Lipstick Wednesday

Lips and lipstick-sensual symbols- a night out on the town or a romantic dinner for two. High heels and short dresses. Club music or a candlelit dinner. This is what comes to mind when I think about lips and lipstick. 

Sara Hartless, 22, a Connecticut raised and Arizona dancer thinks about self-confidence and self-healing. When thinking about lipstick, Hartless remembers how her self-worth plunged somewhere in the pits of hell almost four years ago, when she was sexually assaulted.

After feeling so worthless and depressed after her assault, Hartless one day decided to put on some lipstick, which allowed her to finally feel like herself again. When walking down the streets of Arizona, Hartless felt beautiful, receiving compliments and praise.  Her self-esteem and confidence slowly seeping into her veins once again, a life restored.

With this, Hartless began her own personal movement- to come forward with her assault. From there, after hearing about Bill Cosby, Brock Turner and Donald Trump in the media, Hartless decided she wanted to start an organization called Lipstick Wednesday. The organization promotes and provides a safe space for women who have been assaulted allowing them to engage in a dialogue about what happened to them, how they are healing, and what they can do together to make a safer community for each other.

“Lips are sensual, yes, but they also symbolize keeping a secret. The darkest secret a woman can keep”.

Hartless explains how women grow up in a society that normalizes rape. That rape “isn’t a big deal” that it is something that “women can get over”. Rape, as demonstrated from the various cases that have gone viral, like the Brock Turner case, must be explicitly violent to be considered rape.

Hartless angrily explains, “I think what infuriates me the most is how society turns against the victim-asking what she was wearing, or how much she had to drink…I was wearing a baggie t-shirt, shorts and Chuck Taylors”.

Society doesn’t think about the victims, or the eternal damages done to them.

“I did not have a menstrual cycle for 5 months. I wasn’t pregnant. My body just shut down entirely”.

I heard Hartless’ voice break over the phone. A pained silenced echoed through the radio-waves. I heard her heart break into a million pieces all over again. The sound of failed promises and faulty legislation breathed unsteadily-the sounds too many women in this country are familiar with.

What Does It Mean to be a Woman living in a Trump Nation-

My question had lingered in the air for several painful moments. A cacophony of silence on both ends.

“As a victim, I feel like my assaulter was just elected”.

Additionally Hartless explains, “for women to be coming forward with their stories and for them to be negated in front of the entire country, it’s like our nation is saying that they don’t matter. That I don’t matter.”

Living under a Trump nation as a woman, is terrifying. According to Meredith Melnick, of the Huffington Post,  “This is the major force of rape culture: Not the moment of violence, but the use of your body as a cheap stepping ladder. It isn’t just Trump, who grabs your pussy ― an ugly, straightforward thing ― it’s Billy Bush, who offers your pussy to his friend in whispers, making the world unsafe in ways you can sense, but cannot see.”

Hartless hasn’t been able to sleep or eat regularly since the election, and she explains that she doesn’t know whether it is because she’s a woman, a survivor or both.

Melnick powerfully questions,

 “Who could I have been if I’d grown up in a culture that saw me as equal and worthy?”

Questions banged against the windowpanes- “what does it mean to be a woman anymore”, “what will become of us”, “what are the young men and women going to learn from this”, “is anywhere safe anymore” ….

Hartless continues, “I started Lipstick Wednesday to help women who are scared, who need to share their stories, who need a safe space”.

Hartless created this organization to not only to help women, but to also help the current state of women in this country. Not only are there heightened tensions between men and women but also tensions between women themselves. Alina of USA Today explains how, “exit polls show 53% of white women voted for Trump, pushing him to victory. They looked past his obvious misogyny, and in doing so, created a deep rift among American women.”

Hartless want to create a safe space, a dialogue, and then to begin rallying against the systemic issues that oppress and mute women across the country.

The organization is not limited to women either, it is open to men as well in hopes that they too will not only share their stories but help the overall cause.

“Although I am the founder, and it has my stamp- it is not solely mine. It is the community’s as well”.

Hartless details that she has several yellow lined legal pads filled with ideas on how to expand her organization. She hopes, with help from her community, to develop the organization into a non-profit; to partner with LGBTQ organizations across the country; and to enact a type of ‘AA’ meeting space across college campuses in which assault victims can meet and talk about their experiences, their traumas and their emotional well-being

Hartless has a meeting with The Woman’s Resource Center on her campus later this week to discuss change, how to make resources more readily available to students, and possibly partnering together with Lipstick Wednesday to transform victims into survivors. To positively enhance the state of women in her community and further, in this country.

Join the movement and throw on your best shade of Lipstick on Wednesdays and hashtag your pictures #LipstickWednesday. Support your women by spreading the word about this organization, contribute to the dialogue, and fight for the state of women in this country.

A Minute Analysis of Educational Inequality

I’ve taught high school seniors for two years through two different programs offered at Loyola Marymount University, Street Read and Street Write. In my experiences at both Westchester High and Culver City High-I have witnessed the results of gerrymandering and have witnessed how our political environment severely effects the students in their everyday classrooms and lives.

One semester my partner Miquel and I wrote an investigate piece on Westchester High, in which we highlighted how although a magnet school-required by law to have a 70% minority ratio- fixed their CAHSEE scores to appeal to prospective students. All the while, in our class of 45 seniors, only 7 applied to college and most, if not all, were either illiterate or still reading at a 7th grade to an “advanced” freshman level.  It was heart breaking.

As the numbers show, under performance is an issue facing many schools in LAUSD, but for magnet schools something else plays a very distinctive role. Joanne Bernstein, our supervising instructor, recalls working as the Magnet Coordinator for Westchester High, a job in where she sarcastically claimed that she, “was replaced for a younger, newer model.” At that time, she received a call from the then superintendent Ramon Cortines who she reported as saying,

“Why the hell am I sending these kids to you to fail, when they can just fail at home?”

We came into the classroom every day, and I still do, with the high hope of reaching out to these students, and if we managed to help a handful, we would call that in of itself a blessing. These students came from backgrounds unfamiliar to most of the privileged LMU community. One student, for example, Ryan, is 17 years-old and he is homeless. He doesn’t know where to sleep at night, or what he will eat.

These students have no positive reinforcement. No one to tell them they could be greater than what society tells them to be-gangsters, drug dealers, laborers, prostitutes-they have no aspirations because they are systemically taught to not have any.

With this being said, one would think that their unfortunate circumstances would motivate teachers to do everything in their will-power to positively enhance these students’ lives. Though, this issue of racialized educational inequality predominately stems from America’s long history of racism and slavery targeted towards most, if not all, minorities.

For example, did you know that the liberation from Spanish rule in 1821 and the US conquest of territories beginning in 1845 did not allow Chicanos the time required to stabilize cultural, legal and economic boundaries.  Acknowledging the Chicano people’s vulnerability, the newly American states fully imposed its social hierarchy on them; blatantly disregarding The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. With this, legal forms of disenfranchisement began to implement into Chicano culture.

Subsequently the American states, founded on a social hierarchy on the premise of color, “proposed that only free whites would receive the full benefits of citizenship; leaving those of color with limited civil rights” (Menchaca, 584). The Anglo’s blatant disregard of Chicano people and culture perpetuated segregation, racism and disenfranchisement; further fragmenting the relationship between the two cultures to this day.

Continuously, writer and activist Virgilo Elizondo reflects upon his experiences in the American school system as a Chicano American student and he describes how:

“The schools had done a good job of convincing [them] that [they] were different…all the courses indicated this by pointing to the Anglo-American models of existence as the only normal existence of intelligent, civilized human beings” (Elizondo, 18).

The imperialistic ideology that the white man is the ideal human being has been embedded within the education system. Teachers regurgitated these ideologies onto Chicano-American students, obstructing the quality of education they receive. Elizondo’s academic accounts aid in depicting that “policymakers and educators are failing Mexican-American students and cementing their low status in American society” (127); again highlighting educational inequality as a continual systemic issue.

It is so depressing to know and witness these drastic levels of educational inequality in 2017. We live in a time of consciousness, where we have information at the tips of our fingertips. If only actual effort, at the state and federal level, was implemented into helping these students. However, any social movement begins with word of mouth, and information.

Ideally, the white American population needs to begin a dialogue in regards to the continual marginalization of minorities in the education system; acknowledging the personal accounts of these students, their cultures and histories. As the dialogue progresses, the understanding of educational inequality will reach policy makers, who will be in a federal position to mend current racist and derogatory policies; resulting in the positive enhancement of minority lives.