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And you know what? This is
absolutely true—women do need greater self-esteem, and we
do need to start taking better care of ourselves. Unfortunately,
we still have a shitload of work to do while we’re developing
this self-esteem, and we still have a lot of institutionalized
sexist tree stumps blocking our path to improved self-care.
So before we get that self-esteem, can we try a little anger?
As for the many people who
are actively concerned about our low self-esteem, I’m sure
folks won’t mind rising to the occasion in order to help us
out. So while all the world’s HIV-positive and at-risk women
go on a big Paths-To-Wellness Retreat for a few days, we’d
like everyone else to address some of our more noticeable
“challenges.” We limited it to a random five (didn’t want
to overwhelm anyone), so here you go:
1. Help us with child/elder
care, home maintenance, and transportation. Yes, many
women do take care of everyone and everything else before
taking care of themselves. We do this because families require
a lot of care-taking, and we’re trained from infancy to take
on the bulk of this work. It’s going to take us a while to
break down generation upon generation of conditioning—and
in the meantime, our children still need to be played with,
meals need to be prepared, laundry and shopping needs to done,
elderly parents require care, and money needs to be earned
to support ourselves and our families. Some of us have partners
and family to help us with these responsibilities, but many
of us do not. So please: Come over! Stay with our kids and
elders while we go to doctor’s appointments, drug/alcohol
rehab, support groups, and desperately-needed mental health
retreats. Come by and do our shopping or clean our bathroom
when we’re sick from our meds. If you have a car, drive us
to appointments or go pick up our medications from the pharmacy.
Revive the “Buddy” programs, especially as they pertain to
childcare, elder care, and transportation assistance.
2. Give us information
we can understand and apply to our daily lives. Given
the difficulty many of us have even going to doctor’s appointments,
we need quality educational materials we can use at home—including
materials printed in the languages we understand, especially
if our doctors do not speak our language. Nutritional information
must reflect the foods we eat at home, not the foods most
commonly eaten by the people who make nutritional pamphlets.
Additionally, we need materials for those of us who don’t
read in any language, especially regarding our medications—it’s
hard to be compliant when you don’t know how to take your
meds, or which side effects are dangerous vs. merely annoying.
We’re working on this among ourselves, but we generally don’t
have as much time and money as do hospitals, clinics, universities,
and pharmaceutical companies…so please feel free to help us
out.
3. Men who have sex with
us must accept responsibility for condom use. Even the
most empowered, self-loving woman in the world cannot force
a man to wear a condom. Guys, you need to quit giving us a
hard time about protecting ourselves. You need to quit acting
like cavemen when we try to put the “No Glove, No Love” rule
into practice, and you need to stop dishonest portrayals of
monogamy if you’re having sex with other people. If you’re
going to lie, outright or through omission, protect yourself
so we don’t pay the price for your fun. We don’t have the
power to control your behavior, and you don’t have the right
to hurt our health. Ditto for drug use.
Plus, you never know if we
have something we could pass to you…self-care goes both ways,
boys.
4. Fund microbicide development.
“Consistent condom use” aside, I hope that by now everyone
acknowledges that most of the world’s women don’t have a lot
of control over when they will and will not have sex. Therefore,
insisting that we develop enough “self-esteem” to control
our male partner’s actions (i.e. condom use) is a remarkably
cruel avoidance of medical responsibility to women. We need
woman-controlled methods of HIV and STD protection—including
methods that will allow us to conceive children, if we want
them. Microbicides will also allow us to help protect our
partners and children from infections. So please, consider
microbicide development a Family Value.
5. Quit abusing women
verbally, emotionally, physically, sexually, and economically—especially
when we are children. Developing and maintaining self-esteem
is difficult for all of us, but immeasurably more so if we’re
encouraged to believe that we’re powerless pieces of crap.
Abuse in childhood is particularly damaging to self-esteem
and leads many of us into dangerous behaviors in adolescence
and adulthood—sexual risk-taking, drug and alcohol misuse,
dependence on romantic relationships and/or motherhood for
a sense of self-worth, and lack of confidence in our ability
to learn and to sustain ourselves economically. Sexual abuse
can also make it difficult for us to seek out health care
when we need it, especially sexual-health and gyne care.
If you abuse women or girls,
knock it off and get some help. If you see girls or women
being abused in any of the above-mentioned ways (and if you
don’t see it at least once an hour, you’re not looking very
hard), do something! If you are a man, examine both your own
actions towards women and your interactions with other men
when talking about and interacting with women. Refuse to support
“male-bonding” activities that involve disrespect and/or violence
towards women and girls. If you are a woman, examine the image
of womanhood you reflect to other women, especially girls.
Refuse to support aspects of “femininity” that bring down
our self-esteem, including acrimony among women. We need to
help each other be strong, not tear each other down…
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…and anything we can get for ourselves
here needs to be expanded to include women everywhere, or
we won’t have the right to feel very good about our “progress.”
We all deserve safety and good health, no matter where we
live or what we look like.
Women’s self-esteem will
grow when the people with the greatest power to affect change
start acting like women matter—like women are human beings
whose life realities are to be taken seriously and addressed.
Telling women to “get some self-esteem” and “take better care
of themselves” without acknowledging our reality is like telling
closeted gay men to come out in a roomful of God Hates Fags
disciples, or suggesting that people starving in a famine-stricken
area really just need to plant more crops.
But anyway…when we come back
from our retreat, bursting with self-esteem and all the tools
we need for proper self-care, we expect to see at least these
five realities addressed and corrected (you’ll notice that
we left off the really complicated ones like access to health
care, clinical trials, economic self-sufficiency, and complete
overthrow of patriarchy). And who knows? If y’all can fix
these five for us, maybe we can harness enough collective
self-esteem to take care of everything else.
Laura Jones is the
Hotline Coordinator for the Illinois AIDS/HIV & STD Hotline.
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