My So-Called Life

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

A short note. . .

. . .to all the guys who work in my building or live in my apartment complex or go to church with me:

if I want you to ask me out, I will let you know. I am aware that this is very odd, but trust me, if I am interested in you, I will make it very clear. Just ask my ex or various other guys I have pursued shamelessly and without great success. You will have no doubt that I want to go out with you.

And if I don't let you know that I want to date you, then please, don't ask me out or let me know that you "have a crush on me" or anything of the sort. I will interpret all invitations to lunch/dinner/drinks/church as a come-on unless I know you well enough to know that you mean it in a "just friends" way. And when I don't want to go out with you (and trust me, most of the time I don't), it's just uncomfortable and awkward for all of us. This is especially true if I can SEE YOU waiting in your car until I get out of mine or hanging around the parking lot around the time I leave work. If this happens and I give you some lame excuse as to why I can't go to lunch with you, then know that I have the nagging suspicion that you are stalking me. Seriously.

So guys, from now on, how 'bout a moratorium on asking me out. . .unless I tell you to, okay? Great, thanks.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Who ever thought they'd read this in the New York Times?

Saving Grace
By LAUREN F. WINNER
Published: May 19, 2006
New York Times
Durham, N.C.

THE recent Harvard study that found teenagers' virginity pledges to be ineffective should come as a surprise to no one. Several studies had already come to that conclusion. If we are truly to help our teenagers adopt the countercultural sexual ethic of abstinence until marriage, Christians concerned about the rampant premarital sex in our communities need to rethink, rather than simply defend, young people's abstinence pledges.

It is awfully easy for Christians to blame our community's sexual sins on the mores of post-sexual revolution America — to criticize Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs, to natter on about how "Grey's Anatomy" portrays sexual behavior that doesn't square with Christianity.

But perhaps it's more important that we reconsider how we talk about sex in the church. For although the church devotes an immense amount of energy to teaching about sexuality — just go to the Christian inspiration section of your nearest Barnes & Noble and compare the number of books about chastity to books that challenge, say, consumerism — many Christians still "struggle with" (in that euphemistic evangelical phrase) premarital sex, adultery and pornography.

So why is the church's approach to teaching chastity falling short? Consider the popular "True Love Waits" virginity pledge: "Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship."

This pledge and others like it are well meaning but deeply flawed. For starters, there's something disturbing about the assumption that teenagers are passively waiting for their future mates and children, when the New Testament is quite clear that some Christians are called to lifelong celibacy. (Paul, for example, did not have a mate or children, and Dan Brown's fantasies notwithstanding, Jesus's only bride was the church.) Chastity is not merely about passive waiting; it is about actively conforming our bodies to the arc of the Gospel and receiving the Holy Spirit right now.

Pledgers promise to control intense bodily desires simply by exercising their wills. But Christian ethics recognizes that the broken, twisted will can do nothing without rehabilitation by God's grace. Perhaps the centrality of grace is recognized best not in a pledge but in a prayer that names chastity as a gift and beseeches God for the grace to receive it.

The pledges are also cast in highly individualistic terms: I promise that I won't do this or that. As the Methodist bishop William Willimon once wrote: "Decisions are fine. But decisions that are not reinforced and reformed by the community tend to be short-lived."

During our first year of marriage, my husband and I lived in a small apartment inside a church. On Tuesdays, Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon met downstairs. As I got to know some of the regulars, I began to wonder if there wasn't something the church could learn from the 12-step groups in our midst.

After all, what are 12-step groups but communities of people expecting transformation? People show up because they want to change, and they know that making a promise by themselves — I will stop drinking — won't cut it. Alcoholics Anonymous explicitly recognizes that transformation works best when a community comes alongside you and participates in your transformation.
Christians, like 12-step group attendees, are people who are committed to becoming, to use the Apostle Paul's phrase, new creatures. Living sexual lives that comport with the Gospel is one part of that.

Perhaps pledges for chastity need to be made not only by the individual teenager. Perhaps we also need pledges made by the teenager's whole Christian community: we pledge to support you in this difficult, countercultural choice; we pledge that the church is a place where you can lay bare your brokenness and sin, where you don't have to dissemble; we pledge to cheer you on when chastity seems unbearably difficult, and we pledge to speak God's forgiveness to you if you falter. No retooled pledge will guarantee teenagers' chastity, but words of grace and communal commitment are perhaps a firmer basis for sexual ethics than simple assertions that true love waits.


Lauren F. Winner is the author of "Girl Meets God" and "Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity."

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

It must be true

Monday, May 15, 2006

This is so cool!

You might not find this interesting, but here you can see a pair of baby bald eaglets in real time. They don't do a whole lot yet, but I just got to see them fed by one of their parents, and it was absolutely awesome!

(Oh, and if you don't care, you have full permission not to visit the site. The more visitors to the site, the slower it runs for the rest of us!)

Friday, May 12, 2006

I want to marry this man.

I stole this off Kyle's away message. Stick with it, it gets better as it goes along. (Seriously, though, a man who can dance=tres sexy.)

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Dear Chris Field,

I was going to jot you a short little note in the Comments section, but it turned into a HUGE note, so here it is:

Thanks. There are a lot of "justice issues" that I hope Christians will get more serious about.

I can't speak for anybody else, but I didn't feel attacked, and my toes are just fine. Forgive me if I did come off as somewhat combative--I like to argue.

And I agree with Connor, thanks for talking about the stuff no one wants to talk about. I'm just afraid it was sort of one-sided and that it aimed to attack a symptom, not a problem.

Christian women who dress immodestly do so because it gets them something they want: power, self-esteem, attention, affirmation, dates, etc. And why does this work? Because as Scoots, DLove and others mentioned, the way men and women in the church interact is all jacked up, and that’s the problem. (Or at least one of the problems in the church. Not enough room to address them all here, but I digress.) Women’s dress is just one of the many symptoms of this problem.

I mean, let’s face it, I’ve never heard an older Christian man say to a younger one, “You should keep her around; she’s got a great set of morals.” I have heard plenty of, “She’s a good-looking girl,” or “She’s sweet.” The one I always heard growing up was, “What a pretty girl!” God love ‘em, the elders at the church where I grew up (the good ones who are dead now) used to tell me how pretty I was, even when I was at my most awkward and least pretty. I love those men dearly and what they said to me was good and I needed to hear it, but it never occurred to them to compliment me on my spiritual gifts or my talents or the good things I did. It didn’t occur to me then that they should be encouraging me in those things, especially because the church I grew up in is still not really big on women using their gifts where other people can see them.

And now that I think about the church where I grew up, I remember my Dad preaching a sermon on the fact that women (especially the teens) should dress modestly in church because it was brought to his attention that some of the men were struggling because of some immodest dress. (I was a teen at this time, but I can tell you that the sermon was not directed toward me. I have only recently learned that I might be able to wear spaghetti straps in public and not go to hell.) Anyway, the whole time he was preaching I was thinking about this older man, probably in his thirties, who needed to hear the OTHER side of the sermon: that he needed to control his thoughts even when he saw women who were covered. This man creeped me out and always made a special effort to talk to me, and when he did, I got the feeling that he was imagining me naked. Ewww. He weirded some of my friends out, too, but I don’t think we ever told our parents or any other adult. I probably should’ve said something, but if he had tried anything, it would’ve given me an excuse to knee him in the balls, which I’m pretty sure he deserved. He and his wife moved away after a while, so it wasn’t a problem anymore, anyway.

I also just learned through experience that the Singles Groups at many larger churches are like meat markets. Very few of the singles in the local groups I visited would talk to me, and I couldn’t understand why. Now I think it’s because I am an attractive and intelligent woman, and the women saw me as competition and the men either didn’t notice me or found me intimidating. It was, for me, more like trying to meet people in a bar than in a church. Or trying to make friends on the set of The Bachelor. And that made me sad.

I also got the feeling that the singles at a lot of churches were either pitied or thought of as existing in a sort of purgatory. It’s pretty easy to argue that the church places more emphasis than it should on getting people married and that singles, especially older ones, are sometimes viewed as second-class citizens. And why is this? Didn’t Paul say that being single was better? I think too many of us are convinced—because of our culture and what we witness in churches and not because of anything biblical—that we can’t be happy unless we’re paired off, that one is not a whole number. Are we uncomfortable around older singles because we’re afraid there’s “something wrong” with them?

Or are we afraid that they’re homosexuals? I think the way we treat homosexuals is also a symptom of this problem. If homosexuality is a sin, then why do we treat it as so much worse than any other sin? Why do we invite in the greedy jerkwads who mistreat their wives and tell the homosexuals that they have to change before we’ll accept them? Is it because we’re afraid to admit that if they’re attracted to people of the same sex, then perhaps we could be, too? Are we afraid that they’ll contaminate us in some way or “lead our children astray?”

Why do so many Christians blame the breakdown of the American family on the prevalence of homosexuality in our society? It seems pretty obvious to me that most of the time, the American family is broken down because the American parents get divorced. Why are the divorce rates of Christians the same as the rest of the country? Could this be another symptom of the problem?

I would even argue that in many churches, women aren’t allowed to use their gifts in public because some men have a desire for them to fit certain roles and not because of any shared hermeneutic perspective. It seems to me that their “biblical beliefs” may spring more out of their tradition and expectations than any actual study. I think this is another symptom of the problem.

So thanks, Chris, for starting the discussion. Let’s keep it going.

Monday, May 08, 2006

I don't know about preachers and sermons and bible class,

but this speaks to me. . .

"You don't want to die when you're this upset--you get a bad room in heaven with the other hysterics, the right-to-lifers, and the exercise compulsives. But thinking of heaven made me remember something: that I believe in God. And I smote my own forehead."

"Over the years, my body has not gotten firmer. Just the opposite, in fact. But when I feel fattest and flabbiest and most repulsive, I try to remember that gravity speaks; also, that no one needs that plastic-body perfection from women of age and substance. Also, that I do not live in my thighs or in my droopy butt. I live in joy and motion and cover-ups. I live in the nourishment of food and the sun and the warmth of the people who love me."

"I was desperate to fix him, fix the situation, make everything happy again, and then I remembered this basic religious principle that God isn't there to take away our suffering or our pain but to fill it with his or her presence, so I prayed for the health simply to enter into Sam's disappointment and keep him company."

"And then the music began.
"Mandolin music. A folksy bluegrass trio began playing, the mandolin offering the quavering meoldy, then two guitars joined in, and then three voices singing. We turned slowly to look at the musicians. A woman got up from her table and began to dance on the lawn between us and the stage, all by herself, and I thought to myself, I wish I were the kind of person who could dance in public, not caring what everyone thought. And I wanted to be this way so badly that after a minute I just got up, moved closer to the music, toward the one woman dancing, and slowly and very shyly and without enormous visible grace, began to move in time to the music. I figured that once I stepped forward into that spotlight, another would appear somewhere near my feet, and if it didn't, at least I'd have had the chance to dance.
"So I did, dancing with my eyes closed so as not to be distracted. Nietzsche said that he could only believe in a God who would dance, and I feel the same way: not Jesus as John Travolta, but Jesus as Judith Jamison, the great black dancer with Alvin Ailey, a shining, long-limbed, elegant crane."

~Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

Friday, May 05, 2006

Is there no place safe to shop?

So I quit shopping at Gap (even though I only shopped the sale racks, anyway) because they use sweat shop labor (see FAQ page). By proxy I had to quit shopping at Old Navy, too, because they're owned by Gap Inc. That was a great deal more painful.

I try not to shop at Wal-mart, mostly because of how they treat their workers and the fact that they are China's biggest exporter. I haven't bought clothes there since my Freshman year of college, I guess, but here's another great reason not to start up again.

It seems that there is no place safe from sweat shop labor! Grrrr.


An Ugly Side of Free Trade: Sweatshops in Jordan
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: May 3, 2006, The New York Times

Propelled by a free trade agreement with the United States, apparel manufacturing is booming in Jordan, its exports to America soaring twentyfold in the last five years.

But some foreign workers in Jordanian factories that produce garments for Target, Wal-Mart and other American retailers are complaining of dismal conditions — of 20-hour days, of not being paid for months and of being hit by supervisors and jailed when they complain.

An advocacy group for workers contends that some apparel makers in Jordan, and some contractors that supply foreign workers to them, have engaged in human trafficking. Workers from Bangladesh said they paid $1,000 to $3,000 to work in Jordan, but when they arrived, their passports were confiscated, restricting their ability to leave and tying them to jobs that often pay far less than promised and far less than the country's minimum wage.

"We used to start at 8 in the morning, and we'd work until midnight, 1 or 2 a.m., seven days a week," said Nargis Akhter, a 25-year-old Bangladeshi who, in a phone interview from Bangladesh, said she worked last year for the Paramount Garment factory outside Amman.

"When we were in Bangladesh they promised us we would receive $120 a month, but in the five months I was there I only got one month's salary — and that was just $50."

The advocacy group, the National Labor Committee, which is based in New York, found substandard conditions in more than 25 of Jordan's roughly 100 garment factories and is set to release a report on its findings today. Its findings were supported in interviews with current and former workers.

Such complaints have dogged the global apparel industry for years, even as it has adopted measures intended to improve working conditions in factories that produce clothing for American and European consumers. But the abusive conditions that the guest workers described show how hard it is to control sweatshops as factories spring up in new places, often without effective monitoring in place.

In recent years, Jordan has become a magnet for apparel manufacturers, helped by the privileged trade position that the United States has given it, first because of its 1994 peace accord with Israel and then because of a free trade agreement signed with Washington in 2001.
Jordan's apparel industry, which exported $1.2 billion to the United States last year, employs tens of thousands of guest workers, mainly from Bangladesh and China.

In interviews this week, five Bangladeshis who used to work in Jordanian apparel factories and four who still do had similar tales of paying more than $1,000 to work in Jordan, of working 90 to 120 hours a week, of not being paid the overtime guaranteed by Jordanian law, of sleeping 10 or 20 to a small dorm room. The National Labor Committee helped arrange interviews with the Bangladeshi workers, who spoke through interpreters.

The largest retailer in the United States, Wal-Mart, and one of the largest clothing makers, Jones Apparel, confirmed yesterday that they had discovered serious problems with the conditions at several major Jordanian factories.

In addition, a factory monitor for a major American company confirmed that Jordanian factories routinely confiscated their guest workers' passports, doctored wage and hour records and coached employees to lie to government and company inspectors about working conditions. The monitor asked not to be identified because the company had not given authorization to speak publicly.

Beth Keck, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said the company did not own or manage factories, but tried to improve working conditions in Jordan and elsewhere. "It is a continuous challenge, not just for Wal-Mart but for any company," she said, noting that the most commonly observed problems included failure to pay proper wages, "egregious hours," and "use of false or insufficient books or documentation."

Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the National Labor Committee, which has exposed mistreatment in factories in Central America and China, said he was shocked by what he discovered in Jordan.

"These are the worst conditions I've ever seen," he said. "You have people working 48 hours straight. You have workers who were stripped of their passports, who don't have ID cards that allow them to go out on the street. If they're stopped, they can be imprisoned or deported, so they're trapped, often held under conditions of involuntary servitude."

Mr. Kernaghan said Bangladeshi workers had contacted his organization to complain about working conditions in Jordan. He then traveled to Jordan and met quietly with dozens of workers. He said American companies, despite their monitoring efforts, were often slow to uncover workplace abuses because workers were coached to lie to them or were scared to speak out. Moreover, factories often send work out to substandard subcontractors without notifying American retailers.

Several factory owners in Jordan insisted that they treated their workers properly.
"Some people are always making allegations," said Karim Saifi, the owner of United Garment Manufacturing, a factory near Amman that workers criticized for long hours and wage violations. "As far as we know, we follow all the labor laws here. If we were not abiding by all of the local Jordan laws, we would not be able to operate."

Several foreign apparel workers said that while their factories required them to stay until midnight, the Jordanian workers were usually allowed to leave at 4 p.m.

Two large industrial zones outside Amman are thriving, having geared themselves to the American apparel market. They have attracted dozens of garment manufacturers, some with 200 workers, some with 2,000, that say they produce clothes for J. C. Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Gap and Target.

"It would be wrong to think that problems at a few places are representative of the 102 apparel factories in my country," said Yanal Beasha, Jordan's trade representative in Washington.
Jordan's ambassador to the United States, Karim Kawar, said "If there are any violations of our labor laws, we certainly take it seriously."

Mr. Beasha said Jordanian government inspectors monitor the working conditions in factories. But several guest workers said factory managers hid abuses by coaching workers to lie. Mr. Beasha said the Jordanian government cared about the welfare of foreign guest workers, noting that it enforced overtime laws and recently increased the minimum wage for citizens and guest workers.

But Mohammed Z., who has worked for more than a year at the Paramount Garment Factory, said that even though he worked more than 100 hours a week — normally from 7 to midnight seven days a week — the company refused to pay him overtime when he did not meet production targets. He asked that his last name be withheld for fear of retribution.

Having paid $2,000 to work in Jordan, he said, in an interview from Amman, "I'm not earning enough to repay my loan or to support my wife and son."

Unhappy that his passport has been confiscated, he said: "My identity has been taken by the company. I have no freedom because I have no freedom to move to other places."

Mohammed Saiful Islam, 30, a Bangladeshi who was production manager at Western Garment, said that several times the workers had to work until 4 a.m., then sleep on the factory's floor for a few hours, before resuming work at 8 a.m.

"The workers got so exhausted they became sick," he said. "They could hardly stay awake at their machines."

Mr. Saiful, who is in the United States to highlight poor working conditions in Jordan, pointed to a yellow and black fleece sweatshirt that he said his factory made. It had an Athletic Works label made for Wal-Mart, selling for $9.48.

"Sometimes when companies sent in monitors, the workers were instructed what to say," Mr. Saiful said.

Mohamed Irfan, who in a telephone interview from Jordan said he was Western's owner, said, "The workers get the minimum wage, and all times, there is no problem in our factory."

Mohamed Kasim, Paramount's owner, said his factory also paid its workers properly. Mr. Kasim and other factory managers said workers received free room and board and sometimes medical care.

But several workers said that when they were sick they did not receive medical care, but were instead punished and had their pay docked.

Several Bangladeshis said there were terrible conditions at factories that made clothes for Wal-Mart and Jones Apparel, which owns brands like Gloria Vanderbilt and Jones New York.

Ms. Keck, the Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said company inspectors recently identified "serious violations" of its labor rules at three Jordanian factories. At Honorway Apparel Jordan, for example, which manufactures sleepwear for Wal-Mart, inspectors found employees working off the clock, managers who refused to pay overtime and wages that "could not be verified," Ms. Keck said. At the Ivory Garment Factory, which Wal-Mart ceased working with two years ago, inspectors found "egregious working hours."

Joele Frank, a spokeswoman for Jones Apparel, said the company had also found "serious problems" at the Ivory Garment Factory, which produces Gloria Vanderbilt clothing, and said it would "monitor the situation closely." A spokesman for Sears Holding, said the company was investigating potential problems at Honorway, which produces clothes for Kmart, a division of Sears Holding.

A Kohl's spokeswoman denied workers' accusations that clothing sold by the company was made at several Jordanian factories with poor conditions. Target said it worked with only one factory that has come under criticism— Al Safa Garments, which Wal-Mart recently cited for labor violations.

Many retailers said their policy was, after discovering violations, to work with a factory to improve conditions, rather than automatically withdraw their business. Wal-Mart says it gives factories a year to fix serious problems, reinspecting them every 120 days.

"Our business with the factory is the only leverage we have to push for improvement," Ms. Keck said.

After The New York Times asked about the accusations on Monday, Wal-Mart dispatched two inspectors to Jordan.

Hazrat Ali, 25, who worked from September 2004 to March 2005 at the Al Shahaed factory, said he sometimes worked 48 hours in a row and received no pay for the six months.

"If we asked for money, they hit us," he said.

Nasima Akhter, 30, said that the Western factory gave its workers a half-glass of tea for breakfast and often rice and some rotten chicken for lunch.

"In the four months I was in Jordan, they didn't pay us a single penny," she said. "When we asked management for our money and for better food, they were very angry at us. We were put in some sort of jail for four days without anything to eat. And then they forced us to go back to Bangladesh."

RelatedReport on Jordanian Clothing Factories (.pdf)National Labor Committee