It’s Monday night basketball, an all-comers pick-up game, supposed to be fun and a good sweat. But week after week I steel myself against the anger, the frustration of not knowing how to correct the problem, and the despair of not being able to even begin to do just that. Eventually it happens: this time it’s Josh who yells at me to switch, to guard the new grade niner who’s just come onto the court to sub for the guy who’d been guarding Josh and Josh would guard the guy I’d been guarding.
I am distracted, as always, by the insult, the unwarranted assumption that I’m always the worst player there (even worse than the new grade niners) (although I’m thirty-five and played basketball throughout high school), and by the faulty logic that weak offensive players* are weak defensive players and should therefore guard other weak offensive players.
Nevertheless, I manage to focus on yet another problematic aspect of the shouted order: that it was an order, and it was given with the full expectation of compliance. How is it, I thus have occasion to wonder yet again, that a kid, a 17-year-old less than half my age, believes he can tell me what to do, believes he knows better than me? The answer is simple: he’s male. And I’m female. If I were a man over twice his age, he’d keep his thoughts to himself. And if he were a girl, he wouldn’t even have such thoughts.
When Chodorow wrote “Being and Doing”, a ground-breaking analysis of sexism in terms of passivity (of being, of women) and activity (of doing, of men), she got it right – but she also got it wrong. Josh is so easy in his authority over me simply because he’s male, simply because he is male. He hasn’t had to do anything to gain that authority, or the respect I feel myself giving him just before I catch myself acting like Pavlov’s dog. The confidence, the assurance, the arrogance that he must have to even think he can just tell me what to do – he has it just because he’s male. And he probably started developing it as soon as he realized he was indeed male: I’ve heard 5-year-old boys speak with the same kind of authority.
Women, on the other hand, have to do – we have to earn respect, we don’t just get it automatically. And I’m not sure we ever achieve any authority, no matter what we do.
And of course it’s not just respect and authority men feel entitled to just because they’re men: they also feel entitled to money (pay, and higher pay) and power (supervisory positions). In short, they feel entitled to dominance, just because of who, of what, they are (not because of what they do).
* I concede on this point, especially when I’m playing with people who are taller than me, who play with a slightly larger ball than I learned to play with, and who, most importantly, recognize only a hotshotting inside kind of game.
slovenly, a. Personally untidy or dirty, careless and lazy, or unmethodical
slattern, n. Sluttish woman
Not what my mother meant when she called me a slut. For whatever else I am, I am tidy, clean, careful, industrious, and methodical. Quite methodical. So just what did she mean? I don’t know. I really don’t. I asked her, but of course she refused to discuss it.
1. Maybe people call you a slut if you have sex before you’re married. This poses a bit of a problem if you don’t intend to get married. Did my mother expect me to remain a virgin all of my life? Surely not. Besides, that would reduce marriage to a license for sex, and I’m sure she (and many others) would object to that interpretation.
However, even if I did intend to get married, what’s wrong with having sex before I sign on the dotted line? A little knowledge and experience might make for more realistic attitudes – less disappointment, frustration, and anger. Not to mention regret. Call it informed consent.
And actually, if Jane did have a little sex with Dick before she married him, I don’t think my mother would call her a slut. She might be pissed off that Jane didn’t follow the rules and wait, like everyone else – like she – did. And if she could get beyond herself, she might be angry with Jane for exposing the lie that marriage – i.e., religious and civil law – has a monopoly on love and/or that love must be recognized by law before it can be expressed physically. (Though we do seem to allow its psychological expression before marriage. Interesting implication then about which is considered to be more important.) But she wouldn’t call Jane a slut for having a little sex with Dick – hm –
2. Maybe people call you a slut if you have a lot of sex. Well certainly after marriage, that’s okay. Though my mother may tsk tsk a bit, she wouldn’t call Jane a slut.
What about a lot of sex with Dick before their marriage? Well, I think my mother would tsk tsk a little more loudly, but still she wouldn’t cry ‘Slut!’
Okay, what if Jane had sex with not only Dick, but also with Tom and Harry? Aha. I think we’ve got it.
3. People call you a slut if you have sex with a lot of different people. Before marriage or after marriage. Now why is this such a problem? Multiple partners increase the risk of disease, yes, but my mother’s tone for ‘Slut!’ wasn’t quite the same one she used for ‘Take your umbrella!’ (Not that umbrellas prevent disease.)
a. Insofar as one has sex in order to reproduce, multiple partners may make paternity harder to establish. Or it may not: if Tom is Black, and Dick is White, and Harry is Asian – or if Tom had a vasectomy, and Dick used a condom –
Nevertheless, why is uncertain paternity a problem? Why does it introduce an element of immorality? Given that the amount of quality time a man spends with offspring known to be his is only negligibly more than that which he spends with offspring not known to be his, the not knowing wouldn’t seem to result in much of a deprivation.
However, given that financial support and inheritance is determined by genetic lineage, uncertain paternity opens the door to – what? Not exactly fraud, but misappropriation of funds? So I’m a slut because my behaviour may put some guy’s money into the wrong kid’s hands? Is that what it’s all about? There’s got to be a less ridiculous explanation.
(And if sex for reproductive reasons is considered the only ‘legitimate’ sex, then not only must one call lesbians sluts, but one must call all married people who have sex more than once every nine months sluts.) (And if consistency in thought matters at all, then women who use multiple samples from a sperm bank are also sluts. Though a few minutes with a turkey baster might not qualify as ‘having sex’. Despite the similarities.)
b. Insofar as one has sex for pleasure, multiple partners is immoral because because – it’s a sin to have too much pleasure?
Actually, this may not be that far off the mark. My mother also disapproves of my being semi-retired at twenty-two. Apparently I’m supposed to work 40 hours/week for 40 years before having the leisure time to read and go for long walks every day.
In fact, I suspect the force of the insult reflects the perceived injustice, the underlying envy: ‘Slut!’ means ‘That’s not fair – you’re breaking the rules – I had to limit myself to one man!’
But I think there’s an even better explanation.
c. Insofar as having sex is making love, someone who has sex with many people shatters the romantic myth of Mr. Right. It either says there’s more than one Mr. Right or sex isn’t just making love (see 3.b above). And of course both proclamations are to my mind more realistic and more rational, indeed more mature, than the alternative.
First, isn’t it rather weird to consider that, sexual intercourse, the ultimate expression of love? I mean it seems as arbitrary as touching one’s big toe to another one’s nostril (except that there is, presumably, a little more physical pleasure involved). It seems to me that a lot of other things – continued support in one’s chosen field, for example – are far greater expressions of love than the mere giving of a few minutes of physical pleasure.
Second, if the objection is that I’m having sex, making love, with someone I don’t love, well then half the married women in the world are sluts. How many people stay married even though they don’t love each other any more? And how many of those people still make love, still have sex?
Third, though one may well want to give pleasure to the person one loves, why stop there? Why should we be ungenerous? Should we not want to give pleasure to other people as well, people we like? And why not also to people we don’t know – what’s wrong with giving pleasure to people we don’t know? And all this applies equally to getting pleasure.
Fourth, even if one does restrict sexual pleasure to the beloved, do you really believe you will or can or should love only one person, consecutively or simultaneously, in your entire lifetime? However, loving two or three may not make one a slut – so how many is too many? In fact, it may not be only the quantity that upsets my mother –
4. Maybe people call you a slut if you have sex with someone you just met. I suppose the argument could be that Mr. Right is less of a risk than Mr. Goodbar. Well, in two-thirds of all marriages, Mr. Right will beat his wife at least once. That sort of takes care of that argument. Furthermore, my mother didn’t seem concerned about my safety so much as my morality. (And, actually, now that I think of it, she seemed concerned not so much about my morality as about her own).
Of course, if it’s sex for reproduction, then it seems to make sense to know something about the biological father. But who can judge how long it takes to find out all the important things?
But if it’s sex for pleasure, does it matter whether you’ve just met? I can have lots of fun with a motorcycle I just met.
And if it’s sex as love, well I guess if it’s with someone you just met, the definition of love is stretched a bit. But then again, aren’t those who believe in Mr. Right the same people who believe in love at first sight?
My guess is, however, that ‘someone you just met’ is taken to mean ‘with anyone’. Which is, in turn, taken to mean ‘with everyone’ –
5. People call you a slut if you have sex with anyone and everyone. This is interesting because I think that under this definition, there are very few sluts indeed. It is rare, very rare, for someone to have sex with anyone, to have no criteria for choice, to be totally indiscriminate. One, almost every one discriminates on the basis of sex – that is to say, almost everyone is either heterosexual or homosexual. Two, most women discriminate on the basis of attraction; those women who don’t, that is those, such as prostitutes, who have sex with men who are not sexually appealing to them, discriminate on another basis: ability to pay. Three, I don’t think I’m alone in not having sex with a person I suspect of being diseased. Four, I don’t have sex with someone if I think they might be physically violent. And five, I don’t have sex with a person who wants to impregnate me. So far from being indiscriminate, my behaviour is very discriminate.
It is important to note that my discussion so far has not included men. There are some very good reasons for this. One, the word ‘slut’ applies to women only. There is no equivalent for men. ‘Stud’ is perhaps the closest in denotation, but it is exactly opposite in connotation: positive rather than negative, complimentary rather than insulting. This of course is very interesting because it reveals a double standard. And I could dismiss the entire question of what’s wrong with being a slut by merely drawing attention to that duplicity. But one, I wanted to examine the standard that justifies the insult by itself, independent of any other standard. And two, there is no doubt that the standard by which men are judged is equally deficient and therefore of dubious value in proving a point.
Nevertheless, a comparison at this point might be rather interesting. My behaviour, I’ll argue, is not only as discriminate as that of most men, it’s far more discriminate. One, men do not seem to restrict themselves to women they find sexually attractive: sex for men is not just a sexual thing, it’s a power thing; so they’ll have sex in order to display dominance, in order to conquer – and sexual attractiveness, therefore, becomes irrelevant. Two, I don’t think men are very concerned about having sex with women who are diseased: not one that I have been with has ever insisted on a condom; indeed, most did not want to use one, even when supplied by me. Three, they are no more discriminate concerning the next criterion: men do not seem to consider possible physical violence (yet how easy it would be to reach over for a knife in the back when he’s about to come, to give a quick twisting wrench instead of a caress). Lastly, the possibility of pregnancy does not seem to matter either: apart from the sad absence of condoms, no man has ever asked if I’m using contraception, indicating either a confusion or an indifference as to purpose. So it appears that men are far less discriminate. Indeed, of all the men I’ve ever asked, only one said ‘no’. Does that make them sluts?
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
“Even if we don’t think of women wanting to BE married, we at least think of them as wanting to GET married. … Whereas very few boys grow up looking forward to the day that they’ll be a groom. There is no “American Groom” magazine. G. I. Joe does not have a little tux with a cummerbund … ” Singlism, Bella DePaulo, p.103
Why do you read the paper (or listen to/watch the news) every day? Certainly not for an objective account of events. Because surely you’re aware of editorial bias – what gets in (or not), where it goes, and how much space it gets there. And reporter bias – who gets interviewed, what gets asked (or not), and what gets put at the beginning of the piece.
And how it’s said. To describe an incident with complete objectivity is to give a phenomenological account. And anyone who’s taken Phenomenology 101 knows how difficult that is. Even to say “There is a brown house” is to have made an assumption, is to have imposed your subjectivity. You can’t see the house. From your perspective, standing in front of it, all you see is one, or maybe two walls. You assume there’s a third and a fourth. Your subjectivity fills in the gaps. All the time.
[This one’s a little old, as you can tell by the Salt-n-Pepa reference, but still relevant, I think. Sigh.]
Disc jockeys generally come in two sexes: male and female. So what, you may think, sex doesn’t matter. Oh but it does, so sad to say.
I used to deejay for weddings and other parties, and on any given night, one or two of several things might happen. For a long time, I never gave them much thought. But when all of these things happened during a single night, it suddenly seemed clear to me that all those hitherto separate things were, in fact, related. They were all related to my sex.
On the night in question, I had agreed to fill in for a friend, to do his regular gig at a basement bar. When I arrived early for a show-and-tell with his system, I was immediately struck by – size. Mike and I had started out as deejays at the same time: we went through the training together, we apprenticed with the same outfit, and then we each bought out our identical systems and started our own businesses. I had pretty much kept the same system – a couple cassette players, a search deck, a mixer, an amp, and a pair of 12″ x 16″ speakers on tripods, with a microprocessor. Mike, I saw, had added. And he’d added big: he now had two pairs of speakers, each 3′ by 2′, a second amp of course, and a couple CD players.
What is it with men? They get suckered in to the ‘bigger is better’ mentality every time. (And it’s not just immature, it’s dangerous: look around – continual growth is not good, we can’t keep expanding, getting bigger and bigger, using more and more.) I asked him if the smaller set-up wasn’t loud enough, if he’d gotten too many complaints. Of course he had to say no. But this looks better, he says. And that really pisses me off. Most people – most men – are stupid that way: they see Mike’s huge array of equipment, compare it to my little set-up, and figure he’s a better deejay. There’s no logic to it. And either Mike knows it and he’s taking advantage of it (and making it that much harder for the rest of us who refuse to be taken in by size) or he doesn’t know it and he’s just as big a fool as the rest of them (unknowingly at my expense).
Whatever, he walked me through and in a few minutes I was fine – unless I got a lot of requests. And this is another problem with more, more, more: there were at least four different places to look up a title – there was one directory for the old cassettes, a separate directory for the new cassettes, a third directory for the CDs (except for the ones which weren’t listed anywhere), and a fourth ‘hits’ directory. This is crazy, I thought as he left. I took some time to familiarize myself with what was where, and saw a ridiculous amount of duplication – there had to be at least a hundred songs I could find in at least two places. And altogether he had ten times more music than he could ever hope to play in a night.
Well, the requests started coming in at 10:00. The bartender told me to play Seger’s “Rock and Roll”, “Dance Mix 95”, and the “Macarena”. Gee, none of those would’ve occurred to me, thanks. Then the other bartender came up and asked for something. A little later I got a note with seven or eight titles on it. It occurred to me at that point that I was getting a lot more requests than Mike usually got. (He had said this gig would be a piece of cake.) And I wondered, is it because I’m a woman, so people think I’m more approachable? Or is it because I’m a woman, so probably I have to be told what to play, because I probably don’t know. (And half the time it is just that: I’m told, not asked, to play such-and-such.)
At around 10:30, this guy came up to chat. He opened with ‘So are you Mike’s helper?’ Excuse me? Mike’s helper? I told him no, I have my own business (I gave him my card), I’m just doing this gig for him tonight as a favour. The guy continued the small talk. I was trying to be polite, but I was also listening for the end of the piece, and trying to find at least one of the requested songs in at least one of the directories or boxes of music – and then it dawned on me that this guy was really trying to stretch out the conversation, he was, in fact, ‘hitting on me’. And I was, in fact, trying to work.
The same thing happened again later on. Only with the second guy, we got into this ridiculous competition of ‘I know more about deejaying than you.’ I’m sure you know the type, there’s one in every crowd who comes up to tell you ‘Yeah, I used to do this, how many watts do you have?’ But this guy really wanted to win – and it occurred to me that this man-woman thing was getting in the way again, it was complicating simple shop talk, he refused to lose to a woman. Listen, I’m trying to work here –
And then this third guy came up and said, ‘Play some rock, this stuff is shit.’ I smiled and said, ‘This shit was requested but I’ll certainly put on some rock for you.’ I did so within two songs. He came up again, and this time sat himself down in my chair, behind my table (I’ve never seen anyone do that to a male deejay). He told me he had been drinking since 2:00. He thought he was bragging rather than proclaiming how pathetic he was, and I realized, geez, he’s hitting on me too. ‘Play some rock,’ he said again. I said, ‘I’ve been playing rock, what specifically do you want to hear, what do you mean when you say ‘rock’?’ ‘Any rock,’ he exploded, then insulted, ‘Anyone knows what rock is!’ He came up a third time, and said he’d taken a survey and no one wanted to hear this shit (“Dance Mix,” requested three times), play some rock and roll! By now, I was just trying to ignore him. I’d already played Seger, Springsteen, the Stones, Cochrane, and Adams; I’d played Tragically Hip and Pearl Jam; I’d played Hootie and I’d played the Smashing Pumpkins. This was one drunken asshole I would not be able to please. He persisted from the end of the bar, yelling ‘Rock and Roll!’ every time I put on some dance or country (also requested several times).
I almost lost it when at around midnight the bartender came up and asked me to play some rock and roll – ‘He keeps asking us to come up and tell the girl to play a little rock!’ Any man pushing forty would be, I think, insulted to be called a boy. Wake up call, guys: most adult women are just as insulted to be called a girl.
Shortly after, the first guy came back up to tell me he thought I was doing a fine job, he saw the shit I was getting from the other guy. Part of me wanted to take that at face value, that was a really nice thing to do. But another part of me was thinking ‘Yeah but he’s only nice like that because you’re a woman’: there’s a subtext of either making the moves on me or patronizing me. (Did he think I was about to burst into tears? Actually I was thinking about just hauling back and decking the drunk – but I didn’t want to have to pay Mike for damage to his equipment.)
The night finally ended and I left.
The next night, I had a wedding to do. And it was just like any other wedding I’d done, but after the previous night, well, it was just like that night…
‘I don’t think this is gonna go, you should play something faster,’ I heard someone say to me. I looked at him and wondered if he thought his being male and my being female gave him the right to criticize, to give advice to someone old enough to be his parent. Thirty seconds into the (slow) piece I’d chosen, the dance floor was full. Have I proved myself? Of course not – I just ‘lucked out’. ‘Again’, I mused sarcastically.
Another guy came up, walked around my table, and stood beside me. No, he didn’t have a request, he just wanted to introduce himself, say hi, how’s it going. He stayed, in my way, for three whole songs, oblivious to my suggestions that he join the party, it looks good.
A little later, an older guy, fifty-something, gave me a gentle warning, ‘You can’t please everyone, but just try a bit of 50s and 60s.’ ‘I know,’ I told him, not pointing out that I’d already done a 50s-60s set, ‘I’ve been doing this for over five years now.’ ‘Oh you have?’ He is so surprised. What, do I have ‘novice’ written on my forehead? Did the way I set up my equipment suggest that I didn’t know what I was doing? (Single-handedly and in fifteen minutes flat.) No – I’m female – so it just goes without saying that I probably don’t know what I’m doing.
I just wanted to be a deejay. But people, especially men, kept insisting by their behaviour, that I was a female deejay. Sex shouldn’t make a difference. But they make it make a difference. Do male deejays get questioned? Are they expected to chat pleasantly while working? Do they have to deal with a constant stream of guidance, advice?
Frankly, it’s irritating, it’s insulting, and it’s exhausting.
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
Have you ever wondered why, in the sport of figure skating, there are no men’s precision teams?
Sure, precision skating requires attention to detail and a highly developed spatial sense. But both are surely male capabilities; in fact, aren’t they male superiorities? Isn’t that why (so we’re told) men dominate science and engineering?
And of course, it requires skating skill. But countless men – Alexei Yagudin, Elvis Stojko, Kurt Browning, Brian Boitano, to name a few – have proven this to be Y-chromosome-compatible.
Perhaps it’s the degree of cooperation required that’s simply beyond men. Yes, men are capable of cooperation – that’s what team sports are all about. But in hockey, football, basketball, and the like, there’s always room to be a star; there’s always room for grandstanding, for upstaging. In a precision skating team, there’s no room for even the teeniest of egos. (Synchronized swimming – there’s another sport men simply couldn’t handle. There’d be way too many deaths by drowning.)
And yes, men are capable of the timing that cooperation entails. Quarterbacks and their receivers demonstrate this all the time. But the perfect synchrony of a precision team performance is not achieved by such discrete instances of cooperation. It’s a matter of continuous cooperation. The sport requires continuous adjustment to others, which requires awareness of and sensitivity to others, not to mention patience, and persistence, with the practice. It’s not only about relationships – to the ice, to the music, to each other: it’s about maintaining those relationships. (Hey, this sport should be mandatory for boys 13 to 18.)
But no, this can’t be right. Consider marching bands and drill displays. They have as much precision and uniformity as a skating team. (Oh, well, give a man a gun – )
Maybe it’s because so few boys go into figure skating that after the channelling into solo, pairs, and dance, there aren’t enough left over for precision teams. Hm. There are no male corps de ballet either. Is it really jut a matter of supply and demand?
Well, maybe. Or maybe it’s just that members of a precision team have to put their arms around each other.
Well, they are, of course. It’s just that many men don’t find them funny. Which is why many stand-up clubs (those managed by men) (that is, almost all of them) actually have a rule: only so many stand-ups on any given night can be women. Too many and they kill the night.
But, of course, that’s so only in clubs where most of the audience is male. Because, as I’ve said, men don’t find women funny. Partly, this could be because men find farts and burps funny. (Except, of course, when women fart and burp. For some reason, they find that horrifying.)
The other mainstay of comedy (for both sexes) is ‘(heterosexual) relationship humour’ – so men laugh at the caricatures of women presented by men (and women laugh at the caricatures of men presented by women).
According to the Canadian Criminal Code (and probably a lot of other criminal codes), murder can be reduced to manslaughter if the person was provoked. Provocation is defined as “a wrongful act or an insult that is of such a nature as to be sufficient to deprive an ordinary person of the power of self-control is provocation for the purposes of this section if the accused acted on it on the sudden and before there was time for his passion to cool” (CCC 232.(2)).
It is unfortunate that “an ordinary person” is used as the standard for judgment rather than “a reasonable person”. The ordinary person, in my experience, is not particularly reasonable. The ordinary person is a walking mess of unacknowledged emotions and unexamined opinions, most of which are decidedly unreasonable.
Women have a long tradition of being diplomats. “Historically… marriage has been the major alliance mechanism of every society, and little girls are trained for roles as intervillage family diplomats…the married woman straddles two kin networks, two villages, sometimes two cultures” (The Underside of History, Elise Boulding, p.53-54).
Many women have decades of experience, settling a dozen disputes a day. To whom do the kids go crying “It’s not fair!”? Mom. She’s the mediator, the negotiator extraordinaire.
Girls develop language skills before boys, and their level of proficiency continues throughout their lives to be superior. Women in languages and linguistics degree programs outnumber men.
Translators? Women. Writers? Women. In short, women are better at communication.
(And) (So) We talk a lot. (Well, when we’re not interrupted by men.) Although ‘gossip’ can be superficial and mean, much talk among women is unjustly dismissed with that term – when women talk, they’re doing social cohesion work.
But of course communication doesn’t involve just words. And, well, women are also better than men at reading facial expression and body language. And they go deeper: men actually avoid any kind of psychological understanding (of themselves as well as others); women actively embrace such knowledge (“But why did you do that?”).
Lastly, women, whether by nature or nurture, are more predisposed to cooperate, whereas men are more predisposed to compete. We prefer a win-win solution; men love a win-lose one.
So why is it that when presidents fill their ambassador and diplomat positions, they appoint men? Is it because their ambassadors and diplomats will be talking with men? And men are more comfortable talking to other men? That would mean ambassadors and diplomats are men because they’re men.
Or is it (also) because the goal of a diplomatic exchange is not to cooperate, not to resolve conflict, but to conquer, to come away ‘one up’ on the other? Diplomats are really just smoke screens; mediation isn’t the goal at all.
And why is that? It could be as simple, and as awful, as (1) Women are good at mediation; (2) Whatever women are good at is devalued; therefore, (3) Mediation is devalued.
But look at where that’s gotten us. Planet-wide, we spend more on weapons than food, clothing, and entertainment put together. Unless of course you consider weapons to be entertainment. Which apparently men do. (Turn on any tv show during prime time, and nine times out of ten a gun will be fired in the first five minutes.)
But hey, when the aliens come, NASA’s first contact team had better include a bunch of women. Because please, guys, all those weapons of yours? They will surely be but slingshots.
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
"We License Plumbers and Pilots - Why Not Parents?"At Issue: Is Parenthood a Right or a Privilege? ed. Stefan Kiesbye (Greenhaven, 2009); Current Controversies: Child Abuse, ed. Lucinda Almond (Thomson/Gale, 2006); Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 2004)
"A Humanist View of Animal Rights"New Humanist September 99; The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist Winter 98; Humanist in Canada Winter 97
have been previously published in Canadian Woman Studies, Herizons, Humanist in Canada, The Humanist, and The Philosopher's Magazine - contact Peg for acknowledgement details.
ImpactAn extended confrontation between a sexual assault victim and her assailants, as part of an imagined slightly revised court process, in order to understand why they did what they did and, on that basis, to make a recommendation to the court regarding sentence does not go … as expected.
What Happened to TomTom, like many men, assumes that since pregnancy is a natural part of being a woman, it’s no big deal: a woman finds herself pregnant, she does or does not go through with it, end of story. But then …
Aiding the EnemyWhen Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang BangWhen a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
ForeseeableAn awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
Exile (full-length drama) Finalist, WriteMovies; Quarterfinalist, Fade-In.
LJ lives in a U . S. of A., with a new Three Strikes Law: first crime, rehab; second crime, prison; third crime, you’re simply kicked out – permanently exiled to a designated remote area, to fend for yourself without the benefits of society. At least he used to live in that new U. S. of A. He’s just committed his third crime.
What Happened to Tom (full-length drama) Semifinalist, Moondance.
This guy wakes up to find his body’s been hijacked and turned into a human kidney dialysis machine – for nine months.
Aiding the Enemy (short drama 15min)
When Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang Bang (short drama 30min) Finalist, Gimme Credit; Quarter-finalist, American Gem.
When a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
Foreseeable (short drama 30min)
An awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
What is Wrong with this Picture?
Nothing. There’s no reason women can’t be the superordinates and men the subordinates. But life’s not like that (yet).
Minding Our Own Business A collection of skits (including “The Price is Not Quite Right,” “Singin’ in the (Acid) Rain,” “Adverse Reactions,” “The Band-Aid Solution,” and “See Jane. See Dick.”) with a not-so-subtle environmental message
Rot in Hell A soapbox zealot and an atheist face off…
