She will not be Forgotten
By Richard Leader
I don’t know Ruth Christenson.
Until today, I’d never heard her name before. I suspect that
you haven’t either.
What I do know:
In July of 1984, she walked into a Minneapolis bookstore that sold
pornography. She carried a backpack filled with literature that
condemned sexual exploitation.
Earlier that week, Christensen had written letters to local politicians.
One recipient was Charles Hoyt, a city council member sponsoring
an anti-pornography ordinance. Her letter told him that “sexism
has shattered my life.”
When she entered that shop, she proved that her beliefs —
so easily dismissed by even her peers in this world — were
more than just words.
Ruth Christenson doused herself with gasoline and set herself on
fire. She burned for over a minute before bystanders were able to
extinguish the flames that engulfed her. She was removed from the
store in critical condition, with burns over 65 percent of her body.
It’s a tremendous story. It’s also one that I stumbled
onto by accident. News clippings from 1984 don’t exactly throw
themselves at you, not even on the internet. The short article,
written just days after Christenson burned, told only the most basic
facts about her existence.
The most heartbreaking aspect of the saga can be witnessed in the
words of another local activist. Terese Stanton was the organizer
of a Pornography Resource Center in Minnesota. Speaking through
that article to an audience twenty years removed, her words about
Ruth Christenson are haunting: “This will not be in vain —
she did this for a lot of women. This will definitely be witnessed
and remembered.”
Perhaps Ruth Christenson is still remembered in quiet vigils in
Minneapolis. I hope so. She sure as hell isn’t remembered
anywhere else.
Perhaps that’s for the best. If Ruth Christenson were remembered
today, she’d be remembered not as a hero — or even as
a martyr — but as a crazy woman. A tragic figure, no doubt,
but the tragedy would be considered hers to bear alone.
Even people calling themselves feminists, no shortage of men in
that number these days, would believe Christenson did what she did
out of selfish, personal desperation: an inability to cope with
private horrors that have little to do with what the “common
woman” experiences. Hormones and brain chemistry. To them,
that can be the only reason why she took such a terrible and final
action.
Not because sexism shatters women’s lives.
Two decades after Ruth Christenson set herself on fire, very little
has changed. Many would argue that things have gotten worse.
While sexism can be talked about as violence, only the most blatant,
rude, and Republican forms of it can be addressed. A bourgeois woman
is a battered wife, a bohemian woman is a “bottom,”
living a lifestyle, or transcending cultural mores.
Sexism can only be seen as violence when that violence isn’t
seen as sexy.
Eve Ensler’s “V-Day” festivities are, well, festive.
All too often they resemble drag shows even when they aren’t
specifically drag shows — as they sometimes are. The consumerist
crowds they assemble would never condone a legitimate anti-pornography
message. No Monologue will ever be said in honor of Ruth Christenson.
That’s likely for the best. I doubt she’d want someone
talking about her vagina. After all, it’s men and not female
genitalia that needs to change.
Even the more somber Take Back the Night processions, now often
equally about men’s “pain,” are enthralled with
capitalism. The march that takes place in my home city of Buffalo
was once sponsored by a college bar that uses underage girls as
bait for its paying male clientele.
When it comes to the idea of consent, critiques of capitalism aren’t
allowed in our culture: few are willing to think about how money
— and the power it gives one person over another — influences
our opportunities to say “no.”
Even liberals run from such critiques. Feminists, too. How could
Ruth Christenson be remembered in a world where feminist bestsellers
borrow the language of pornography to drum up sales?
What room is there for the utter simplicity of Ruth Christenson’s
message in a world where bait-and-switch schemes shift the blame
from pornography to easily trademarked phenomena such as “Raunch
Culture?” Even authors who aren’t necessarily against
porn can make a mint off of women’s fundamental uneasiness
with their own exploitation, happily displacing feminist writers
in the process.
Who would be willing to remember the bravery of Ruth Christenson
in a world where even anti-pornography activists are ready to shed
the word “feminist” from their organizations in exchange
for better funding?
And what of this new virtual world that all too many of us seem
to inhabit — is there room in it for Ruth Christenson, someone
so clearly invested in the realities of life?
Online feminism tends towards a curious fusion of post-modernist
academia and hipster sensibilities. There, the idea of “gender
oppression” has become subordinate to “gender expression.”
This shifts the political focus of feminism from the voiceless to
media exhibitionists. Gender is something that makes you more interesting.
Gender is something that makes you better in bed. Gender is something
that scores you a book deal.
There are a lot of Gender-Superstars now. And not one of them has
ever made a sacrifice for his or her convictions the way that Ruth
Christenson did.
Instead, they’ll tell you that porn isn’t going away.
They’ll tell you that it’s vital for our education as
sexual beings. They’ll tell you that even though they agree
that 99 percent of porn is sexist and racist (not that they’ll
personally do anything about the pornography that is sexist
and racist, indeed, they view both on the same level as “tackiness,”
the only pornographic crime they ever publicly object to), they
hold out hope for a new feminist porno-paradigm. And they’ll
require you to do the same or they’ll throw you to the dogs:
the male pimps and johns that cluster about them, celebrating their
every word.
In turn, they’ll glorify the ingenuity of the men who conspired
to shatter Ruth Christenson and her world. In my research I found
a magazine article bearing testament to her deed: it was a journalist’s
1997 love-letter letter to the store franchise’s founder,
congratulating him as Russian immigrant who made good on the American
dream.
It was an ode to freedom and male cleverness at any cost, including
women’s lives.
Ruth Christenson was reduced by the writer to a “moral snit”
and a punch line. One former employee recounts how, on his very
first day there, Christenson set herself alight: to him, it was
just a zany event that bookended his rollercoaster of wild experiences
at the store. In order for him to become the man he is today —
and not just any man but a “rocker” whose persona is
created out of the telling of such stories — she had to die.
Only Ruth Christenson didn’t die that day. She lived.
She endured seven operations and somehow found the strength to
carry on, despite her wounds and disfigurement. She didn’t
just disappear. She brought a message of hope to the women in her
community. Larry Cloud-Morgan, manager of a shelter for American
Indian women, told the Star Tribune how Christenson would
stop by to talk with the occupants. “She knew them on the
street, and she loved them. We talked about justice and a woman’s
world and compassion.”
Her compassion was without limits. Cloud-Morgan said that the last
time they spoke, Christenson said that she feared a war in the Persian
Gulf, that she was afraid “that the women and children there
may someday have to look like me.”
Such compassion wears hard on a human soul. Ruth Christenson died
on December 6, 1990. She set another fire. Only this time she was
alone, cloistered in her apartment.
She never lived to see “Desert Storm” on her TV. She
never saw the images of bombs falling down chimneys in antiseptic
black and white. She never watched her country march to war a second
time, our corporations lining up to trademark “Shock and Awe”
for use in videogames. But Christenson fully anticipated it. The
pornography of war — and of everyday life — was all
too clear to her.
If Ruth Christenson were alive today, she would be approaching
50 years old. I can’t know what she’d think about me
dredging up the past and telling her story — I’d hope
that she’d prefer someone more worthy to tell it. I certainly
can’t speak for her. I’ll never know the full extent
of her motivations when she set herself on fire. All I know is that
I wish she hadn’t done it. But even more than that, I wish
she hadn’t needed to do it in the first place. Her psychology
was never the real problem.
Sexual exploitation is always a backburner issue. It comes up from
time to time, but only when it’s “over there”
in other countries, countries our government declares are full of
bad men. Men who aren’t at all like the men who live here.
Women who complain about the men here are silenced quickly. After
all, they certainly don’t have it as bad as the women over
there. I defy anyone to say that Ruth Christenson didn’t have
it “bad.”
Liberal men, especially, demand that their female peers abandon
any interest in “feminist issues,” those things that
“only affect women,” until the more important crises
are all brought to conclusion. When men set themselves on fire to
protest one war or another (each always a problem of male creation),
they are at least honored for their sacrifice by those who share
their politics. Those men are proved strong by their actions, rather
than weak, foolish, and broken. And yet that’s just how our
world regards a woman who would make the same sacrifice for herself
and others like her.
If female bravery of that kind could be celebrated, it would mean
that women suffer under patriarchy in the here and now, even surrounded
by good men.
Relatively few today would celebrate bravery of that kind —
even those of us who believe in equality for all human beings. The
vocation of silencing women comes with great rewards in our society.
And with those rewards, it’s quite easy to believe that one
is smarter, stronger, and better than the Ruth Christensons of the
world. We think that we can find the middle ground. We absolutely
know that we can have it both ways.
Imagine the hubris of someone saying, “Ruth Christenson just
needed to see some feminist porn. Then everything would have been
different.”
Someone will say it soon enough.
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