Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

justice

what we want from those privileged men

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As the stories of sexual harassment pile up, I wonder if men are reading them. I wonder if they can imagine doing any of these things, or enduring any of these things. Over and over I think, “I can’t imagine believing for one second I’m entitled to behavior like this.” Over and over, I realize we live in different worlds.

I find myself increasingly suspicious, or even resentful, of men in power—people I don’t know, people I’ve long assumed to be respectable, good at heart. Now I’m not so sure. Even men who think they have good intentions can cover up for offenders and blame victims. Even those men who are usually generous and humble live, sometimes, with an entitlement they can’t see.

I don’t want to think this way, but it’s not a mindset to be overcome; it’s the truth. I remember, for example, the first time I went to a lecture and stretched out my arms across the backs of the chairs next to me, just as an experiment, imitating hundreds of men I’ve seen throughout my life casually taking up the space of three people in churches, lecture halls, and trains. I feel arm and back muscles pulling out of confinement, my chest thrust open in an alert, confident pose. Adopting this posture is like seeing through someone else’s eyes—someone with little to fear from the world, who can expect others to accommodate him, who can sit this way and project a casual, capable demeanor, and not feel himself ridiculous or overlarge.

I wonder if some of the jokes we make about the differences between the sexes mostly serve to paper over the vast chasm between our ways of seeing the world—or, more accurately, between the ways the world teaches us to be treated. I wonder if we’d rather banter over silly stereotypes than sit for a minute in each other’s worlds. How many men have ever sat like a woman sits? Managing their personal space; apologetic for possessing limbs; wondering if we have offended, overstepped, invited harassment or violence?

I was recently catcalled by a couple of kids, maybe seven and ten years old. It stung in the moment as I tried to ignore the whole episode, but my sorrow and rage have grown since then. The problem is exactly that they were just kids; just practicing how to be men. They were only imitating the men they knew. They giggled and hid, betraying nervousness; getting the script down for when they are old enough to truly assert dominance.

I think it would be easier to write an article where we all simply understand that I’m angry about this. But sometimes anger is little more than a reflex to avoid overwhelm when the political gets personal.

The truth is, I’m angry, but I’m also scared, and constantly flummoxed, and deeply, increasingly sad. The truth is I don’t want to be angry. I want to believe in the decency of men and the empowerment of women. I would rather just leave it at “we all have something to learn from each other.” It would be nice if I could envision a neat scenario where grown men calmly recognize their privilege and share it with women; where we all know how to raise girls who easily take up their own space and boys who easily keep their hands to themselves.

There is this, too: in everything I’m saying I recognize, word for word, the pleas of black and brown brothers and sisters to white people. And I, who have always sought connection and harmony and bright visions for the future, have to accept that before there can be bright visions, there is already a vast gulf between my experiences of the world and theirs. I have to understand that I don’t simply get to master a vocabulary and collect a pat on the back. I have to commit myself to a lifetime of listening and learning, humility and counterintuitive choices, constant questioning of the status quo and deep unpopularity with those who uphold it. And these things are exhausting. And I don’t always want to do them. And they will still not simply fix things for my friends who experience racism daily.

So why should I expect men to do the same things for women?

Maybe some of them will start out like me: so invested in their perception of themselves as decent people that they’ll listen when we say decency means believing us. Please, just try to inhabit our world.

Or maybe some are truly such caring, empathetic people that our stories will inspire them to help make the world a better place—even if the process is grueling and the rewards come slow.

Maybe they will find their own anger over injustice, and let it propel them to action.

And I suppose I’m hoping that if they start—if they will crack open a little bit, and make our pain theirs, and take the time, not to dismiss, but to really see us, and see that painful chasm dividing our worlds from theirs—they could find themselves coming beautifully undone. Not that they would be filled with self-loathing or eternal regret; but that they might begin to understand how limited their own vision has been. Not that they would walk on eggshells around us because of our demands, but that they would actually learn from our experiences how to be in the world with more gentleness, courtesy, and respect.

Maybe if our stories were heard and believed, and our bodies protected, women would slowly find ourselves healing and our resentment lessening. If men really believed that our well-being is essential to theirs, that our worldview is worthwhile, that sharing their spaces with us makes those spaces better; we could wrap up the work of anger and carry on to other tasks.

But we know that the men who choose this path will first be overwhelmed by grief, because breaking out of their own perceptions to see things as we see them means entering into our fear and pain. Our courage and strength, too, for sure, but first, the danger and hardship that lurk everywhere for us. We’re not watching this grief with glee, but with simple relief and guarded hope that it could lead to change.

We’re asking men to see what it could be like to try taking up less space. Or to consider that interpersonal dynamics could be as important as productivity hacks. Or to listen extra carefully to women in meetings—as women do for each other—to make sure they get credit for their contributions.

Yes, we want to see ourselves more highly valued and more free. But mostly, we want our daughters to grow up without fear and disadvantage.

Of course we know that life is hard for everybody, that the privileged do not escape trouble altogether. But isn’t that the point? Life is hard for everybody—but maybe someday we won’t insist on adding to the hardship of some. Life is hard for everybody—and maybe someday that will be a fact that doesn’t divide, but unites us in care for each exquisite, fragile, breathtakingly brave, unrepeatable other.

For We Are All One Body: on healthcare

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Is it my sixth? My seventh visit to this doctor in nine months? I wish they didn’t make you sit in a high chair to draw your blood, I think, rummaging through my purse for something, anything, to fidget with. I gulp cold water from a paper cup and smile at the other people in the room as if to calm them down. They are never as worried as I am; my body has a mild phobia of needles, my blood pressure sometimes dropping until jagged stars invade my vision and the world goes black. Today, my heart has already been racing and my head light for a while, since my doctor told me we have exhausted our options in pill form and she is prescribing a weekly injection. This is good, maybe this will be the one that helps, my brain says. My body is gearing up to reject these future weekly invaders.

“Would you mind loosening this band? I’ve passed out before,” I ask the phlebotomist, trying to sound nonchalant.

“It’s a tourniquet. It’s going to be tight,” she snips as she relieves the pressure choking my arm.

It’s about the rudest thing that’s happened to me since I left Boston, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Even when your doctor is kind and patient, she conveys through her busyness, her degrees on the wall, her brusque responses when you venture an idea, that you as a patient should sit down and shut up. When it comes to managing your health, you are viewed more as a liability (prone to eat too many cookies or forget your meds) than as a partner; your familiarity with your own body, ability to read and research, and willingness to make lifestyle changes do not count for much at all.

The bloodwork goes smoothly despite my insistence on retaining consciousness. “We will get to work on your prior authorization with the insurance,” the doctor tells me on the way out the door. The injections are so expensive she will have to make a special plea on my behalf.

Two weeks later, I get a phone call: the insurance company will pay for the drug, the pharmacy says. My copay will be $200 a week, but the drug company might bring it down if I call them. I thank the lady and hang up. It’s been my best two weeks, physically, in the last nine months; at the urging of several friends, I’ve been taking turmeric. It costs five cents a day.

Even when we pretend to be objective about healthcare, the word means different things to all of us. My own feelings about doctors. His memories of the time he nearly died. Her mother, in the best nursing home they can afford. His kids receiving the mental health treatment, disability help, or asthma meds that help them function in an inhospitable society. Her brother trying to get clean again.

The last time the country debated healthcare, I was 19, my chronic illness was in remission and I’d never paid for a doctor’s visit; so “healthcare” was a bit of an abstraction to me. But I remember many conversations about all aspects of the healthcare system: we were concerned with the reasons healthcare was so expensive.

This time around, I hear only about who’s going to pay. It almost sounds as if lawmakers believe, if they get the right actuaries and accountants into the same room, some way exists to balance costs and benefits so most everyone will end up happy. But most of us know that’s not really true. And it is the vulnerable, the cash-strapped and the caregivers, who are losing sleep waiting for the verdict: will their families be counted among the “deserving?”

This time around, as families find themselves feeling powerless, I have been reminded at every turn how the healthcare system itself disempowers people. How patients are run through systems like widgets on an assembly line. How your doctor, your insurance company, and countless bureaucrats in between decide whether you receive treatment. How one’s various doctors and specialists make it difficult to share records, information, and ideas between them.

I am disturbed that we don’t, properly speaking, participate in “healthcare”; we have a system for disease-care, organ-care, but not for helping people lead good and happy lives. It is hardly acknowledged amidst the sterile walls and medical machines that our organs are connected to one another,  let alone that the mental, emotional, and social spheres can impact our bodies as heavily as drugs.

I am frustrated that I have the option of trying dietary solutions to my own health problems only because I run in well-educated circles—that even though these options pose zero risk (unlike immune-suppressing injections), they do not merit mention by my doctor.

I am convinced we are not asking enough questions; for even if we found some way to pay for it all, our healthcare still would not be healthy, or holistic, or just.

There are philosophers who say that everything Americans do, we do to avoid thinking about death. Whether or not they are correct, most of us could agree that we are avoiding some hard conversations. For so long we have believed we could outsource the burden of considering these topics: the doctor manages our health, the Congress, our obligations to our neighbors, while the pastor answers moral questions and knows what to do when someone dies.

Some people in the gut-health and autoimmune-management communities (industries?) speak of a patient-led revolution: putting the parts of the body back together and empowering people to manage their health through their own decisions, relying less on drugs and more on lifestyle choices whose side effects are only good.

I hope that as we are re-examining healthcare, making our phone calls to Congress and our judgments of other political positions, we will notice that the experts are not the only ones who can make change in every aspect of our medical lives.

We can discuss end-of-life with our families to avoid unnecessary medical bills and mental anguish.
We can improve lonely seniors’ health outcomes by spending time with them.
We can pay more attention to how our diets make us feel.
We can share information with friends and neighbors and help people research their conditions.
We can redirect future tax savings to support programs that offer free medical or mental health care, make healthy eating and exercise more accessible, or treat drug addiction.
We can face questions like how to deal with pain and when to pull the plug in our churches and community centers.

We can thank science for its meticulous dissection of creation—while also recognizing that the mysteries of life lie beyond the reaches of repeatable experiments and double-blind trials. We can honor the gifts medicine brings—while calling out the ways the industry has concentrated money and power with a few.

We will help someone else to be healthier, because we know that our own health cannot be disentangled from theirs, any more than the trees of the forest could pull out their own roots’ from the others’, any more than the eye can say to the hand, I don’t need you. We, too, will be the ones who give care.

it was your forefathers who killed them

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It is Friday afternoon when it flashes across as I thoughtlessly check my Twitter feed: Black Lives Matter. Panic seizes me. What has happened this time? It is Philando Castile, his shooter has been acquitted, as if it was never Jeronimo Yanez who was on trial for firing seven times into an unarmed man’s chest, into a car where a baby sat. It was always Castile on trial, the judicial system only a conference in which everyone agreed in the end: it took 49 stops in 13 years, but we finally got him for driving while black.

I am unable to believe it. It was not even a murder charge. I am angry that I was so naive, that I believed police officers should not be allowed to shoot any person seven times. It is Friday afternoon. I go quiet and numb. It is a privilege to go numb, and I do it anyway.

It is Saturday morning, and it is the anniversary of the shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church. Maybe I should have gone to the Unity Walk today, but excuses and misgivings proliferated. Charleston seems to treat the shooting as a family tragedy, not as a public one. Not as a terrorist attack. This is hard for me, this politeness, this murmuring and the talk of hope; and the pretense that Dylann Roof was such a deranged outlier that white people can sufficiently distance themselves from him by expressing sorrow for the Emanuel Nine. But it’s not true. Fear of Black people put up walls around whites’ homes in 18th-century Charleston. Fear of Black people sent Roof into that church. Fear of Black people sent seven bullets into Philando Castile’s car. When white people let this verdict go by without acknowledging all this, we are allowing the system to call black people Others, subcitizens who do not actually bear rights to arms or to due process or to life. When white people pray for healing without working for justice, we are following the footsteps of the Pharisees. You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of wickedness. You give God a tenth, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them.

I was not here for the attack and so I do not go to the march, do not want to seem a meddler, and tell myself uncertainly it was good not to take myself so seriously. I do not get to be a fixer here, I tell myself for the thousandth time. I do not get to put the Walk on a checklist that proves I am trying hard enough. I pray, and pray, and pray. I pray I am becoming a good friend to my Black neighbors. I pray I will show up for justice, and not just for sorrow. That is all I know I can do. There is very much I do not know.

It is Saturday afternoon, and Bill Cosby receives a mistrial. I am watching who is upset about which trial. Few have said anything about either. Maybe they are also numb. Maybe they are exercising their privilege to ignore the news, like they exercise the privilege to drive around without fear, to move their arms in front of police officers. The privilege to broadcast their sexuality or visit people’s houses without the implication that they cede all rights to their bodies.

Social media on a Saturday is not the place to evaluate who cares about what. I know that. But it feels, everywhere, closing in on me lately, like justice is being mocked. Like might makes right is winning in politics and in the courts and in churches and the local school. And I don’t know who else feels that way, except a few who say so, on their pages or on the phone. They make me feel that I am not crazy.

It is Saturday evening. I am not numb anymore. I am searing; I am sick. Why does the man standing with a gun get the benefit of the doubt while the seated, unarmed one is scrutinized? Why does the comfort of some take precedence over the very lives of others? Why do we refuse to see these questions as connected?

Am I crazy? The people who say they are sick of hearing about “justice”—do they know the Gospel better than I, education-addled, do?

I am overwhelmed; I offer my crushing feelings and my swirling thoughts, my desire to act, to the Author of justice. They look small and silly. But others have made this same absurd gift.

Arise, Lord! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless.
Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself,
‘He won’t call me to account’?
But you, O God, do see trouble and grief;
You consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you;
You are the helper of the fatherless.
Break the arm of the wicked and evil man;
Call him to account for his wickedness that would not be found out.

The Lord is King for ever and ever;
The nations will perish from his land.
You hear, O Lord, the desire of the afflicted;
You encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
Defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
In order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more.

I light a candle and I begin by speaking up in this raw voice, with more faith than I feel: we are not crazy. We are not alone. We are looking for each other. Sunday is coming.

Sexual Harassment for International Women’s Day

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It may be a failing of mine that I don’t like to feel as though I’m on a bandwagon; so I’m not always keen on celebrating things that hardly seemed to exist before social media, like International Women’s Day. A certain amount of naivete, too, has in the past made me wonder how much we still really need to celebrate women, at least in the developed world. I thought, a year or two ago, that “feminist” wasn’t such a radical label.

Today, though, I was followed by a man in a car for two blocks on my walk. “Be my friend,” he said. “I like that. You’re cute. Princess. I like that.”
“I’m married,” I said.
“You sure?” he replied. He knew it didn’t really matter. He knew it was a calculation, the way of saying please go away that usually seems least likely to incite physical violence.
“I’m sure,” I said. If you don’t respect the demands of civility, of humanity, please at least follow property law.

Last week my neighbor was suspended from her high school for reporting sexual harassment.

Our president has bragged about sexual assault.

I wish that feminism were just a matter of working for equal pay, or for the rights of transgender people to exist.

Instead, feminism is still fighting for women’s physical safety in broad daylight. At school. In the office. Women are still waiting for the day we do not go outside expecting to be demeaned, intimidated, or attacked for sport or spite.

The book of Luke passes the Bechdel test* right away.  I’ve been reading and rereading the beginning of this book for a few days now, enthralled most by its celebration of the rich and joyful friendship between Mary and Elizabeth. The two women are prophets before they are mothers, secret bearers of a wide and deep vision of the future. They have been faithful where Zechariah, the priest, was unfaithful, and they see now beyond a doubt that the Lord lifts up the humble. I can’t stop thinking about them, the older woman and the younger, preparing together for the births of their new boys, marveling at the work of God.

We are not allowed to forget, in this gospel, that every moment of Jesus’s ministry is borne up by women, women who bear and maintain life, women who offer financial assistance, women who do not abandon him at the cross and women, again, who are the first to believe in his new birth out of death. He insists on naming those unnoticed roles that sustain all of us with their everyday faithfulness: they who cook, clean, tend, mend, and bury, holding up the world in these tasks we deem small only because they are so ubiquitous. So necessary and precious.

The Christian doctrine of creation tells us that God is the sustainer of the universe, in some sense recreating us all at every moment. Creation is not an event about which we must decide whether it happened thousands or millions or billions of years ago. It is an intimate, involved embrace of all that is at once beautiful, mundane, and yucky in this world. It is a recurring yes, an ongoing artwork—and, perhaps, a tedious, exacting, unappreciated one. God is at work in the splashy sunsets and the wild-eyed desert prophet. God is also at work in the clouds drifting overhead at night, and through the prophet’s ungloried mother. Women and servants meet this humble God in our own work. She sees us and we see Her, different than do the powerful and celebrated.

*The Bechdel test is a cultural barometer asking whether two female characters in a work talk to each other about something other than a man.

We say that feminism is the belief that women are equal to men. This has come to be parsed in many ways, but I think one that is often overlooked is the belief that traditionally feminine ways of being in the world are equal to traditionally masculine ones. I think we fear putting women on a pedestal; the pedestal doesn’t have to be so high, after all, before it becomes a prison of its own. But launching certain women into the C-suite shouldn’t come at the expense of the women who will never have the money for childcare, the education, or the social clout to climb the corporate ladder. Or, for that matter, the expense of men who want to go into caring professions, but fear losing prestige. Moreover, we must recognize that many women who succeed in the C-suite do so precisely because they lead distinctively: seeking consensus, drawing connections, and caring for whole people, rather than defaulting to a top-down model or convincing employees to ram their way to success by sheer willpower.

Christian feminism, in particular, should recognize that part of our duty is to follow our servant-leader, Jesus, in a way that leads downward. Many men have worked hard to pull the heart of our faith away from service, humility, simplicity, and sharing; but they are ultimately inescapable. To celebrate International Women’s Day, for me, is to celebrate these virtues, not to mirror the patriarchy’s contempt of them. Some of us, it’s true, have lost ourselves in them, and have not much reflected Christ until we recovered other virtues like rest, self-love (dignity), confidence. Still, I do not think women’s safety or equality will be achieved until society recognizes, not only that women can be as stoic, as strategic, as strong and unflagging and dogged as men, but also that emotion, intuition, and human connection are themselves sources of strength worthy of reverence. Let us not rest until men have begun to learn, too, from us. May we assert our rights to live without fear, to take up space without reprisal, to have our gifts and talents not only used but recognized, and may we do so for the sake of the world. May we make a place that is better for caretakers and maintainers, for the weak and the vulnerable, for bodies and babies; and may we do so for the sake of the God who is incompletely imagined until we see her laboring in their midst.

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