(Almost) Live from the Mountain Kingdom!

I'll be updating my photography website tonight with photos from the mountain kingdom of Lesotho!

Thoughts on Ferguson From South Africa

        If I were back in New York City I would be blocking a street in support of the Ferguson protests demands. I've simply had it with a system that refuses to treat me as an equal human being. Because I am both a medical doctor and a patient, I am often made acutely aware of how little people think of me because of my race. The day I flew out of the US, I had some prescriptions to fill. My normal pharmacy had run out of one drug, so my pharmacist called in the drug to another pharmacy. The other pharmacy, a Rite Aid, decided that since they would replace my drug with another one, however the dosages were not equivalent. I pointed this out to the Rite Aid pharmacist, a redheaded young white woman. For some minutes I stood there arguing as she spoke to me as if I were an illiterate five year old. At some point, I interrupted her, and told her "Look, I think you should know I'm a physician and I prescribe these drugs myself, I'm going to show you my package, and have you read the dosage out loud, then take your drug and read the dosage  out loud. You will see the number of milligrams in one is about 60% of the number of milligrams in the other..." At that point the pharmacist rolled her eyes and examined the boxes. Then she started to panic. She realized I was correct. She probably also realized it isn't a good idea to assume every black person is borderline illliterate, and speak to them as such.
   
     This tiny incident brought back innumerable memories where other medical professionals have assumed I was a stupid, and definitely not a doctor even if I was wearing a white coat and an ID. It also brought back memories of how certain doctors had treated me as a patient: essentially as some sort of inferior person who didn't deserve decent medical care. Not every doctor has treated me this way, but enough so that I now think dealing with most American doctors is hopeless; a pretty sad statement considering that I am one of them.

     Here in South Africa, I am not considered black. I'm considered an American. People can't understand why I think I am black. But being black in America is fundamentally a political situation. Our political situation goes right back to the founding of the country in which we were counted as 3/5ths of person. In fact it goes back further to when the UK was moving towards abolition and wealthy whites in the colonies panicked, founding a country at least in part to avoid setting my ancestors free from slavery. Hundreds of years later we are now stuck in some kind of miserable existential political crisis. We have only succeeded in putting black faces on a system that is white supremacist. Yet, we are constantly reminded we will not be considered a deserving equal human rights. Whether it is drone bombing hundreds of brown people at wedding parties or drone bombing US American children in the middle East without any trial or shutting of people's water in Detroit; most of us get the message. Brown lives somehow just don't matter as much as white ones. Some of us will be killed by acts of police or military aggression, but it is important to understand that others of us will be killed by acts of total indifference. I remember the shock and horror of a German anesthesiologist I know about some time she spent as a medical student in the US. She told me of patients who had cancer, but lacked money, who were simply diagnosed and discharged...for many reasons, those kinds of patients, sent off to quietly die for lack of funds are disproportionally us. What shocked my German colleague the most was that the other doctors didn't seem to care. Even after a lifetime of being black I am hit with the same sense of shock as I watch most American's indifference to the Detroit water shut-offs. My best friend, who is white, reminds me a lot of people just don't like black people; people are still racist.
     
      Racial hatred goes in all directions except away but the damage of racism is not equally distributed. Just yesterday at the hostel I am staying at I met a thirtyish Italian backpacker who told me he "hated Jews". I continued to talk to him, and told him I was Jewish. Moments like this are inconvenient and embarrassing, but I do not have the same political situation on my hands over being a semi-semite that I do over being black. I don't think I'll see the day where some other doctor has me as a patient and treats me like a moron because I'm Jewish. Jews are well represented in American medicine. Blacks make up under 5% of American doctors, with a significant percentage of those being non-African-American blacks (Africans, Afro-Caribbeans etc.). The bizarre underprevalance of African-Americans in medicine particular is not strange seen from the perspective that being a black American is a political situation. I've read that years ago when African dignitaries would come to the area near the US capital they were given pins to distinguish them from other blacks, and therefore allow them to dine with whites. Apparently the discrimination wasn't about color. It wasn't about culture either given the melting pot mentality that absorbed and assimilated all kinds of people every generation. It was about keeping a particular group of people in a certain situation.

    I am not delusional enough to think white people will wake up tomorrow and understand the political situation of blacks. Nor am I crazy enough to think all white people are evil or out to get me. My own guidechildren are white, and I'm actually quite happy about it. I've noticed that usually when I meet a white person who "gets it", they had a positive black role model early in life. I think these kinds of white people people hit some sort of cognitive dissonance between the popular understanding (or more precisely imagination) of blacks, and those really nice psychologists or physicians or whoever down the street who happened to be black. At some point they realized the official story of blacks as a problem is oh so much bullshit. The problem, unfortunately, is the entire situation.

    My guidekids were adopted. It takes a whole lot of problems for the social service system to take white kids away from their parents. Working through some of these issues with my guidekids has taught me that yes, white American people suffer too. There is a white underclass in the US and it's problems are as real as those of black folks. Social class remains the elephant in the room almost no one is talking about in the US. We can talk about blacks, and we can talk about inequality, either of which become an imperfect proxy for the lower class at times.

    I do believe that one day, probably after I am dead, Americans will reach reconciliation. I think of how young voters black and white elected Obama; and I vaguely remember his campaign message. Hope.

UK Occupied Again

Occupy is back in London!...I was laid over today, and walked by Parliament Square. I spoke with a young man about their issues. I explained to him that believe it or not, most of the problems of neoliberalism-gone-wild they have here are much better than in the US. He insisted like many Europeans that everything we get in the US, eventually comes there. Poor them.

Dahlheim on Debt: Part I

The liberty bell, one of the most iconic objects of the United States, carries a message still relevant today. But isn't what we were told. Nick Dahlheim explains...

The Shredding of the Social Contract: Revisiting the Moral Positioning of Debtor-Creditor in Light of the U.S. Student Loan Debt Crisis

By Nicholas T. Dahlheim

“If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you.  If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the banks.”  ~American proverb

    I apologize to readers for the one week delay in completing the first of a series of posts that are as much autobiographical as they are analytical.  Their overrunning theme is the shredding of the U.S. social contract which promised the prospect of upward mobility.  Perhaps the most egregious violation of this implicit social contract comes with the mounting U.S. student debt crisis.  Back in 2012, a paper authored by economists working at the NY Fed reported that the outstanding student loan debt (at $870 billion) surpassed the nation’s outstanding auto loan debt ($730 billion) and credit card debt ($693 billion) for the first time.[1]  Arguably, that 2012 paper would have gone unnoticed, maybe eve unwritten had it not been for the autumn 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement where frustrated indebted college students and recent college graduates played leading roles.  Millennials, the generational cohort most burdened by student loan debt, has lived most or all of their entire lives under a rising tide of tuition and school fees that has—rather than lifted all boats—sunk all of them.  Tuition and fees have risen over 538% since 1985, easily outpacing the CPI inflation index by over 400%.[2]  The continued “recovery” of the U.S. economy has sadly been mostly a recovery in stock prices and corporate profits, unemployment and underemployment remain brutally persistent.  Moreover, more recent 2014 news stories which have been attempting to say that Congress and/or the Obama Administration have somehow contributed to unemployment rates dropping below 7% nationwide have played fast and loose with numbers. The Democratic Obama Administration uses “fuzzy” math similar to that used by it’s predecessor.  A much more accurate statistical proxy for the on-the-ground situation re: unemployment, incidentally which does not exempt most college graduates, is the labor force participation rate shown in the graph below.

Chart 1

Source: Damon, Andre.  “Mounting Unemployment in America, Hundreds of Thousands Drop out of the Workforce.” GlobalResearch.ca.  (Reposted from World Socialist Website).  April 6, 2013.  http://www.globalresearch.ca/mounting-unemployment-in-america-hundreds-of-thousands-drop-out-of-the-workforce/5330086/  (accessed November 15, 2014).

    The trend, which has been especially pronounced since the 2008 credit crunch and global economic meltdown, has been unmistakable. The reality is probably worse than it looks given how many of the 63% of Americans with a job can only find a part-time one. There is some “recovery,” but only if you are in the top 1%.  How are college graduates supposed to collectively make enough income to pay back their surging student loan debts with such clear secular trends in employment, not to mention continued wage stagnation, working against them?  Sadly, the mainstream press which is completely devoted to the dominant neoliberal ideology has been slow to connect the dots between the economic struggles of the Millennial generation and the crushing realities of student debt.  This oft-read and commented upon October 2012 piece from The Atlantic entitled “The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy” is an illustrative case.  The article makes only passing reference to the student debt crisis, and instead tries to paint the brutal economic conditions facing the Millennial generational cohort as a product of their exhaustion with consumerist values. 

    As a Millennial struggling with a crappy job market and having dealt with crushing student loan debt myself, I find articles like this piece from The Atlantic offensive to the common sense I’ve derived from the experience and observation of spending my late 20s in the midst of this awful economy.  Even worse, the post-2008 recession advice many Millennials, and even older professionals received, about the value of going back to school because “education is always the way up the socio-economic ladder towards achieving the American Dream” has been wooly-headed at best, downright maliciously stupid at worst.  With student debt trending upwards, wages and employment trending downwards do not make for economic security for my generation.

    But for a country whose prevailing ideologies about work, employment, debt, family, and their relationship to the broader society are still more firmly planted in the Puritan days of the 17^th century than the globalized Digital Age society of the 21^st; the student debt crisis should serve as a wakeup call.  I cannot tell you how many times I have run into uninformed and unthinking Americans, most of them conservatives, who quickly default to a position of “it’s honorable and morally required of a person to pay his/her debts because nobody forced you to take out the money for school” when discussing the student debt crisis.  Furthermore, most of these conservatives and their ilk fail to mention, lest they even know, that student debt is NOT dischargeable but in the most extreme of circumstances.  This punitive moralism from the right-wing regressives and other conventional moralists misses the mark—the historical, and even Biblical, understanding of debt shows that BOTH debtors and creditors have moral responsibility in the forging of the debtor-creditor relationship. 

    First of all, debt in the neoliberal economy founded in large part on the fiction uttered by that reprobate British P.M. Thatcher that “there is no society, only individuals” (paraphrase) actually conceals debt as a vehicle of elite social control rather than a mutually beneficent instrument of social good.  As anthropologist David Graeber argues, the very nebulousness of debt as a concept—particularly to student debtors who usually hold positions lower on the social ladder and have less insider knowledge about the state of the economy—works inherently to the disadvantage of the debtor.  For,

“If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.  Mafiosi understand.  So do the commanders of conquering armies.  For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something.  If nothing else, they ‘owe them their lives’ (a telling phrase) [quotes and parentheses are Graeber’s] because they haven’t been killed.”[3]

   And given the underlying Puritanical attitudes from the 17^th century behind stifling American middle class morality, it’s not always the case that student debt relations are founded on overt violence.  Rather, they are founded on more subtle forms of coercion of a more thaumaturgical bent practiced through the dissemination of mass media consumerist propaganda and institutional programming in schools, churches, and communities.  In this sense, the violence that has been promised to those individuals who have not opted to enter the student debt game in order to receive a college diploma is the violence of exclusion and of anomie.  In other words, the oft-repeated conventional message says, “if you don’t go to college the road to the middle class will be closed off for you.”  Given that the American Dream of a middle class lifestyle is axiomatically at the foundation of the post-WWII American social contract, the role of student debt invariably plays a role in the shaping of the public morality binding BOTH creditors and debtors. 

    Indeed, official Biblical morality dating back to the Bronze Age directly stipulated more moral responsibility for creditors than social convention has presently with respect to the Sallie Mae, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. financial industry, and universities who share that moral burden as creditors to students attending American universities.  Like today’s over-indebted students, the Axial Age Jews of ancient times had to rediscover the lost wisdom from Bronze Mesopotamian kings of the social value of periodic debt cancellations after the usurious landlordism of King Josiah.[4]  In protest to the exploitative aristocracies which emerged after the end of the Bronze Age in 1200 B.C.E., the revived Judaism of the Pentateuch represented a populism which sought to protect rural peoples from predatory financiers and absentee landlords.  Indeed, the underlying theme uniting the tradition of the Hebrew prophets is the overarching concern God felt for His People.  This concern was expressed in terms of a covenantal relationship that the Hebrew Prophets reformulated in terms of powerful apocalyptic imagery of the necessity of continued national economic renewal through regular debt cancellations to prevent high inequality.  Yet, ironically, Biblical scholarship has neglected the importance of regular debt cancellations in Axial Age Near Eastern society inspiring the social revolution of the Hebrew prophets.  For,

“Indeed, what turns out to be ironic in studying the history of Near Eastern legal practices is that precisely those parts of the Biblical narratives that hitherto have been most in doubt—the laws cancelling debts, freeing debt servants and redistributing the land to its traditional users—turn out to be the most clearly documented Bronze Age legacy…Indeed, the Babylonian experience survives today primarily in the transmuted form that has come down to us through the Bible.”[5] (Emphasis is the author’s)

   Indeed, a key Biblical text from Leviticus 25:10 likely antedating the Hebrew Prophets appears on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.  The verse reads, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.”  But what the Liberty Bell inscription from Leviticus leaves out is the context.  What is being discussed in the longer Leviticus passage is not political liberty to “vote” in a “democracy.”  Rather, the passage speaks of the moral necessity to free debt bondsmen when their debts become unpayable.  Moreover, Leviticus, in a passage to which undoubtedly influenced the later Hebrew Prophets, exhorts a massive debt cancellation during the Jubilee celebrations that occurred every fiftieth year.

   Recognizing that the current U.S. student loan debt situation is patently unsustainable and that colleges, the federal government, and lenders have not shared any risk for overburdening unsuspecting students with debt—students who have been told of the absolute necessity of a college degree for their entire lives—it is time to revisit a student loan Jubilee as necessary for restoring the shredded American social compact between society, creditors, and its student population promised but increasingly denied the standard of living promised them.

---

[1] Daniel de Vise, "Student loans surpass auto, credit card debt," College, Inc. - The Washington Post, March 6, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/student-loans-surpass-auto-credit-card-debt/2012/03/06/gIQARFQnuR_blog.html (accessed November 15, 2014).

[2] Chase Peterson-Withorn, "How Today's Student Loan Debt is Failing Future Generations," Forbes, July 30, 2014.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2014/07/30/how-todays-student-loan-debt-is-failing-future-generations/.  (accessed November 15, 2014).

[3] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2011).  Pages 19-20.

[4] Michael Hudson, "The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations," Michael Hudson, March 2010, http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/HudsonLostTradition.pdf  (accessed November 15, 2014).

[5] Michael Hudson, "The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations," Michael Hudson, March 2010, http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/HudsonLostTradition.pdf  (accessed November 15, 2014).

My Plastic Surgery

         I stared in the mirror this morning. I hate myself. Millions of children in Syria and all over Africa are dying of malnutrition; and I'm terribly concerned about getting the best plastic surgery possible. I'm a monster. 

           Then I think of the conference I was at yesterday. All these successful important people. All of them under 50 looked like they could launch second careers as catalogue models. I wonder if there is no hope for an ugly woman like myself. Who would ever want to be involved in anything I headed? Who could take me seriously? It seems absurd, but I'm keeping score and the last time I saw an ugly woman under sixty running anything was exactly never. Never. I know correlation is not causality, but it's impossible not to notice precisely no woman as ugly as I am gets anywhere I want to be. Yes, there are people even uglier than I am, and so what. The world has different standards for men. And as to the ugly women in my life most did not start out that way, but slid there after they had accomplished everything: husbands, children, careers, financial stability. The one counterexample I can think of survived on the largesse of generous parents, and a socialist state while she wrote a book of poetry, alone in her room. I have a sneaking suspicion if she had to sell the book by appearing on TV, sales would plummet. At any rate, I can't write poetry, and I'm not living in a socialist state.

            I have finally decided to bite the bullet and have plastic surgery. The only question is when. I am still undergoing fertility treatment on the vain hope I'll get pregnant. So it would be an obvious shame to fix myself, get pregnant and fat, and then need to fix myself all over again. Truth be told I have much less of a problem with my body than many women. I lack the self-discipline or mental illness or whatever it takes to develop an eating disorder. My ass is huge, and I'm OK with that. My thighs are starting to look like I already had several kids, and I think its fine. Just motivation for me to actually exercise. My belly is becoming more round by the day, and somehow it doesn't bother me. But I can barely look at my own face in the mirror. From the shoulder's up, I wish I could erase everything and start all over again. I would do it if it meant breaking every bone in my face; but there are no guarantees it would work. 

             I have come to a certain peace with the fact that I am an ugly woman. Not the ugliest woman. But certainly not the woman of anyone's fantasies. What I cannot quite get past is my mess of a chin, or more precisely the fat hanging beneath it. I fixed it once. At one point I went to the gym 6 days a week for over an hour a day for months. I ate lots of lettuce. I lost 20 pounds. Most of my face looked scary...but my chin looked the best it ever has. Before the days of plastic surgery women spoke of a tradeoff between the face and the ass. You lose control of your expanding rear end, but you keep a round, young face; or your keep slim and trim and let your face fall. In my case the tradeoff was the face or the chin or just finally go get some plastic surgery.

             For me this surgery will be a breaking free of society’s expectations I'm almost proud of. My whole life people have lied to me. "It's what's on the inside that counts!" Really? I suppose that's why I've never seen an overweight or ugly female reporter in my life. Skinny people have more intelligence inside? This is just one of countless lies I have been told. They all seem to revolve around the idea that it is permissible for me to be ugly as long as I continue to be kind and intelligent. Basta. Enough. I live in a society of superficial people so concerned with what Kim Kardishian's did yesterday, they have no mental space to even understand who Marie Curie was. The obsession with the surface seems to only grow worse the higher up the power chain one goes. And unfortunately, at the top everyone has money to fix themselves. Every woman has Botox, and hair dye, and trips to the spa to get everything tweezed and plucked. And then goes around hypocritically pretending we should all care less about the way we look. 

             I could change the way I am processing this. I could practice meditation, self-acceptance, and go to even more therapy. But I fear it has not worked. And further, I'll never change the way the world processes me. I understand for many of the positive outcomes of beauty in my life, it is simply too late. I can't undo the past. I'll never forget the humiliating moments...the disgusting men who let me know they were interested in having sex with me yet did not want to be seen in public with me, all the times a man would open the door for women in front of me to slam it into my face as if I were invisble, all the boyfriends who not one ever told me I was beautifull: because I wasn't. So I'm going off to try to start living my dream: to finally stop being this pitiful pitied ugly woman whatever that means in the context of being an old single barren witch. I'm only a few operations away from finding out. 

Childhood Debt Part II: Understanding Identity Transfer Debt

Nick Dalhiem is still working away at his academically enhanced theories of the morality of debt; in the mean time, I'm putting up more material about childhood debt.
     Although most Americans could recognize the cruelty of holding children responsible for debts, a particularly misunderstood and unthinkably cruel kind of debt which has begun to plague American children at ever increasing alarming rates. By some of the best estimates about half a million children are carrying debt for their parents or relatives. This kind of debt could be called identity transfer debt. Cynics who think debtors are entitled losers would mislabel these kids as the victim of identity theft at the hands of evil parents. Unfortunately, when combing through the qualitative data an even bleaker picture emerges. While in some cases irresponsible parents steal their children’s identities, in many parents or other close relatives and caregivers use children’s identities, sometimes even with their knowledge to keep a family financially afloat during a crisis that would otherwise have them homeless.
     In some cases the perpetrators of this debt identity crime are unsophisticated immigrants who do not realize they will make hard their progeny’s future. Consider the case of Ana Ramirez as reported in the Huffington Post. Her mother was a recently divorced low income woman with children to support and a job as a cleaning lady. Like many low income people she already had bad credit. Faced with impending financial doom, she borrowed using her daughter’s social security number to get into a house. She may have saved the family homelessness or time with an abusive father but the story does not give clear details about those circumstances; the story focuses on how she ultimately ruined her daughter’s credit. Women like her daughter will be dealing with a low credit scores for years that will haunt them every time she applies for a job, and possibly even when they try to get education.
     Every article I read covering the phenomenon of identity transfer debt paints parents who put debt in children’s names as evil criminals. But imagine that you and your children faced potential homelessness…I personally don’t have to imagine. I remember from my own childhood the absolute panic and fear of my mother at financially difficult times. I remember her screaming about the possibility of losing our house and everything we had. I remember the kinds of choices she made to keep a roof over our heads as a working single mother. There was never really money around for adequate childcare so she would have us sit in the waiting room during her medical appointments. One time she refused anesthesia for a surgery she needed, so she could drive me and my sister home to avoid paying a cab fare; then drove us with tears streaming down her face. My mother was meticulous and driven to see her children succeed. If it took going through surgery with no anesthesia for us to have adequate food, books and shelter, she would do it. But I don’t think this level of sacrifice is reasonable to expect from every parent if we are going to punish the children for their parent’s lack of it.
     Right wing neoliberals want us to look at the problem of identity transfer debt as the result of a bunch of bad decisions of individual people. But really, this problem is just as much about a bunch of bad collective decisions in American society. At this point, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out, the single best indicator of which women will go into financial collapse is which have a child. But financial collapse or not: the child is there and must be fed and housed. We are putting working parents between a rock and a hard piece of concrete: unbearable debt, or homelessness.  Should we really be surprised some turn to throwing on more debt by any means necessary including putting it in their child’s name? Should we really be surprised that identity transfer debt skyrocketed at approximately the same time a lot of mortgages went into default and jobs were lost due to our poorly regulated financial system? Once we understand identity transfer debt holistically we can begin to understand how to take this problem apart. We need to understand why it is that American women go into financial collapse after children. While this is a tremendously complicated multifactorial issue; a few fixable culprits stand out. Lack of affordable adequate childcare options, and some of the most draconian maternity leave policies and practices in the entire world are among the reasons so many American women are financially doomed. Neoliberal policies have failed the American family, even if they have been theoretically positive for some individual well paid workers. At the lower part of the class spectrum, the results of our policy choices have been absolutely catastrophic. We have chosen as a society to incentivize a demotion of a lot of the working class down to the would-have-been working class. Financialized credit has become part of de-facto the safety net we refuse to provide. But this safety net is toxic. It is slowly tearing families apart instead of keeping them together. In the case of kids who are carrying debt to help their family survive they will enter the workforce at a distinct disadvantage as employers use credit checks to screen applicants. And just as horribly this plastic credit safety net has the tendency, if we analyze it by the logic of orthodox macroeconomics, to push up the cost of the very necessities poor families were so desperate to get they threw their kids into debt over them in the first place. This is not Marxist economics or some linear algebra based complex model’s projection; this is what you would get by either solving the basic supply demand curves on certain commodities with credit pushing up the demand or just looking at the historical data. The toxic bad-debt based bubble in housing prices that popped in 2008 is a perfect example.
     But if we pull away the credit mechanism of survival for at risk families, what will we replace it with? We don’t have safe shelters and great programs for at risk families in every state. Costas Lapavistas has written about the idea of credit, in some kind leftist post capitalism utopia, as a quasi-public utility. For millions of American parents falling a hole of debt this is a very distant dream: the kids need to eat every five hours whether you spent through your paycheck or not and some academics at the SOAS are not coming to save us. Part of the real solution for the time being must be growing back stronger communities where money and credit circulate locally. We can’t simply, in good conscious, have academic discussions among leftists and simultaneously throw a generation of families under a train with the consolation that in twenty years after their kids’ lives are ruined, we may have devised a solution that does not involve usurious debt and poverty. Stronger local communities will not fix all our problems, but they are something we are not going to have to wait on the neoliberal state to give us permission for. Simply by raising consciousness about the incredible financial burdens incurred during American parenthood and how often it has pushed families to debt as the best of bad solutions, we can begin to be more empathetic, and help each other out. If we break away from the atomization induced by our choices, we will understand our communities more, and begin to fix them ourselves. Anyone who has lived outside of the US will notice how disconnected Americans are from each other and each other’s children. It’s time to get a little closer; whether by packing another kid into the carpool, mentoring a poor child, or simply trying to bring people in our communities together. We simply cannot afford to continue to do things the old way if we care about our future.

     My personal credit score is very high in spite of having been a childhood debtor. For whatever mistakes my mother made with me, including encouraging me take on debt as a child, she never took on debt in my name. The story of how she hung on to her dreams of seeing her daughters get terminatory degrees and her house in spite of the same kinds of adversity parents who take out debt in their kids name is not only a story of personal triumph. It is also a story of neighbors who were willing to pitch in and help with childcare. It is therefore also a story about the geographic luck of a neighborhood with demographics that favored immigrants with dreams of upward mobility, respect for education, and less individualistic mentalities than more assimilated Americans.

     I am not a social scientist but I write my honest impressions in part because of the hope that those inside the machines of social sciences and policy making can take them and apply further analysis. If we truly understand the mechanisms of each kind of childhood debt we can stop them. If we let ourselves fall into the cheap superficial explanations of simple criminality that pervade the media about identity transfer debt, we will try to stop this with criminal justice. In my forthcoming blogging I will mention some of how our current criminal justice system tends to push even more young family debt. 

Plastic Welfare? Dahlheim on Debt

       Millions of American households with children are living on less than 2$ a day. If that number seems to have a particular sting, it should. It is how extreme poverty is measured on a global level. It is still a number that shocks first world people. While it isn't pretty, or healthy, you can get by on a few bucks a day in a place like Haiti. I'm not so sure it's possible in the USA, without ending up in jail. On the street,in societies as diverse as Venezuela, Israel and Haiti have a stronger sense of community than the US. You can go to your neighbor for a bowl of rice, and talk about how you can maybe get a job. I'm afraid wandering on the neighbor's property to beg for some rice in parts of the US may get you legally shot. Sleeping in the streets will land you in jail. And as to the inherent stress of all of this cracking up your mental health... well just pray you don't end up in the wrong mental healthcare facility because you could easily end up bankrupted as well. These facts are not exagerations; they are the realities of everyday American life for millions of young families.
         Everyone, even our oblivious politicians, realize that raising children in poverty creates problems. But as far as our political rhetoric goes there have basically been two solutions proposed by our mainsteam politicians neither of which is viable. From the right wing there is the culturally conservative solution: marriage. And from the left side: increased government spending on welfare. Neither one of them is an adequate solution to a mounting crisis, or what is actually keeping many American families alive.
          Let's start with marriage. Truth be told, marriage is more and more a mark of upper middle class socioeconomic status. Save some certain Latino populations where traditions hold strong; marriage happens less and less for poorer women. There has been an investment in certain parts of the country to push marriage. Even in liberal New York City, you can't avoid subway adds showing a black woman beaming about marriage sponsored by some public health campaign. But marriage in the lower classes is not always healthy for women.
            I was recently reading an article about how Indian women end up as surrogates. The article talked about how lower class men are a bunch of unemployed drunks and mental cases who abuse their wives and expect them to make the money for the family. I found it strange was that the article mentioned these facts as if these women had some rare exotic disease like African sleeping sickness. The truth is most of the American women in my family could tell you about such relationships because they were married to men just like that. I though of the time my own civil partner had once been so drunk he blacked out and couldn't remember urinating in my closet the night before. For some of the men I saw get into my family the problem was drugs, for some mental illness; but the same basic pattern was there, and it always seemed to end in a messy expensive divorce. I guess that's what the middle part of lower middle class buys you...the ability to afford a lawyer.
          I'm not claiming every poor man is a drunken fool. But let's be honest: men with problems like substance abuse and mental illness tend to drift towards the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. So do men with prison records. Together, these groups make up a lot of the available men in some areas. In these places the dynamic around marraige shifts. Marraigable men have very little incentive to marry. As much as Republican lawmakers blather on about marriage, they still pretend to respect our freedoms. At no point soon will they be taking masses of poorer women and assigning them second wife status to actual marraigable men- that is pretty much what it would take to actually create the fantasy of marriage as a poverty alleviating solution. With three or four incomes per child, we just might have a fighting chance. With just two incomes, most families fall further and further behind these days.
          To their great credit some democrats, like Elizabeth Warren, have realized this phenomenon of the current unaffordability of family. Lots of her academic work addresses the paradox that the average normative American family has added a worker, and lost financial stability. Housing, education, quality nutritious food and healthcare, exactly what you need to get a kid on a stable path in life, have become too expensive for normal families to handle. We have enough welfare money floating around to give families in extreme poverty access to healthcare, but not much else. We throw vulnerable families into roach and mouse infested shelters, and feed them Spam. We take away their children if they stay in their subpar living arrangements. Just go ask some of the parents who recently lost their kids in the Detroit Water Debt fiasco. Whatever the reasons, it's painfully obvious that the welfare state is now in reality contracting, not expanding. And in the current political climate there is little hope for a real lifeline coming from the government in the next three years.
           Under these conditions taking on debt to stave off being one of the desperate families in a shelter or broken up by officials seems logical. But everyone can see that modern forms of credit have a way of distorting markets. It happened in the housing market. To a large extent the same phenomenon has happened with higher education. Credit subsidized by the government created a lot of largesse and nonsense at ever inflating prices. A recent JAMA Dermatology edition had an article about the availability of tanning beds at colleges. It's not enough that our tax dollars are supporting creating a class of indentured servants. Now we must give some people melanoma too. Universities probably claim high end amenities are there to make them money. But what happens when the tan look is unfashionable for a few seasons, or the new gymn doesn't create the revenue projected, or enrollment in Urban Semiotics drops? Somehow it all seems to get rolled into ever higher prices that can only be financed through debt. Why am I so sure? Well, let's take my own experience: I'm a Columbia alumni. Through my years as an undergrad the administration talked of enlargement and enhancement. Having taken a few economics classes, I assumed this was about economies of scale. Adding a few seats to liberal arts lecture halls costs a lot less than students are paying for those seats. As long as not all students head off to lab intensive science training; the project should have been an obvious net gain for the University. I was expecting that by the time my own kids would apply to Columbia, the price would  have fallen. Ha, ha, and ha.
             I am not an economist, but I have a suspicion we are in a vicious downward spiral that will eventually hit bottom. Debt drives up prices of basics for families, which makes families take on more debt, which drives up prices, which makes families take on more debt....and then one day, there is some breaking point. But I suspect that breaking point is already here for very low income families. As families descended into the debt spiral they took on more and more usurious forms of debt. Or they just went delinquent. If you look at a map of average delinquent debt by state or even county it almost perfectly matches a map for not only childhood poverty but also many indicators of poor child health. You would be mistaken to think all of the arrows flow one way from a beginning of poverty in this schema. Connections spring up in all directions. Childhood illnesses bring medical bills parents can not handle either monetarily or in time off from work. Or unaffordable housing pushes families into asthma inducing, toxic structures inhabited by leptospirosis carrying mice. Or a thousand other tragedies of poverty go on day in and day out, and all seem to spell a trajectory of doom for children. If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider that the only way I got my own middle class area of the Bronx landlord to take responsibility for my apartment's mouse population was to bring the full medico-legal implications to the attention of my local health department at the same time I brought it to his. All around my floor lived low income Latino families who told me mice, as well as several other health hazards I listed, were "the way it is." Some of these young families even old me how proud they were to have moved out of even worse neighborhoods. These families were in fact the American conservative dream families. They were avoiding welfare, joining the army, marrying young, going to church, and certainly not blowing their money on conspicuous consumption. Unlike the Albanian families around the corner, they were fully assimilating into the mainstream of American society. But if our own militaries statistics are to be believed, these patriotic assimilating American families are sinking further and further into debt just to keep the lights on and food in the fridge.
           Groups like Strike Debt have fought to take the moral language away from issues of debt for good reasons. The story spun by the mainstream press is that we debtors have hung ourselves due to our lack of self control. We were out partying like crack whores, and now we must pay the price. This is, according to such a narrative, a classic Greek tragedy at best and a morality play at worst. But what if that really isn't the story? In a few days I'll be posting some guest posts from Nicholas T. Dahlheim. He is a young sociologist and educator who has been writing about morality and debt in a way informed by philosophy. I can't see past my looming debt problems enough to consider the morality...but someone has to. The way I see it justice is actually on my and most debtors side. We don't need to avoid talking about morality. We need to get into discussion about the ethics of how debt should be shaping our lives. I'm unsure if I'll agree with Dahlheim's writings...but I hope they will be informative for anyone reading.

Sex and the Sharing Economy in America: Leave Me the F*** Alone !

      According to a pretty tragicomically myopic article on the new sharing economy this week, Salon.com says the sharing economy has a race problem. But supposedly with just a few technical fix-ups we'll all be off to some kind of collaborative cum-by-ya singing, happy hand holding platonic orgy. Then again, at least this article admitted this new set of innovations is not perfect. Many have written about the sharing economy like it's the much awaited messiah ushering in utopia. Apparently the sharing economy can "make the world freindlier", be "a force for good", "save our economy" and perhaps most completely supernaturally allow real people to live in Manhattan below 120th street ,or so Airbandb implied. Words like the tremendously suspect "liberating," which should be warning enough in itself, sit in the same paragraphs as "empowering," "efficient" and even "ecosystem" peppering fluff articles about this new normal. Who could be against ecosystems? Well, in this case, me and probably any other woman with common sense.
       This is not entirely just a cliched tired tale of gender like little red riding hood and the big bad wolf that doesn't really hold up in reality. I don't have just a simple story of how women get unwanted sexual harassment facilitated by buying into sharing. This is a story of how a new class of petty capitalists have hit the skids harder than workers. This is, to some degree, the story of many Americans under forty. We invested in our own human capital through education. We tried to get ownership of places and things in this world. And now we are renting half of these out if we are lucky. We are renting our rooms, and renting out brains. We are selling our very selves in some cruel fight for survival that has become a race to the bottom. This race sponsored by the new sharing economy demands we all primp ourselves like beauty pageant contestants but vie for Ms. Congeniality and Hospitality instead of the real crown. This race has both buyers and sellers in service roles and it is not empowering either side. Those of us in the race are not there at random, and we are in reality the last people who need to learn how to share. As the economy goes down, by and large the few workers who can keep their heads above water are men. Women of my generation got degrees in order to compete on the labor market. Then too many of us got low paying jobs which demand a certain kind of subservience we are supposedly suited to. I've watched friends run this equation to the limit if they tried to break into creative industries. For them a hope to break in was about working for free, playing the attractive good girl who let the boss pat their ass if not fuck it, and lots of waitressing. I don't think many men are emotionally strong enough to put up with these kinds of arrangements. For these and many other reasons the sharing economy can not be entirely separated from gender issues.
        The first couch surfer I ever met was a wealthy young woman traveling through Israel who could have easily afforded a hotel, but liked to keep her family money separate from her own. Her father was an Upper East Side dwelling doctor. She flew out to Israel on birthright and couchsurfed. She landed on my ex-boyfriend's roommate's couch. Not two days after I met her did I hear her host whining that she wanted to be taken here and there, and all without "being his girlfriend." According to my acquaintance, she sat in front of him and knowingly flirted. There was always the promise that she might be interested, at least in the mind of her host. His mood seemed to bounce around depending upon how much hope he held. I didn't worry about her safety though, because I understood, she had the money to walk away at any moment.
       People asked me why I didn't just couchsurf when I needed accommodations to take my United States Medical Licensing Exam Step IICK exam in London (they shut the testing center in Israel at the time I wanted to take it). I was afraid. It seemed like men thought couchsurfing was some kind of sex service. "Then you only interact with women!" the surf- experienced told me. At some point, I took the plunge, and I must say, I am sorry. I have never hosted or been hosted by a male...but over time interacting with a few women I have hosted, and men who messaged me was enough to let me confirm what was going on. Obviously "couschsurfing" is not "sexsurfing"; but apparently about half of men on the site are confused on the point. One female surfer I had told me a long list of her many experiences where male hosts tried to get her to sleep with them. The most ridiculous was one who told her she could help him in a scientific experiment about kissing, but in order for the conditions of the experiment to work, they would both need take off their clothes. The most banal were men who simply demanded sex. Apparently the experience is so common there is a catchphrase women publish in their requests to rapidly relocate. I have forgotten the phrase, but I won't be using it. After my own interactions with men on the site, I'm frankly afraid to couchsurf. I thought I had set up my account to show I was interested in hosting with and staying with other women. A bizarrely high percentage of messages I got were from were older men looking hoping to meet for coffee or something else that sounded like a date. A date where I would pay and show them a bit of the city I suppose, otherwise, why not just find someone on the over 3,000 actual online dating websites? 
       Yes, that number is correct. With over 3,000 online dating sites, including footworshipclub.com, dateamormon.com, farmersonly.com and hundreds more there truly IS someone for everyone. There are dating websites for the mentally ill people, high IQ people, paraplegics, Zoroastrians...no group is too small; in fact statistically insignificant groups flock to online dating to save themselves from genetic erasure. I don't think Sawyourunningfromisis.com for Yazidis can be far off in the future in a world where Sawyouatsinai.com is one of over a dozen dating websites aimed at the two percent of Americans that share my religion, many of whom are married already. There are websites for all kinds of dating, including dating for married people cheating (Ashleymadison.com) and even...this one floored even me...dating for people who don't like sex (Asexualitic.com). So why would anyone, no matter how unique their tastes or profile, waste their time trying to get some action on a sharing site supposedly about hosting people? I have a simple hypothesis: people on a dating site can just say NO. People, most often women, on couchsurfing might need somewhere to stay, and feel pressured to acquiesce. Yes can be as simple as a woman too broke to spring for a hotel. You see, the sharing economy is all about love, and by love I mean desperation.
        When I was websurfing a few weeks ago I happened on a story about how Uber, a new car sharing service, had a sexual harassment problem. I was not surprised. Men boast that the Uber app lets them "pick up girls", literally. Those young women are, I suspect, not unaware of the issues of getting into a car with a stranger who is not that well tracked. Like the thousands of women on couchsurfing, they need to save some money, and are willing to take a calculated risk. The women I have met who surfed my couch or rented my bed via Airbandb, were almost never on vacation. They were trying to hang on to their jobs or get a foothold into some part of the labor market. If they had to be in New York City for even a shot at some gig, they were there. Apparently the days when employers picked up travel costs are gone. I can not however tell a rosy story about how we became some sort of sisterhood of labor due to sharing my apartment. In fact it became painfully clear that some of my mini-renters viewed me as pathetic given that I was so poor I had to sleep on an airmatress while renting out my own bed. Nonetheless, I avoided the fate or ever having to couchsurf a man's place. This fate seems to bring a certain kind of sexualized doom onto single women.
       Sharing was supposed to bring us all closer together.  But can men handle that lots of women don't want to be so close as to let them grope us or use us as courteous cheap labor? The sharing economy is not just about men finding new forums in which to sexually harass women, it's also about some men throwing certain women and men into a low wage pit of doom. Technology enabled sharing model companies market themselves as the salvation for stay-at-home moms among other gendered groups. But what they are really about is chopping work up into tiny bits that can be done by no benefit underpaid workers. Hosts working instead of salaried hotel workers. Car sharers instead of professional drivers. Amazon's mechanical Turks instead of tech and office workers. The ideas of sharing style companies seems to be spreading like wildfire through every single part of the American economy. You would be wrong to think many of us are immune. This year when looking to pick up more income one company I interviewed for specifically pursued would-like-to-stay-at-home bilingual MDs and RNs to staff online call centers for the pharmaceutical industry. The pay was based on only minutes actually talking on the phone. with patients. Before taxes the pay came up to 11$ an hour when talking. So if you got calls about 50% of your shift, you couldn't even make minimum wage. Yet that was more than I would have made on many share-model service businesses- because they just don't seem to be influenced by the minimum wage at all. But hey, we are all sharing, right? Except that those at the top don't seem to be sharing any of the profits from turning everyone below them into independent contractors in a fight to the very bottom of a personalized capitalist pit. Paradoxically we aren't the new capitalists in this scenario in spite of selling the sharing of precisely our capital. We are instead, to be honest, all prostitutes now; I think that is the best summary for the sharing economy. The sharing economy is really about servicing others at dismally low rates while maintaining the illusion of a happy intimate exchange. Then again, prostitution isn't what it used to be either, apparently.
     Every few months I have a passing fantasy about becoming a high end hooker: the kind of woman that gets flown to exotic vacation locations and receives gifts of expensive jewelry but doesn't have to smile in front of cameras when her man gets caught in some embarrassing infidelity sextastrophe. I know what you are thinking...and you may want to keep in mind I'm too far in debt and age for anyone to marry, thanks in part to my supposedly awesome education. Becoming a high end hooker seems kind of romantic when I think about the fact that I may never have sex again. The fantasy of happy hooking of course ends abruptly when I look in places they advertise, and realized I don't have the correct skills for any kind of sex work at all. I think most of us lack these skills, which include the ability to sleep with unattractive people on demand. I used to think maybe only one in a million of women could ever bring herself to sleep with a stranger. Therefore the numbers of streetwalkers I saw as I walked around surely reflected the fact that somehow they had all just decided to work near my old apartment in Brooklyn . I was convinced 'normal' Americans didn't get into this stuff; and I was living in a very abnormal ghetto; but I was only half right. Apparently I was naïve and overly privledged if not straight up delusional. A quick perusal of the web proves prostitution is booming at every level. From high earners on websites that match "sugar daddies" to middle of the road whores on websites like craigslist, prostitutes are not too hard to find in America. Apparently there has been a dramatic surge in the number of women in the sex trade due to the new economy, not so coincidentally, this new "sharing" economy. This is what happens when you combine soaring student debt with "chick jobs" and their famously low entry level wages or even non-wages...How else did you think all those 'I'm trying to break into the film/art/publishing/other creative biz' unpaid interns paid their bills and had somewhere to live? Oh, yeah, how could I forget? Couchsurfing...that will certainly fix their problems while saving the world one intercultural exchange at a time...Well, I'm not going to hold my breath for a new sharing inspired collaborative world peace. The reality of the sharing economy is not the increasing intimacy, trust, and wealth it claims to promote...it is increasing sexual harassment, suspicion, and poverty: exactly the opposite.

Sex in Austerity: Personal Notes on Sexuality in the Modern Milieu

     A fiftyish female friend of mine is getting married soon as her friends and family are breathing a sigh of collective relief. This wonderful woman who was unfortunately widowed at a young age may not have found love again, but she will get at least its functional proximity. She can move out of the psychological ghetto many modern single women over thirty inhabit. She may not have the kind of love we dream of. Then again "love", the kind that fills our imagination, is largely delusion anyways as many people I know began to reason over the last few years. As a medical professional I can apply precise terminology to the phenomenon. Modern Western Romantic love is usually a case of folie a deux. Of course over time the delusions fade to overvalued ideas at most in at least one party. Historians believe that modern western romantic love is a fairly new phenomenon. What no one has questioned is whether it will soon become a thing of the past for most of us. The age of austerity has seen tremendous changes in sex and love. Oddly, it is the political left and leftists that are at the forefront of pushing these mostly devastating changes.

      Many modern Western women are starting to become secretly envious of their supposedly oppressed Southern sisters. I sat in a hip cafe in Haifa, Israel some years ago with another woman. She was quite a phenomenal woman. She was an Ivy League minted mathematician who had just graduated medical school and an under thirty beauty. She was any potential Jewish family in law's dream of a bride. "I think we should all just get married at 16...we should all just be forced to get married at 16" she lamented "life would go on, and we wouldn't have to worry about any of this...." Interestingly by “this” she was not referring to the alarming phenomenon of how modern romance wreaks havoc on biological clocks, or even new conflicts over gender roles. She simply couldn't take the annoying humiliation that was the 2000s world of dating. It was the year the market crashed worldwide, but economic problems came early to Israel, or for many people, simply never left. “Dating” had become so mean, many women long to return to the traditional norms they see in the peculiar premodern cultures existing side by side with their own.

     Pre-modern cultures often exist within postmodern realities. In this way Israel is no different from India or even many large megacities. If one looks hard enough in megacities one can find more traditional cultures flourishing. In New York City, for example, there are communities of Albanians, ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi Jews and Muslim Yemenites that all adhere to the strict dictates of traditional cultures in gender norms. The economic market may be up or down but women, married off early, have a certain place. Dating, to the extent that it even exists, is largely controlled by cultural elders and limited to a formal check of whether two people can stand each other. Dating, in these traditional societies, is certainly not about love.

     But what many contemporary women have come to realize is that paradoxically love is strangely elusive for modern women as well in spite of nearly endless dating. "Dating is different now" one of my hipper male friends told me with a smirk a few years ago. "You know you used to go to a movie, maybe a dinner...now, with the economy, people just stay in and have sex." At the time he seemed strangely thrilled about the lack of pretensions and romance in the new scene. He might not be laughing if he understood the creepy realities of sexless life that are becoming the norm for more and more people. Researchers as far back as Kinsey have concluded times of low earnings correlate with less sex. The seemingly endless barrage of worry in the press over supposedly increasing sexlessness and the supposed triumph neoliberal policies are intertwined in ways we are only beginning to understand.

   Female writers from all sides of the political spectrum seem to agree on one thing. Men, the brave heroes of lore, are by and large over. In their place have come a bunch of underemployed unkempt man-children who wonder why women are not falling all over them. Unlike fine wine, these brats do not improve with age. My aforementioned fiftyish friend told me that in her quest to find a husband she met lots of men her age who did not realize that they would not be forever twenty five. They were endlessly combing over hair that was falling out and swigging on beer, because they lived in an imaginary frat party for decades that had of course substantially widened their waistlines. Even the men who at some point aged as well as fine Bordeaux unfortunately seemed to have become angry vinegar. Ironically, it seems to have been their own power that ruined them. Secretly, many people have figured out that a lot of straight alpha-men single after their early thirties often become nothing more than cruel assholes in the dating arena. We have the internet to thank for clear insight into the sad workings of some such creatures minds. The internet is not disturbing because it is a home to weirdo outliers who make sport of women, the pick-up artists and professional womanizers who boast of their deeds online. What is disturbing is the window it provides into the callous attitude of everyday respectable men who should know better. The philosophy professor who proudly comments on how glad they are that they could marry a hot babe 15 years younger than themselves as if age or looks were most salient quality of his wife. The doctor who won't go on a date with a woman because she might have an imperfect lip based on her picture online. Years ago, I realized the insanity of reducing women to their looks was not all online, or even all in dating. As a medical student, I saw a female patient dying of ovarian cancer with a well-respected male gynecologist. There was little to be done medically beyond the palliative, but the doctor actively pushed consulting a nutritionist for dieting. The woman was at most 5 pounds heavier than I am- not thin, but not exactly dramatically overweight either. When I later questioned why the doctor explained that she had been a beautiful woman, and "some women, they get cancer, and they just let themselves go..." Indeed.  

  None of this nonsense is particularly new. Yet the age of austerity has brought on about two separate phenomenon that seem to amplify it. As Laurie Penny points out the mechanisms of financialized, globalized, late capitalism create a lot of profoundly disturbed men; ‘losers’ as she succinctly calls them. Secondly, precisely, in their spaces, the new spaces where these young men seek to reclaim control and own their destinies, a feminist revolt is both underway and under siege.  Locked out of the assorted wood paneled board rooms/temples of private power that exist on both the physical and symbolic highest floors of neoliberal power, young men created new spaces and repurposed old ones. They occupied public parks and cyberspace. But in questioning the power structure they perhaps inadvertently opened a Pandora’s Box of liberations never achieved. Movements related to Occupy have an elite leadership that was largely male, white and otherwise privileged; but the benevolence of this reality is openly questioned. Yet this new new feminism of questions really had no great answers for most women. Even some of the new feminism’s most radical thinkers accept certain oppressive orthodoxies. Laurie Penny joined Marcia Inhorn in an embrace of technology as liberating. Penny proclaimed that women were liberated by control over their reproductive lives. She therefore repeated one of the biggest gender oppressive myths perpetrated by the left. Unfortunately, in our brave new world, men not only seek to control women’s reproduction through regressive legislation, but also through technology itself. The “perfect” woman reproduces only if and when men in power over her, including her male partner, want her to. She is a worker-bee drone all day, and a private personal sex worker at night. Just as the new economy has produced men who cannot ever hope to provide enough income to support children, it has also produced a lot of “good girls” who will quietly simply not produce children. Never mind the medical issues it might cost her. Never mind the extreme marginalization she will face if she dares age past 30. Technology has only provided humanity with a new set of tools- in the case of sex and reproduction we now have some very imperfect tools to separate the two. In  spaces with power structures that favor men, it has become clear who will be empowered by the tools; and it isn't the average woman.

     While as a doctor I know various women react to hormonal contraception in various different ways highly dependent on their own biological make-up, I notice a completely nonscientific accidental survey of my friends produced a scary conclusion written nowhere in the little warning pages that come with packs of pills. Nowhere between warnings about the potential for blood clots, emboli and strokes did it mention what we have concluded amongst ourselves is a far more common side effect. The oral contraceptive pill makes you horny. No, certainly not everyone, and not at all times, but enough for many of us to notice and spontaneously discuss. The pill, perhaps coincidentally, turns you into the dream woman of the 2000s- primed and ready for sex, but without those pesky side effects that might require commitment, namely children.

       I never know whether to be believe I was lucky in some aspects of my first real adult relationship. Unluckily it happened a bit past when I had turned 30 so I was ready, and secretly hoping for a contraceptive disaster. An accidental pregnancy would have been perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me. Unfortunately, I dated an unusual and conflicted man. “We are not putting you on hormones! I’d just rather not have sex…” he reasoned. Perhaps because he had lost his mother to cancer, he had a healthy fear of unnecessary hormonal interventions. I, of course, wouldn’t take it. I trotted off to the gynecologist’s office on my own, determined to be a better girlfriend. The gynecologist was a bit dismayed, but a couple visits later I had packs of stick-on patch hormonal contraception. My boyfriend left me in less than a month, but I discovered that I could enhance my performance...in the workplace. If I skipped menstrual periods at times of high demand, I was far more efficient. On the inside though, I was dying. My man had taken a new girlfriend about a week after he left me. I could have become the perfect prey for men who could smell low self-esteem, one ready for sex and unable to demand anything in return. If I had added anti-depressants to the pharmacological mix perhaps I could have “empowered” myself into being the uber-desirable woman of current sexist fantasy: chirpy and happy to have nonreproductive sex. The perfect woman in this fantasy never has moods, wrinkles or children; she has Prozac, Botox and the Pill. She is the true heir to the “girl power” the Spice Girls sang about while flaunting their young bodies in little more than underwear for commercial attention. Perhaps this phenomenon is part of what philosophers like Judith Butler are talking about when they speak of gender as performance. Most women secretly understand that just like the Spice Girls they too can cash in on a certain kind of sex appeal. Seen this way, women obsessed with their looks are not dysmorphic but realistic in a world that is sadly ever more transactional.

        But it isn’t transactional sex that most women, or men for that matter, seek in their personal lives. Most of us seek sex that is not completely devoid of meaning or context for biological, psychological, evolutionary and/or even spiritual reasons. But for far too many women now, there is simply no such sex on the market. Post austerity sex is simply “NSA,” meaning no strings attached, or a not at all, nonexistent, perhaps a distant fantasy memory at best. In this way many middle aged women remind me of a character in the Israeli movie Lost Islands. At the time I saw the movie my Hebrew was less than perfect but if I understood correctly one very young male charecture had been reduced to admitting more or less 'I haven’t had sex for so long, the last time I masturbated, I fantasized about the last time I masturbated.' The line was funny, but captured a moment that all men outgrow because sex is now more than ever a man’s market. I have watched in horror as many middle aged friends of mine, who looked closer to their biological age, navigated this cruel market. They went through long periods of celibacy punctuated by disappointing trysts with mean losers. Some of the more avant-guard hire male prostitutes. But if this is the meaning of liberation: to be able to also exploit other people in the most profoundly personal ways, to be just as callous as men, then I don’t want it.

     The behavior of some supposedly liberated women is embarrassing reminder of the historical inability of the oppressed to create liberation. The most liberated African-American slaves freed themselves to recreate the plantation structures of the old South in Liberia. Ashkenazi Jews crawled out of centuries of oppression in Europe to create a state that seems to become more oppressive to the ethnic other every day. I choose these examples because in this hyper-politically correct world I am only allowed to critique my own cultural background. I can say on the most personal level, we should know better…but we don’t. Apparently no one does. Decade after decade liberation struggles take on the sad aim of equalizing the ability to exploit others. Franz Fanon realized the future endgame of this phenomenon decades ago. Fanon was politically concerned with race in colonial context, but as a psychiatrist acutely aware of many of the power structure’s psychic and sexual dimensions. Since then the sexual dimensions have only been amplified by technology and globalization. Reproduction has become separated from sex into something that the ‘dirty brown people’ can do to service their colonial masters. Save of course "donating" the perfect (most often white) genetic material in high demand, a duty relegated mostly to poor women forced to sell their eggs in desperation. We have come more than full circle back to the days when poor women did disproportionate amounts of the actual childcare because they were the maids and nannies. Now increasingly they must actually donate the genetic material and carry the embryos of the rich too. Farms of gestating women in Asia can work as surrogates for the white queens of the North. The bodies of brown women in the global south also frequently become the testing grounds for reproduction related pharmaceuticals to be made affordable only to the Western woman. A combination of ignorance and arrogance are the ultimate guards of this sexist power structure. Behind the implied imagined power of the state and the capitalist lie real power: the power to violently crush opposition. But the baton alone cannot beat down the opposition. Empires are, after all, expensive to maintain, especially under neoliberalism when the taxable subject is becoming poorer by the day. The real maintenance of empires and hierarchies happens inside minds. The power structure is maintained so long as the limit of our collective knowledge and thus imagination stops before declaring us all equal humans with equally important if varied needs. Facts, like the fact that the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs are tested on third world populations who will get little benefit from them, are conveniently forgotten. Truths, like the truth that men are the primary if not only beneficiaries of reproductive technologies, go unseen and unspoken. The edge of the mainstream feminist imagination is total access to abortion, pills and condoms: the right to not reproduce. Reproduction is not so coincidentally is what many men, both bosses and lovers, now want us to not do.

         A few alpha females, like queen bees, have been awarded the right to sex and reproduction without apology. We watch TV vicariously living through the born rich who can live biologically natural lives. Who wouldn’t like to have been Chloe Kardashian and polish off workouts of a young body with some good wholesome unprotected fucking? But most of us modern ladies know the consequences of that most biological urge in this neoliberal late capitalist world include poverty. Even Marissa Meyer, who had the power to have a nursery built into her office while she simultaneously told work-at-home parents to throw the kids in childcare and live in their cubicles, had to wait until 38 to achieve such queen bee status. No one can yet imagine egalitarian scalable structures that would give us, the women of the 2000s, all the right to sex and motherhood without apologies, poverty and social penalties. The premodern structure that regulated these activities: marriage, is for contemporary women a privilege, not a right. We are condescendingly told by leftist men that we have been liberated from this patriarchal structure. As with the pill and abortion, the liberation is mostly, if not entirely, theirs.