, sad moment when you realize that tonight you won’t have that world in which to escape. It is like every good-bye to every alternate reality into which you step.

Leaving one world for another is no easier than putting down a cherished book. Each time I slip from place to place, from time to time, from moment to moment, a fissure opens, a string pulls, I surface down the road again, sighing with both pain and joy, another trip into another world for another small amount of time.

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My Cooking Ambivalence

Posted on December 15, 2011 by lisa

As I poured the remains of the Thanksgiving Day cranberry relish down the garbage disposal, I suddenly understood why people don’t like to cook. Weeks after the day I spent making homemade cranberry relish, two from-scratch (including the crust) pies, a turkey, mashed potatoes, noodle kugel , fresh haricot vert with sautéed almonds, I found the relish in the back of the fridge. It reminded me that I had spent the better part of two days making a meal that my children and boyfriend and I had eaten, even with spirited conversation, in about an hour. Sure, I made turkey tetrazzini with the leftover meat, and yes many of the other leftover things got pretty well consumed over the next few days, but I still dumped half a pie, a third of a kugel and that cranberry sauce.

I like to cook. For twenty years, without fail, I put a fresh-made supper on the table for my husband and children at least five and usually six nights a week; on the odd night we went out, or brought food in. I did not use frozen ingredients, I did not resort to cans. After a few years I really knew what I was doing with planning and could get a meal on the table in well under an hour. I was also one of those mothers who, after nursing each child for a year, transitioned to only organic milk for the next two, made my own baby food in a mill or food processor, and was adamant about fast food and sugar being very special treats. My kids grew up to be pretty good eaters, although my daughter now challenges me to learn vegan cooking. We had wonderful dinner hours full of sharing and conversation. Yet what I remember clearly is that most nights, as I was cooking, one kid or another would come into the kitchen, ask what was for supper, and roll his or her eyes when I told them the menu. I finally had to banish them from the kitchen and the question until they could learn to ask without offering a negative opinion.

It made me a little nuts, but I kept on cooking.

When my husband and I divorced and my son went to college, my daughter and I found ourselves making sort of pick-up meals; a salad, perhaps, with some popcorn chicken from KFC. Too often we would eat in front of Gilmore Girls reruns. On those nights, my 12 year old daughter looked at me, smiled and said “I like how we eat now that we are divorced.”

I should have felt guilty but I felt relieved. I felt like I was on holiday.

A few years later, re-married, I once again began the every-night-dinner thing. But I found myself balking at it more and more. Why couldn’t he cook? Why did I have to come up with something creative each evening? Why was I sliding back into the pattern I had been happy to get out of for awhile? I had no answers, I did little soul searching. I just cooked.

Now divorced again, I cook only rarely: when I have company, when my boyfriend is visiting or I am visiting him, when my kids come to stay. It feels a little different. As though it is my choice, not my responsibility. But the truth is I struggle with it the same as I always did. As I cooked and baked my way through the holiday, I felt a simmering resentment that all my work would be gone in an instant, that I would have to deal with leftovers for days, and that, really, would it all be appreciated? I think it was, but would the time spent with my family have been just as lovely had I gotten a pre-made dinner from Fresh Market? Who knows?

My boyfriend, the divorced father of a teenage daughter, pours over cookbooks at the beginning of week that his daughter will be living with him. He peruses recipes, writes out the ingredients for them, checks the pantry for what he does and doesn’t have, and writes a grocery list. He posts the week’s menu on the refrigerator. He will even get out of bed a half hour early in the morning just to chop and prepare things to put into the slow cooker he uses a couple of times a week. He relishes the leftovers, which he carefully packs for his lunch during that week.

But on the weeks when his daughter isn’t with him, he admits to pick-up meals, too: an old leftover perhaps, a sandwich, chips and salsa, a frozen pizza. Like me, he knows that cooking for one isn’t much fun. So, even though cooking doesn’t cause me anxiety– and I can put together a decent fresh meal from the pantry and fridge in under a half hour–I do understand that the drudgery of cooking every evening, after a long day of working or taking care of children, can unravel people. And the mess is an issue if you are standing at the sink at eight o’clock doing dishes. I get it, I do.

Yet I persist. I remember that as a divorced woman in her fifties my mother lived alone and for many years cooked for herself. She might make a whole batch of chicken breasts one evening and eat them through the week, but she fixed healthy meals for herself and she kept food in her refrigerator. It was the lack of her shopping and cooking, the empty fridge and pantry that first signaled to my sisters and me that there was something wrong with our mother. Months later her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s confirmed it.

I don’t imagine that my continuing to cook, even sporadically, will prevent me from coming down with her disease. I don’t imagine that anyone will give me a reward for my good cooking or even that, at this point, cooking for myself will keep my weight where I want it to be. I can’t even promise that I will cook for myself on a regular basis. What I do know, though, is that cooking for other people remains a way for me to show them I love them. And no amount of dumped cranberry sauce is going to stop me from doing that.

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Love’s Labors Lost?

Posted on November 29, 2011 by lisa

My 18-year-old daughter who is a freshman in college texted me the other day that she had a date for Saturday night. I texted her back that I thought college kids didn’t date. She replied that yes that was true and she had been complaining about it just the other day, when lo and behold she got an invitation to dinner out with a boy she knows. As far as I know, this is her first date since going off to school in late August, although she had been to the requisite number of parties and “hung out” with young men and women of various sexual proclivities. She was psyched. I laughed, but so was I.

My son, who is 24 and also in school, hasn’t had much luck with women lately. Although he had a fairly serious relationship with a great young woman a couple of years ago, distance and other things broke them up. Since then, he has seen a couple of women, but none of them seem quite right, he says. What he would really like is to fall madly, completely in love. He’s a romantic that way. The bad thing is that he isn’t even dating much: what with school and work his time is limited; he knows that but still he longs for that big love.

I thought about my kids when I read Charlotte Alter’s poignant Modern Love column about how hard it is for her generation to date, find love, have romance, all the things she envies in women of my generation. She fears that her generation has forgotten how to love.

If my own children are any example, I don’t think the younger generation has forgotten how to love as much as they just aren’t sure how to go about getting it. There is the fact that casual hook-ups seem the norm and manners are deeply distrusted as somehow being inauthentic. But more than anything, I think my generation, the baby boomers, may bear some responsibility for our children’s disaffection with love.

We fought hard for equality; some of us so much that we wouldn’t allow men to open our doors, carry our bags, or pay for our dinners. We began to make love with the kind of fervor and abandon that had, previously only been the privilege of men or “loose” women. “Good” girls didn’t have sex right away, and certainly not unless they had a steady boyfriend. But by the time I went to college in the early seventies all that had changed. I had steady boyfriends with whom I had sexual relationships, but it was clear I didn’t have to have a boyfriend to have as much sex as I wanted, and sometimes I did. In addition, the term “slut” no longer had the kind of power to hurt women as it once had. We were emancipated, we were free women; we could major in anything we wanted, go to college, be whatever we chose to be….and we could sleep with whomever we chose, too.

But the thing was, there was still romance. Men still invited me out on dates, thought up interesting things to do, and paid for my dinners and events, mainly because back then they made a whole lot more money than I did. And my men were sweet and kind and faithful and endearing, almost to a man. I have love letters, and dozens of memories of extraordinarily romantic gestures from all of my serious relationships, from a man, who when we were out walking, bought me a new pair of shoes because my feet hurt, to another who swept me away for weekends. Like the mother of writer Alter, I can regale my kids with stories of the men I have loved and who have loved me, including their father. I have been lucky in love, even if my marriages have not lasted a lifetime.

But until my latest relationships, I didn’t have the internet to contend with, the easy availability of pornography and on-line encounters. I didn’t have to contend or compete with explicit television shows where sex was as easy as buying groceries. I didn’t have to worry about the bombardment of images of women to which I could not even hope to complete. There was the telephone, landed, the mail where real letters were sent and received. No texting or messaging, no distractions during dinner or dancing or sex. When you were with a man he was with you, not gazing at a variety of devices that offered him other options.

Just because I am a feminist and believe that men and women should be equal in the marketplace in terms of salary and opportunity, doesn’t mean that I don’t think the niceties of dating shouldn’t be observed. Plans should be made in advance, the romantic gesture, whether it is a home-cooked meal, flowers, the planning of a trip, should be observed. By both parties. But what has happened in response to feminism’s push for equality between the sexes is the same kind of backlash that Frank Rich writes about in his most recent article for New York magazine: violence has erupted. Just because charges can now be pressed against abusing men, even if the woman recants (something so recent I remember the day in Virginia when the law changed), doesn’t mean domestic violence has lessened. Just because women can have sex doesn’t mean that they won’t still be punished for it. Judges will throw out rape charges based on a woman’s “reputation” and the way she dresses, forty years after we began to push for change. Misogyny abounds: from many of our candidates for office, from the men who run our country’s banks and businesses. Why else would Obama have had to pass the Lily Ledbetter law just three years ago?

We have “won” the right to speak our minds, get out from under the thumb of men (both literally and figuratively). We have won the “right” to have sex like a man, to take as many partners as we wish, but with that freedom has come brutality, disease, violence and fear. Automatic respect for womanhood is long gone, but what has taken its place? Images of women we cannot imitate but which experts believe is badly affecting the expectations of lovemaking; easy hook-ups which leave most women I know who have had them feeling empty and lost; and a disaffected youth who isn’t sure love will ever find them.

I wouldn’t trade the experiences I have had for anything; I would never wish to go back to the way women were treated in the last century. But as far as we have come, there is still so far to go. Men and women need each other. They need to believe in love and its possibility and they need to go out of their way to be kind and generous and romantic about it, all while remembering that each of us is to be treated respectfully and honorably. And it wouldn’t hurt any of us women to be honest about what it is we really want before we tumble into bed with the next attractive stranger.

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Despicable Behavior: But is it Harassment?

Posted on November 7, 2011 by lisa

I have been trying to dissect two stories that have come across my desk (or, perhaps I should say my computer) the past couple of days.

In one, a youngish blogger is in the middle of a brouhaha that involves a man asking her to his room as they rode an elevator together at four in the morning and includes the comments of, are you ready for this? noted philosopher and atheist Richard Dawkins. The basic assumption of both Ms. Watson and the men who wrote about her was that she had been the victim of what could have been a sexual assault. The other story is a report in the New York Times, and widely reported elsewhere, which claims that there is widespread sexual harassment of children in grades 7 through 12.

While I am appalled at the sexual propositioning or harassment of anyone, male or female, I am not quite sure that any of the incidents in the two stories constitute what it seems is a clear definition of sexual harassment.

To begin, The EEOC (the Equal Opportunity Employment Comission) states that “sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964” and is “Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.” More about that can be found here. But what happened to Rebecca Watson in the elevator at the conference she was attending was not sexual harassment. It was an unwanted, sleazy, and unsettling advance that she quickly put to rest. It was only in the reporting of it, by her and others, that the issue took on another light. The revelation by Watson, made on a video blog was written about in another blog, and, somewhere around comment #75 out of more than a thousand, long comments, Dawkins takes Watson (although not by name) to task. The gist of his comment is that compared to the horrible things happening to women around the world, her whine is, well, silly. His main defense, when pressed, was that Muslim women (in specific) suffer from misogyny.

There, of course, his argument breaks down. Because while what Ms. Watson was the victim of was not sexual harassment or even, really, sexual assault. She was propositioned, and she felt uncomfortable and nervous. What she was really the victim of was indeed was misogyny, misogyny that, although slightly on the wane, is born out of classic male privilege. Male privilege may lead to sexual assault and it may well lead to sexual harassment as it has done in the cases of the now four women who have accused presidential contender Herman Cain, but it is just as often an outmoded notion of patriarchy. Women who are on the receiving end of male advances should not and must not call them all sexual assault or harassment. If that happens then the real issue of both will neither be properly defined nor properly punished. Ask any rape victim who still has to prove that she wasn’t asking for it. Hell, ask Anita Hill.

It doesn’t seem to hold water that the behavior talked about in the Times article is sexual harassment, either. Rather, it is a virulent form of bullying which often stems from the same kind of male privilege. Although the American Association of University Women, a nonprofit research organization, defines harassment as “unwelcome sexual behavior that takes place in person or electronically,” according to the Times, in fact, every dictionary of note defines sexual harassment as something that takes place more specifically in the work place. It is, by those definitions, an issue of a power struggle between the harasser and the harassed and usually results in economic or job-related consequences. See what happened in the Herman Cain results. See the fear that women in the work place have of reporting sexual harassment for fear of being fired or denied promotion. Witness the fact that the women who accused Cain are being vilified as liars.

This is not to say that sexual taunts or unwelcome advances among schoolchildren are not issues worth disclosing and remedying. But ugly jokes, touching, name-calling and the like are aspects of bullying, which, according to most studies is now rampant. Calling someone a “whore” or “gay” is not sexual harassment: it is a form of tyranny: misanthropic and misogynistic. It is also an outcome of low self esteem, insecurity, and a desire to make one look cool. Bullying is often done by groups of children and young adults; it can be carried out by mean girls as well as mean boys, and as one who was bullied as a middle-school girl, it can be torture. But I can in no way equate it with the sexual harassment to which I was subjected while working as a journalist. That harassment, more than thirty years ago, had no name back then. And as a young reporter and writer I thought I had to grin and bear it, just as I had tried to do with the bullying years earlier.

Richard Dawkins was wrong to make light of what happened to Ms. Watson but he put his finger on the crux of the issue of harassment. We cannot tar all actions, no matter how much they speak of misogyny, with the same brush, just as involuntary manslaughter is not the same crime as pre-meditated murder. Ugly and brutish behavior toward women, behavior that sexualizes them whether they wish to be or not, is not cool. Institutionalized oppression is a whole other bag of worms. Unlike many countries who have laws against women’s equality, we have a few (although not nearly enough) laws on the books which support women. But because the hundreds and hundreds of comments on both blog sites were all over the place, it is clear we have a long way to go to educate ourselves and our society in how to properly behave.

I am a feminist and have been for most of my conscious life. In no way do I minimize male privilege, the privilege of power, or the fact that, whenever they think they can get away with it, the so-called strong of both sexes will always take advantage of the so-called weak. Misogyny, bullying and privilege of any kind that results in our demeaning others in any way have got to stop. If we try and stop bullying, sexual or otherwise, in our schools, perhaps we won’t have as many women having to fend off the unwanted advances of men. But, most importantly, perhaps we will have work places where women and men can work alongside each other without fear that their superiors or co-workers will make it impossible for them to make a living. Calling things that are not sexual harassment diminishes the horror that is sexual harassment. We clearly need to start a lot earlier in our campaign to equalize the sexes in terms of their treatment in society in general. Only in that way can we more clearly define, an prosecute, what constitutes sexual harassment in the work place.

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