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The Tragedy of Heterosexuality with Jane Ward

In this episode of Wine, Women, and Revolution, Heather interviews Jane Ward about her book The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. Jane describes herself as an ally of heterosexual women. You could call her book a self help book that hates self help books. In her book, Ms Ward attempts to tackle the underlying causes of pain in heterosexual relationships which she refers to as the heterosexuality paradox. If straight men claim to love women so much, then why do so many of their actions seem to center hating women instead of loving them? She draws inspiration from the lesbian feminist writings of the 70s and 80s and offers a brand new prescription for straightness. In short, the answer is to take a page from lesbians and to honor "the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.” Transcript Auto Generated Jane Ward 0:00One of the things that became really clear, especially as I was, you know, getting older moving into my 40s was that straight women seemed really miserable in their marriages. They spent a lot of their time complaining about their husbands, there was a lot of divorce happening that was initiated by women. And so I guess I want to reconcile this long standing narrative about how being queer makes for such a difficult life with what seemed to be the reality which is that most queer people I know really love the queer parts of our lives. Heather Warburton 0:46This is Wine, Women and Revolution, with your host, Heather Warburton. Hi, and welcome to Wine, Women and Revolution. I'm your host Heather Warburton coming at you here on Create Your Future Productions. You can find us online at www.yourfuturecreator.com Follow us on all the social medias and get us wherever you get your podcasts from. I've been really excited about this interview ever since I booked it. And I booked it kind of a while ago. This is another author that I'm bringing to you guys today. And she had a really interesting concept for a book and I was so excited to talk to her. The book is called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. And the author is Jane Ward. Welcome to the show, Jane. Jane Ward 1:28Thank you so much for having me. Heather Warburton 1:31So I guess my first question, as I was reading the book, I wanted to ask Who were you writing this book for? Who is your audience you had in mind? Jane Ward 1:41Oh, gosh, that's such a good question. I mean, I, this is my third book. And I am a professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. And so you know, when you have an academic job, you who you're supposed to be writing for is other scholars. However, one of the beautiful things about being at the later stage of your career having tenure, and all of that is that you can decide, you know, I don't just want to write for other scholars, I want to write for a popular audience, I want more people to have access to my ideas. So this book is published with NYU press. And I have a great editor who was very happy for me to try to write in an accessible way that everyone would be able to understand. And so my hope is that this is a book for people. Anybody who's ever been in a heterosexual relationship, any queer person who wants some affirmation about the beauty of queerness, so pretty much everybody. Heather Warburton 2:44Again, I thought you I thought it was interesting that you actually call yourself an ally, to heterosexual people, like you're kind of flipping that script of Usually, people say they're an ally to the LGBTQIA. community. So you're kind of flipping that around in this book. Jane Ward 3:00Yes. So that was that was one of the original ideas or like an epiphany that I had. And when I say epiphany, I mean, really just kind of about my own life experience that motivated me to write this book. So you know, on the one hand, we have this story about how it's really difficult to be a member of the LGBT community. And we often, you know, that story gets reflected back at us, many of us when we first come out to our parents or other family members, and, you know, a very common sentiment that's expressed, it's like, well, of course, I love you, but I'm just worried about what this will mean for your life, that you're going to experience a lot of discrimination, it's going to be really difficult. And so we have this understanding that being gay makes for hard life. And, you know, it wasn't that long ago, just a few decades ago, that that was really amplified that people believed it meant that you were going to be lonely and family-less, and depressed and suicidal and all of this. And so that's one narrative. But the thing is that in my own life, and in the lives of most of my queer friends, there's something about that narrative that just didn't fully ring true, especially in comparison with the experiences of my straight women friends, I you know, I'm now in my 40s. I have a 10 year old. My wife and I have been together for 15 years. And we now have no a lot of straight people because we have a kid and we meet these straight couples through our friends and through our child's school. And one of the things that became really clear, especially as I was, you know, getting older moving into my 40s was that straight women seemed really miserable in their marriages. They spent a lot of their time complaining about their husbands, there was a lot of divorce happening that was initiated by women. And so I guess I wanted to reconcile this long standing narrative about how being queer makes for such a difficult life with what seemed to be the reality, which is that most queer people I know really love the queer parts of our lives. We, at least for me, anyway, and I think a lot of lesbians in particular, feel a lot of relief to have escaped heterosexuality. And heterosexuality often looks pretty miserable to us. And that was a perspective that I just hadn't seen people writing about talking about and I wanted to share it. Heather Warburton 5:53Well, yeah, and I think under the capitalist society we live in, people like to, they love the pain narratives, you know, that they never really want to talk about joy. And certainly you don't hear nearly as much as you should about, you know, lesbian joy and gay joy and bisexual joy, You know, we only focus on this pain aspect. And we really should celebrate, um, you know, the good and, you know, there's a lot of good that comes with it. It's not all pain. Jane Ward 6:20Exactly, there's a tremendous, tremendous queer joy. And a lot of that joy isn't just what we do see on television, which is like pride festivals and dancing and like hot sex, I mean, we do get a version of our joy. That's kind of mass marketed to us. But I think there's another even deeper component to that, which has to do with the freedom that many women experience to not be living with the daily disappointments of heterosexual marriage. And, you know, we have so much feminist research now, that reveals to us exactly what those disappointments and inequalities look like, you know, tremendous inequalities in household division of labor, how much of the household work men do versus their women partners, the parenting labor, the emotional labor, the often kind of just an undercurrent of, of alienation from one another, boredom, just so much that's built into straight culture. And it's important to say, this book isn't about like, individual heterosexual couples as much about straight culture, and straight culture often celebrates the tension between men and women, it kind of presumes that men and women are attracted to each other physically, but they don't actually like each other very much. And then it normalizes that, and sometimes even romanticizes that. And that's just really not only bizarre, but quite sad, from a queer perspective. Heather Warburton 8:06Right. And I think there's so many examples of exactly what you're talking about that, for example, I was just on vacation with my husband. And we were talking about in popular culture, the show Mad About You, that was like this romantic comedy that was on I think back in the 90s. And the whole premise of the show, when talking about it was, there was a couple that all they kind of did was lie to each other. Because they so didn't believe that each other would understand their experiences, that they just lied to each other. And then as the audience, we were supposed to be shocked when they cheated on each other. And so like, it's just something that's reinforced over and over again, in culture. I mean, even now, with COVID. You know, there's so many jokes about, oh, well, if you're both working from home together, I guess you're either going to be pregnant or divorced by the time it's over. That really kind of reduces heterosexual relationship to not a good place. Jane Ward 8:59Exactly. I mean, every generation has a new spate of these television shows and self help books that convey exactly the message that you just mentioned, which is that men and women don't really get along, they don't really respect one another very much. They don't trust each other. And so what's best is if they can kind of learn to manipulate each other to keep the peace, and also not spend too much time together. And you're absolutely right, that we're, you know, it's tempting to think, Okay, well, that was the message in the 1950s. That was the message in the 1980s. But to get to think that maybe it's gone, but we have a beautiful I mean, a tragically beautiful illustration of this exactly, as you said with the Coronavirus and the New York Times has been covering all of the separations and divorces that the Coronavirus has initiated. And the way that's been framed and it may very well be true, I think we have evidence that this is true is that when you have heterosexual couples spending too much time with one another, it illuminates these conflicts and inequalities in a way that makes it pretty hard for women in particular, to tolerate them. Heather Warburton 10:22So you start to sort of open up the book asking a fairly big question of, you know, do women lose more than they gain by being heterosexual? And would you say that during the course of writing this book and doing your research, your answer changed? Or would you say you kind of stayed in the same place with that? Jane Ward 10:43Well, you know, I think it's a complex question because it's, it's that heterosexuality is viewed as love's gold standard. All of us are raised to imagine that it is what will make us happy in many cases, we're raised to imagine that it's our only option, you know, there's not any other way. And part of the way that it's marketed to women in particular, is I can get some women that a degree of self sacrifice is part of what makes them a good woman that, you know, one of the features of being a woman is kind of resilience and ability to endure bad men and to kind of stand up triumphant. And this is what the whole in many ways, this is the pop feminist message that you know, women are survivors, men are trash, but women somehow make it still work. And, and, and so I think we're not even really yet at a place where most straight women could ask themselves honestly, like, Am I getting enough out of this to make this makes sense for my life, because I think what most straight women are getting out of heterosexuality, aside from, you know, sex with men to whom they are attracted, is all of those, all of that cultural legibility all of that recognition as a successful woman, you know, as somebody who's figured out how to play the game, and, and I think that's all really amplified for women who are younger in their 20s, and 30s. And that's why we see so many women, unlike for gay men, who come out as bi or lesbian later in their lives, you know, they will have often a marriage to a man. And then, and then find that that marriage really didn't meet their needs. And so it's later in life that many women wake up to the ways that the privileges of heterosexuality didn't quite deliver to them what they anticipated. Heather Warburton 13:12Do you think it's possible to really separate heterosexuality from the misogyny in our culture today? Jane Ward 13:22I do think its possible so we know that the corrective to misogyny, which is men's hatred of women, is feminism. And I think one of the mistakes that we have made often is to imagine that feminism is something that is for women, or only for women, and to imagine that it is utterly political, that it exists in the political realm, but isn't really a an emotional or spiritual part of who we are. And so in the, in this book, I look back to lesbian feminist writing of the 1970s and 1980s. And part of what I find there is that lesbian feminists didn't just imagine that they were attracted to individual women or to women's bodies, and that that's what made them lesbian. I mean, certainly, that's what was a big part of what was going on. But they also understood that if they were oriented to women, if they loved women so much, if they desired women and lusted after women so much, that was really inseparable from also caring about women as a group and being invested in women's collective freedom, that if you want, if you are so into women, then you care about women collectively. And so the answer to your question, you know, do I think it's possible to separate misogyny from heterosexuality is yes, but I think what needs to happen is that men come to understand that if they're as heterosexual as they think they are, then they necessarily also have to be feminists. Because that means caring, being so oriented toward women, that they actually really like women, they respect women, they're invested in women's freedom. And so part of what is a little suspicious about straight men, from a lesbian perspective, is that their desire for women often looks kind of weak, a little bit feeble, a little bit half baked, because they claim they're so into women, but they need women's bodies, usually to be really hyper modified in order for their bodies to even be attracted to them, you know, they need them to be shaved and waxed, and dieted, and makeup, and all of that kind of stuff. And they also seem to not really care very much about women's rights. And that's just like, how can you actually have such a core feature of yourself, your sexual orientation, be all about women, and care so little about women's well being? So I offer a little roadmap at the end of the book for how straight men could pick up some of the insights of lesbian feminism and apply it to their own desire for women in relationships with women. And then I do think it's possible to separate misogyny from heterosexuality. Heather Warburton 16:33So in your book, you actually talk about you call it the misogyny paradox. And you gave one example that really kind of struck me is, yeah, this is right. You know, this is one of the things I underlined. You talk about the fact that straight men don't really just get together and talk about, like, how they've been, you know, pleasing women or being, you know, a good lover to women in bed that almost, that gets them described as being kind of gay. Like if they love women too much, that actually is sort of not considered masculine in our culture today. Jane Ward 17:04Right? Yeah, it's really interesting, the double standards, I mean, if you, you know, so much of male sexuality is very selfish. It's very self centered. And it's funny, because when it when women are like that, I don't know maybe this concept doesn't exist in straight culture. But in, in lesbian subculture, if you're a woman who really just likes to be pleased, we call that a pillow Princess, you know, you're just gonna lay there, as someone, you know, do things to you. But when men are like, give me a blowjob, you know, no one's like, Oh, what a pillow princess. But why, you know, we should think that because it's a kind of passive, utterly self focused sexuality. And so we have a way of taking a lot of men's sexual habits and recasting them as masculine, even, you know, whether that actually makes sense or not. And a big part, I mean, for me, the misogyny contradiction is about the fact that we claim that straight men are people who love women, but that love is supposed to take shape and express itself in the context of a culture that totally normalizes misogyny or men's hatred of women. And we haven't really reconciled that problem. And it makes sense that we haven't, because if you think about something, like white supremacy, you know, we are aware now as a country that we cannot snap our fingers and undo or heal four centuries of violence against black people in this country. And similarly, you know, patriarchy is so baked in to the gender binary into relationships between men and women and has been for centuries. And so that we're just still very, very much living with the legacy of that. And until we really reckon with it, it's going to show up over and over again in straight people's relationships. Heather Warburton 19:30Well, I think the perfect example now is, you know, we're having as we're recording this, there's a woman who's been nominated for the Supreme Court, who believes that women should be subservient to men. And I mean, when you hear about stuff like that, do you just want to shake your fist and like, see, this is what I'm talking about? Jane Ward 19:49I do but you know, I have to say, I don't know that I would have been able to write this book, or that the book would have landed in the same way. Had Donald Trump not been president? Because part, you know, and had there not been all of this other like you mentioned Amy Coney Barrett, I think I'm about I would say, you know, 10-15 years ago, people were still really believing that we were in a post feminist moment that feminists had really achieved everything they wanted. And we shouldn't, you know, in girl power and, and women had money and, and sexual power and all of this. And you know, anybody who had even a superficial awareness of what research was telling us about the state of women's lives around the globe knew that that was absolutely not true. Or that it was only true for a very small subset of white, wealthy women. But I think most people really wanted to believe that. And when the Access Hollywood tapes were, you know, were revealed, and we all got to hear Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, and then the country elected him to the highest political office in the nation anyway. And then when we started to hear in 2017, all of the testimonials from women who, by the way, most of whom were very powerful women, you know, white, beautiful, wealthy actresses, in many cases telling us about all of the humiliation and sexual objectification and sexual assault they had experienced in the entertainment industry. And in the tech industry, I think people woke up that this was still continuing. And in many ways, it seemed to be getting worse. And so I think, that emboldened to me a little bit to be able to tell the truth in this book, without needing to walk people down such a long path of trying to convince them that we still have a problem with gender inequality. Heather Warburton 22:06I definitely think it kind of primed the culture to be ready for a book like yours. Because I would think, you know, especially when you've got a word like tragedy in the title, you could have generated a lot of pushback against your book. So I think that's a good point that society probably would not have been ready for your book, like five years ago. Jane Ward 22:25Right? I mean, I, you know, I have to say, there has been a good amount of pushback for this book. The New York Times just ran a very lovely and positive review. And because that was in the New York Times Book Review, many people read it, including a bunch of conservative, straight white men who know, you can imagine how the manosphere responded to that. So that's just par for the course. You know, we know that it's funny to me, because I think men who respond that way to my writing, think that somehow they're showing me, you know, and all but instead really, it's always just more evidence of the very points that I'm making when they unleash their misogyny at me, Oh, absolutely. Heather Warburton 23:18I would expect pushback, probably from those kind of segments of the population to anytime a woman says anything. Anything. You know, I'm a woman online that has some fairly occasionally controversial opinions, not even specifically about men just about society, and I get so much hate and pushback from certain segments of the population. So I think that just happens to any woman that has an opinion about something. Jane Ward 23:43Right, right. Heather Warburton 23:46Um, so I did want to touch a little bit more of something, you go into your book, you kind of lay out the history of this giant industry that sprung up around trying to normalize and save heterosexuality. And you actually found out that that started all the way back with the eugenicists, right. Jane Ward 24:04Right. Yeah, I really was surprised to discover that. I mean, I was interested in is this all of these self help books I was familiar with, because I was, you know, born in the early 1970s. And my mom had a lot of these books in the 80s. Like, you know, "Men who hate women and the women who love them" and these kinds of self help classics. And so I wanted to know, you know, what did the earlier ones look like when did this industry start because in part, you know, as a, as a scholar of sexuality, we know that the the classifications of heterosexual and homosexual weren't invented until the late 19th century anyway, so the industry that is forming around, you know, determining what does healthy heterosexuality look like is actually quite recent. You know, we're Relatively speaking so. So I went back to find the earliest marital self help manuals, and I discovered that several of them emerged between the 1910s and the 1930s. And that they, by and large, were published by the eugenics publishing company. And for folks who don't know, the eugenics movement was basically a white supremacist and deeply classist and ablest movement that was about encouraging reproduction of people who are imagined to have, you know, good genes. So white wealthy people and then discouraging reproduction among everyone else. And so the very first self help books were written by white eugenicists, who were really invested in white people reproducing, they wanted white women to have more babies. And they saw that there were some obstacles in the way of that happening. And as I read these books, I discovered that the primary obstacle that they described was that women and men hated each other. Women were frequently raped on their wedding night, they had a lot of trauma from that they often did not want to have sex with their husbands. And there was a lot of, you know, I'm using language that they use, you can read the book and see all the quotations. You know, they talk about mutual loathing, hatred, mutual disgust. And there are a lot of reasons for that. I mean, men and women at that time had have often had very little opposite sex contact before they married. So even just the sight of the opposite sex, a nude body, you know, a man's nude body was described as kind of horrific to women. And so many of these writers were trying to figure out how are we going to keep white women feeling invested in marriage, when marriage is a site of so much violence, and that was really the the original impetus for these books. Heather Warburton 27:18And then the industry is just kind of taken off from there. And I love that you mentioned, a book that I've always hated since it first came out was the "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. That book is just so much sexism, rolling into self help that like when it came out, like, why is anyone reading that? Jane Ward 27:36Right, and so many people, it actually was the number one nonfiction bestseller of the entire decade of the 1990s. Actually, I think it was second to the Bible, globally, and it was translated into multiple languages, it sold millions of copies of that book. And it just as you said, it's so telling because the book is so sexist. But in many ways, it's kind of such a perfect exemplar of the messages of the self help industry, because John Gray makes it really clear, that men and women don't like each other, you know, he starts out he describes that as men and women are so fundamentally different. They have so little in common, they so misunderstand each other, they so don't enjoy each other's company, that they might as well be two different species from two different planets. So that's his first premise, and then a second premise is. But of course, you know, we have to keep heterosexual marriages together. So what we're gonna have to do is teach men and women to fake it till they make it, you know, to learn a set of tricks that they can use to tolerate each other. So, you know, he teaches men you should touch women, X number of times throughout the day, because women need that kind of affection. And you should listen to them talk about their day without offering solutions. Even if you find the sound of her voice so irritating, you can hardly stand it. He teaches women that they need to understand that it has, you know, the home is a man's castle, and you need to respect that and provide a man cave for him because that's how he recharges. I mean, they'll it's just so ludicrous, but but the point is that John Gray really picked up all of the pieces of what at that point was basically you know, 88 years of heterosexual repair what I call you know, the heterosexual repair industry, put it all into one book, made it pretty cute with the whole you know, different planets metaphor and, and then figured out how to very successfully market This as a set of techniques, marital techniques, and because, you know, no one actually wanted to do the work that really needed to be done, which was to, like, actually grapple with feminism and what that would mean or look like inside heterosexual relationships. And no one wanted to do that. Because remember, feminism had been so stigmatized and associated with man hating Butch, lesbians and all that. So people were really hungry for what looks to be like a really easy and practical, step by step approach to saving your marriages. Of course, it did not work. But books that have come on the market since then, continue to just repackage the same exact approach. Heather Warburton 30:52Right, and they're making probably millions upon millions of dollars selling this crap to people to, which is, you know, trying to be a band aid to like a gunshot wound. Jane Ward 31:02Right. Right. Heather Warburton 31:03So yeah, go ahead. Jane Ward 31:06Oh, I was just gonna say one of the ironies is that, you know, my, this book that I wrote is, definitely it's a critique of the self help industry. But it at the same time is sort of a self help book, in and of itself. And so I also hope people will pick it up as a corrective to all of those horrible books and see if it might offer them something new. Heather Warburton 31:31Before I did let you go, you had a whole section of your book, where you talked about seduction coaches, which I honestly didn't know, this was a thing until I read your book, and it really creeped me out. Could you talk a little bit about what that industry is. Jane Ward 31:50Yeah, I mean, I think many people who haven't heard of seduction coaching, maybe have heard of the whole pickup artists subculture, because that was kind of a, you know, got a lot of media attention about 10 years ago. So there, there were these men who created a whole network, whole subculture of pickup artistry, which was some rules that they had developed for how to seduce women. And usually the goal was to get women into bed that day, you know, you meet women at a bar, and then you do whatever it takes to get them to have sex with you that night. And they were trading these techniques. And they were actually traveling around the globe using them on women. And they got some media coverage. And of course, it was quite critical, people thought this was pretty disgusting and manipulative. And so that whole scene, sort of rebranded itself as not about being a pickup artist, but about being a dating or seduction coach, and it turned into an international industry. So that these companies would offer maybe a weekend boot camp, sometimes even a longer, you know, a week long event, where men could pay thousands of dollars to work with a male coach, sometimes a woman coach, who would teach them how to seduce women. And, you know, the more attention they got in the media, the more they they tried to, again, you know, rebrand themselves in a way that was more aligned with the self help industry and with self actualization, and not with, you know, just kind of your basic misogynistic manipulations. And so I felt really fortunate to, to investigate this right at the time when a lot of that rebranding was happening. So that a lot of these coaches and the men who, who were their clients, understood themselves to be doing the opposite of what you just said, which is to try to be less creepy that they were learning how to understand the world from women's point of view, and that if they could do that, if they could learn to be more empathic with women to bond with women to understand women's perspective, then that would get them the sex that they wanted. And so it's a really complex and and yet not surprising. framing these coaches are teaching these men how to trade empathy for sex, how to trade humanization for sex, because women want basic decency from men and men are willing to give that or at least perform that if they think it means that they're going to get the sex they want. Heather Warburton 34:56And you also found there was a lot of racism in this to that It was kind of training of how to get a blonde white woman was the goal, you know, that was like the, you know, prime that everybody was going for. And that was just kind of built into the culture a little bit. Jane Ward 35:12Yeah, I mean, it's probably my own whiteness and naivete, that made that really surprising to me, I guess I thought, you know, because we are living in a time in which, you know, the Kim Kardashians and like, and Cardi B, and I guess I just thought like, it's all about curves. And it's all about, you know, um, like, the broad array of different kinds of women and women of color. And, but really, these men all wanted skinny, young, blonde women, I heard that over and over again, they wanted women who were much younger than themselves. And they were obsessed with blondes. And so the industry actually, if you are willing to pay a lot of money, it will take you on a kind of global tour of countries, where you can try to seduce a lot of blonde women. So they'll start they start in Las Vegas, but then they go to Sweden and other other Scandinavian countries, big cities and Scandinavian countries so that men can seduce those women. Heather Warburton 36:22Yeah, that's really equally gross. And creepy is the whole industry in itself, just that it's got this racism built into it. So we are just about out of time for today. But I wanted to give you kind of a moment to do a last word of summarization and let people know where they can get your book if they want to read it. Jane Ward 36:42Sure. So you know, I'll just say that this book is really intended to be a loving book, I think sometimes people think, Oh, this is going to be a really difficult read. But I tried to write it in a way that would invite people in. And I'm really glad that so many straight women in particular, have picked up this book and read it and felt affirmed and also felt empowered. And it is available anywhere where you can buy books, though, of course, I hope you will buy from a local bookstore rather than Amazon. And you can find me if you're interested in my work at JaneWardphd.com. And I also tweet @TheQueerJane Heather Warburton 37:26All right, thank you so much for being here today. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. To my listeners. Thank you so much for joining us here today. I hope that you enjoyed hearing about this and I hope you're going out and looking into this book and kind of investigating why it is that you believe the things that you believe and are they really true or is it just you've been manipulated into thinking that and once you open up that, okay, I can evaluate things differently. That opens up your entire world. Thank you so much for listening. The future is yours to create, go out there and create it.

41 minutes | 3 months ago

AC 411 with Henry Green

33 minutes | 4 months ago

Drag Queens and Beauty Queens with Laurie Green

In this episode of Wine, Women, and Revolution Heather interviews activist and author Laurie Greene. Laurie wrote the book "Drag Queens and Beauty Queens" which tells the often overlooked LGBTQ drag history in Atlantic City and the undeniable impact drag culture had on the Miss American pageant. She discusses how people competing in both Miss America and the drag pageant Miss'd America use it to access power structures that may otherwise be denied to them in this Cis, Hetero, White, Male, Capitalist world. Now Miss's America is struggling to reconcile its more subversive roots with the goal of capitalism to make everything consumable for the bland mass audience. Only the future will tell if they will be more successful than their beauty pageant inspiration, Miss America. Transcript Auto Generated Laurie Greene 0:00But the history of this event which you would never know from looking at any press anywhere, including the Miss America page is that "show us your shoes" started because drag queens used to be at the corner of New York Avenue and the two buildings would sit up on their balconies during the parade and lean out the windows. And tease the contestants, because they saw they weren't wearing shoes and they're wearing slippers but you couldn't see their feet they would yell "show us your shoes." Heather Warburton 0:34This is Wine Women and Revolution with your host, Heather Warburton. Hi, and welcome to Wine Women and Revolution. I'm your host Heather Warburton coming at you here on Create Your Future Productions. You can find us online at your future creator. com. Follow us on all the social medias and get us wherever you get your podcasts from. Today, I'm talking to someone that's a friend of mine. They're a fellow activist from South Jersey. And specifically what we're talking about today is they're the author of the book, Drag Queens and Beauty Queens. Welcome to the show, Laurie Green. Laurie Greene 1:08Hi, thanks for having me, Heather. Heather Warburton 1:10So you're actually joining us all the way from London today. Even though you live locally here, you're all the way in London when we're recording this Laurie Greene 1:18I've been here for two weeks, I'm actually going to get out of quarantine tomorrow. And I just found out today that they're closing down the country again. So it looks like I'm gonna be in quarantine for another week. Heather Warburton 1:30Yeah, things are definitely challenging in these times of COVID. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. We're talking about Drag Queens and Beauty Queens, which is an awesome title for a book, by the way. And I think what really compelled me was you kind of tell a lot of like the not so well known history of both the Miss America pageant, which if you're local here, you know, you know, Atlantic city's tied to Miss America, and Miss'd America, which may not even be as well known, but it's getting quite popular. And one thing that really stood out to me was when I first moved to the area, I had a friend of mine who was like, Oh, I'm going watch the shoe parade for Miss America. And I'm like, Wait, what? Like this was something I did not know about living outside the area and they were like, yeah, we go and they show us their shoes. I was like, well, why do they do that? And they had no idea why. I don't know, it's just something that happens and you actually explain the history of where that all came from. Do you want to give a little like, quick teaser about what that is, before we dive into the meat of the book. Laurie Greene 2:35Well, the parade is actually called the show us your shoes parade. It is trademarked that way by the Miss America Pageant. And what happens during that parade is that the contestants get dressed up in costumes and funny costumes that spoof or somehow over emphasize the characterizations of their state. And they decorate their shoes, which is the hallmark of this. And they have to hold one leg up ideally as they parade down the boardwalk in convertibles in these funny campy costumes with their shoes decorated. So it's it's a particularly fun event as a parade, which used to be originally the contestants in their evening gowns looking very demure with white gloves on sitting in the back of convertibles has now become this event. And it's the most popular event in the Miss America Pageant. And it continued to be so even when they move to Las Vegas for a while they continue this tradition. But the history of this event which you would never know from looking at any press anywhere, including the Miss America page, is that show us your shoes started because drag queen used to be at the corner of New York Avenue and the two buildings would sit up on their balconies during the parade or lean out their windows and tease the contestants. Because they saw they weren't wearing shoes, they're wearing slippers but you couldn't see their feet, they would yell "show us your shoes" out of these windows. And the girls were taught not to respond until they eventually did. And this is the origin of the parade. Heather Warburton 4:16Right? And I think you mentioned a little bit about that's kind of like an altering of history of how it really started. Like you'll find none of that mentioned anywhere in the official they're like, Oh yeah, it's just this family friendly event we dreamed up not that it actually as an origin out of the drag queen community. Laurie Greene 4:34You know, this is typical of writing history of marginalized people. And so we call that restorative history when we do it and what I aim to do with restorative history is to tell the voices of the community that are never heard. This isn't that it can be in addition to the history because I like to present it because it is the history. It's not the history of gay people or drag queens in Atlantic City, it's the history. It's just not told. And yeah, it has been characterized as a family friendly event. And so much of the part of the book is that are part of the emphasis of the book is that so much of the Miss America Pageant has been influenced by the gay culture of Atlantic City. And this is something that nobody knows. Heather Warburton 5:30Well, I think even just the fact that Atlantic City had this very thriving drag community. And I think people maybe know more about that there was a thriving gay community for a while. But even that maybe isn't as well known as it should be. And that's kind of sad that when I moved the area, I had no idea and even my husband who's lived in the area, his entire life, had no idea about it. Laurie Greene 5:56You know, the, it's interesting, because one of the one of the reasons we don't know about it, is that if you look at the evidence of how Atlantic City evolved, or how cities involve in general, usually see the story of like a thriving city. And then there's white flight, and people move out, and there's just sort of this natural event how a city goes into disrepair. But that's not what happened here. Even though that's how the story is told. What happened here was because this, the city is based on tourism. And there was a natural economic decline in tourism. But during that decline, when Atlantic City really went through its first phase of, you know, losing all its jobs and going into disrepair as a sort of posh resort, the gay community on New York Avenue was thriving. But instead of capitalizing on that as a tourist destination, the economic concerns of the casinos, once casinos were brought as a way to really, you know, reinvigorate tourism, the gay community had to go because they were on expensive property. So it's an interesting look at economic forces at power, and politics, because they could have made Atlantic City, Rehoboth, they could have made Atlantic City, Asbury Park, they could have done any of that, but they chose not to. Yeah, they chose to ignore what was a thriving. The only thriving part of the economy, which was New York Avenue, and the gayborhood. Heather Warburton 7:36And it's really sad that, you know, everyone that listens to the show knows that I talk about capitalism and the destructive influences of it. And we'll dive into that a little more later, because I really want to get into capitalism and the power structures of both of these pageants. But first off, you kind of gave a little bit of a history of beauty pageants in general. And it may have actually started with PT Barnum, the circus guy. Laurie Greene 8:01Well, he is the acknowledged, originator, I guess, of the modern beauty pageant. He used to do all different kinds of contests, in the context of his industry of entertainment and popular entertainment was new then nobody ever had leisure time before. So he's sort of the Father, one of the fathers of popular entertainment. But he had all different kinds of contests, dogs, pets, of other kinds, all these different things. And one of the things he had was a beauty contest. And it was really went against the Victorian standards. They thought it was obscene. And so he ended up not having live beauty pageants. But in the newspaper, he would print people's pictures and the people that read the newspapers would vote on who they thought the most beautiful woman was out of those pictures. And so he started it that way. And then eventually, it it sort of evolved into other sorts of live in person pageants. The first one was actually in, I think it was in Rehoboth and Delaware just for one year, before the first Miss America Pageant occurred in Atlantic City. So Miss America one is one of the earliest live pageants after PT Barnum's attempt at pageantry. Heather Warburton 9:19And some of the earlier parts of your book reminded me of another author that I had on the show who wrote, fearing the black body. And there's a lot of attention at the time given to what is the ideal specimen of whiteness kind of was a lot of what beauty pageants were about. And you actually mentioned, what was it rule number seven? Was that an unwritten rule or an actual rule? Can you go into that a little bit that rule Laurie Greene 9:46That rule said, you had to be unmarried, of white race to be in the pageant, and I don't remember the exact date but I think that was enforced into the 1970s. So that was a rule and in fact, PT Barnum on one of the shows that were the exhibits that he did have was an exhibit called the circassian beauties, which literally was a display of the perfect white female specimen of sexuality and beauty. And this was something that he toured with. And the way that he presented these women was very much like the Miss America Pageant and beauty pageants, present women in the swimsuit competition. So he would have them sitting there just maybe painting or doing something else demure and they wouldn't speak, there would be a voiceover, which would talk about all of their interests, and where they were from and why they were such a specimen of beauty, similar to the swimsuit competition, where the women walk out without speaking, turn around and walk back as there's a voiceover, from the pageant director, or from one of the judges talking about their qualities. There's similar valorized qualities. So this idea of whiteness was very much or ideal whiteness was very much part of early beauty pageants. And it happened to coincide with emancipation in the United States, where whites in the north were, you know, the north in general was afraid of the impact of Black people, who were free slaves, who were coming up from the south to the north, and what impact that might have on their areas. So it is not disconnected. Heather Warburton 11:30And you talk a lot about you know, and this is a perfect example of how the women competing in Miss America has to be something very easily consumable that even now when they ask them political questions, they have to answer these political questions in a way that's very palatable to everyone. Laurie Greene 11:50Yeah, they're actually instructed to do that. If you go online and look at any of the thousands of books, maybe, on how to compete in pageants. The advice that's always given is, make sure when you answer questions that you don't alienate anybody. So I know I've heard one pageant director say, "We want the girls to have opinions, we just don't want them to express them openly". That's also another way, you know, they, of course, we know they should have opinions, but there's things that need to be expressed. And there's things that don't need to however, I will say this, to their credit, in terms of the skill set, you have to have to perform that kind of femininity, right in pageantry. They always ask them hot button political questions, if you actually go through the kinds of questions that they're asked. And it's almost like they're trying to get them, they need to go up and answer these questions, which we know they have strong beliefs about, and we know are dismissive. And they have to have the skill to answer them in a way where it seems like they're answering or agreeing with both sides. And that is very much a part of ideal femininity, don't offend anybody. Heather Warburton 13:05Right. So I want to shift gears now and talk about the Miss'd America pageant, which is another thing that is started off as very hyper local, to Atlantic City. Can you tell us a what is the pageant and then the little bit of that history? Laurie Greene 13:22You know, so the Miss'd America Pageant is a drag pageant that spoofs Miss America. And it was developed in Studio Six, which is was a bar that John Schultz and Gary Hill own, which was in snake alley, near New York Avenue. And it first started as a number of skits that were being performed by some of the local drag queens in order to both psychologically try to keep them upbeat, as AIDS was really becoming epidemic in the city. And people were dying. And then eventually, in the after the first few years to actually raise money to try to combat AIDS in the city. And in fact, the South Jersey AIDS Alliance, which used to be called originally South Jersey, against AIDS, which was one of the very first AIDS or AIDS research organizations age, AIDS philanthropy organizations is a better way to say it, in the United States, was funded by the proceeds that were gained through these fundraisers that were the Miss'd America Pageant. So it started out just to skits and eventually took on the format, which was identical to Miss'd America, and they started crowning people in 1993. So the pageant started in 1991. And in terms of the skits, and they started crowing people in 1993, and the pageant grew from this very local venue to eventually be contested in the Hard Rock casino or the Borgotta Casino in their giant events room. Heather Warburton 15:10It started off as something just very community oriented, like it was not originally set up to be something easily consumable. It was a little risque at times in the beginning, and it was just sort of more geared towards really uplifting and celebrating a community. But that's even kind of changed now as things have progressed. Right. Laurie Greene 15:31Absolutely. That's, that's really one of the hallmarks of the pageant. And one of the reasons that I wrote the book and found this interesting that the patent started out as a very local event with local references, and local people talking about things only locals might understand or laugh at. It was campy, it was bawdy, it was deliberately offensive. And it was packed, just packed and, and everybody came not just people from the gay community, everybody went to it. So much so that they didn't, they really didn't have enough room to have this pageant. And then it stopped for a while because Miss America left Atlantic City. And I believe they didn't feel like they had their reference anymore. And then it started up again in Boardwalk Hall when Miss America was no longer in Atlantic City. They were still in Las Vegas, they decided we'll just take over the hall and the Alliance. They decided as their Hallmark event when they were formed. And that is the alliance of LGBTQ people Business Alliance and social alliance in Atlantic City. They were going to make this their Hallmark event and continue to raise funds. And this is when everything started to shift. And very quickly, the pageant shifted to a professional production in professional venues. And with that, a lot of the campiness a lot of the offensive jokes, certainly all of the local references were diminished, or eliminated from the pageant because people outside weren't going to be able to, as you say, to be consumed this material in the same way. So that is one of the interesting things about the pageant, it gained things and it lost things in that transition. Heather Warburton 17:26And I think a lot of what you talk about in the book is how both the women competing in Miss America, and the people competing in Miss'd America, how that they use that to relate to power. How they use it to gain power that may have otherwise been denied to them in this, you know, white hetero capitalist world that we live in today. Would you like to talk a little bit about how that relates to both of the people competing. Laurie Greene 17:55Yeah, of course, I know more about the drag pageant than the Miss America Pageant. So I would beg for forgiveness, in terms of the details of talking about beauty pageants in particular. But yeah, in the context of certainly Miss America, we can see that these highly intelligent, talented women are not able to get scholarships, or don't choose to try to compete to get scholarships, and therefore get a college education and power and notoriety even for their talent through writing a paper or entering an academic competition, but through a beauty pageant through the display of their bodies on stage. So we can see that for women who don't have access to power in the same way as men do, that a beauty pageant is one way that they can access this door to power in their lives. In the same way, gay men don't have access to the power of hetero normative masculinity. And in some cases, they don't have access to the power of even homosexual masculine masculinity, which may require them to be, you know, have beautiful bodies and be very attractive, which is very much a source of power for men in the gay community. And so drag provides them away to achieve the power of masculinity outside of these normal contexts. Whereas their feminine and he might mark them as disempowered in the heteronormative context. In the context of drag, it affords them masculine power they have they're powerful as men, we might that might surprise us because we might think they're acting as women, but they're gaining the power of men in these contexts, and even within the gay community where they may have been too skinny. Or unattractive or awkward. When they dress up in drag, they take they gain a power within the gay community which is highly revered, that they may not be able to access as men, according to the standards of homosexuality and attractiveness for men. So it is it is really interesting. Heather Warburton 20:22And there were two examples that you brought you mentioned in the book, both of which I thought were great examples. One was where I guess somebody was heckling, or hassling some people, one of the drag performers at a bar, and they like, kind of came off the stage and like, you know, got physically in somebody's face, like, yeah, I may be wearing a dress, but I'm a guy. Laurie Greene 20:45Yeah, that was a very famous drag queen from Atlantic City in the 70s. Yeah, and that, that I, you know, people say it all the time when they work in the drag industry behind the scenes. And they don't call them divas and Queens for nothing, I like to say. So both of those categories Queen and diva. These are not normal women with normal power. Queens have more power than other women do. And divas, I guess represent women who demand whatever they want, even if it's excessive, and expect to get it. So we can see the power that drag queens have in those terms, and we see that it's they don't have the power that women have, they have more power, they have the power of men. And yes, they may be wearing dresses, but they're men, that's how they access and express their power, whether they're on stage or off. Heather Warburton 21:44And I did love one example you gave you didn't go a whole lot into, you know, race, really, you know, race interactions that much. But there was one particular drag queen, you reference that flat out refused to perform somewhere, because the venue was highly racist, do you want to tell their story. Laurie Greene 22:01Yeah, um, race, of course, plays a very important role within the drag community, because it's part of our culture. So the dynamics of race and racism are the same. That was actually Honey Davenport, very famous drag queen, also, now ex RuPaul, Queen, it was at Monster Bar in New York, where she felt rightfully so that the owner had tried to pressure her to change her advertisement, because they felt that there were too many black people in it. And they wanted to appeal to a broader crowd, then they wanted some better looking dancers, I think is what the statement was. And Honey, who had been performing there for quite some time, and had a regular show, went up on stage and told everybody why she would not be performing it there anymore. And it was quite impactful in the community and led to numerous discussions about racism in the drag world, both in New York and in Philadelphia. And that's a discussion which is continuing to happen today. Micah Rasmussen 23:11I just thought it was beautiful. Using that power they created to, you know, use that platform to affect change from is really, as highly impressive thing. Laurie Greene 23:23And drag queens feel very strongly about that, you know, they feel very strongly about the fact that they have a platform that others don't, as some will say, when you're eight feet tall with your wig, your heels, and you have a microphone, people have to listen. And they they use that power for activism, some overtly, they see that as the role. And so maybe less directly, but still, they definitely see that they have a voice and power that others don't. And that drag queens have always been on the front lines, for example of LGBTQ movements, activist movements in the United States. And so they they do see that as their role. And they see that their role is part of the legacy of activism. Heather Warburton 24:12And I couldn't let you go without referencing the dichotomy you mentioned, of how kind of everyone loves drag queens now, drag queens are so you know, bachelorette parties go to drag clubs, and like everyone loves a drag queen, especially after RuPaul. You know, it's a media thing. But yet trans people who aren't drag queens are still some of the main sufferers of violence, that they are just attacked. And it's a weird dichotomy of how we love someone on a stage but hate someone in real life. Do you want to talk about that. Laurie Greene 24:45Yeah, um, without getting using any sort of academic technical terminology. What happens on the stage is interpreted differently than what happens in real life, you know, off that stage. So when someone's on that stage, all the actions that take place there are different. We can love somebody in that space of the performance, as long as they don't step off and act like that. Outside of this context of the performance, the same drag queen that is loved on stage will be beat up in an alley afterwards if they walk outside like that. And so that's true, whether we're looking at in performance theory or from perspective of anthropology, our identities change from one place to another. I think one of the things that happens is when something's on a stage, if it's curtailed in a way that it'd be that it is denuded of its danger, it's happening up there, but if it steps off, it becomes potentially subversive in a way that isn't accepted. And so, we do need to remember that that just because people love drag queens, doesn't mean they are aren't homophobic. Just because people love drag queens doesn't mean they're not transphobic. It just means that they appreciate a kind of popular culture, which is what drag has become. Alexia Love one of the Queens that I interviewed, that's a local Atlantic City Queen and also a MIss'd America, former crown holder titleholder said it really well, she said, "everybody used to want to have a gay boyfriend. Now they want to have a drag queen as a friend". So this is how he described, you know, cisgender heterosexual women in this country, they used to want to have a best boyfriend that was gay. Now it's a drag queen. And again, this is it's this kind of exceptionalist thinking, right? Just because you have a friend who's gay again, doesn't mean you're not homophobic. So and it's it is difficult for us to understand that. And remember also that there's transphobia, in the gay community. And this is very much something that I tried to deal with in the book, and talk about that being the next frontier, really the next challenge for the Miss'd America Pageant in particular. But the gay community in general, this is the challenge right now. Heather Warburton 27:34Right, you actually mentioned that like someone that's in mid transition, and taking hormones isn't allowed to compete, or at least hasn't historically been allowed to compete right. Laurie Greene 27:44In the beginning of the pageant when it was local, there weren't these rules. In fact, one of the earliest winners, Miss Tunay, who's local queen is a transgender female. And she won right in the beginning, and there was no nothing. It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't an issue, then it was about being local. Everybody knew each other. These issues didn't matter. But as it moved to the national stage, it takes on national issues. And that was when it was decided that traditional drag, meaning cis males were the only ones that were going to be acceptable competitors, there had to be rules. And transgender females or for that matter, cis women that we call them bio queens, dressing up as drag queens. We're not going to be allowed in the pageant now that is, has been discussed, and is going to be a challenge for the pageant as it goes forward. I think it's ironic, and also not surprising that the kinds of challenges to be relevant that Miss America has gone through in the way that they've struggled, and one could argue failed to meet those challenges are the same sorts of struggles that Miss'd America is going through. And the question for me is, are they going to stand up and meet that challenge in a way that doesn't make them irrelevant? Heather Warburton 29:19It's a good question. Only time will tell. So I have two more questions before I let you go. One is what was your favorite thing you've learned in researching this book? Laurie Greene 29:30Wow. That is that's such a hard question. I have a favorite anthropologist. Her name is Ruth Bahar. And she says that when an anthropologist goes into a situation where we're living with people like we do, we do something called participant observation, which means in our fieldwork, we go and live with people for a long time. And we allow them to We allow ourselves to form relationships with people and really get to know them in a way that research from outside doesn't allow that it has the potential to break your heart. And I really feel like this research for me did that. And I mean that in a very positive way these are people that I know, in my life, many of them, I've never had the opportunity to do this kind of research. And I learned so much from all these people that I thought I knew about things that I didn't know. And it's hard for me to pick one thing, maybe that's it, maybe that people are fragile. People are always more interesting and more complex than you know, people's identities are malleable. And we are different things for different people at different times. And it's all authentic. And maybe that's the thing I've learned the most for doing this particular research. Heather Warburton 31:04Good answer. Very good, answer So final question. If people want to get your book and read, you know, learn more about this culture, where can they get copies of it? How can they find it? Laurie Greene 31:15Well, it's it's actually being released December 18. But it's available on all the major booksellers, including Amazon, if you go to the website for Rutgers University Press, and they actually have a great discount for people if they go for friends and family. If you go to Rutgers University press.org one word, and put in the code, RFLR19. You get 30% off as my friends and family, if you order it before the release date. And that's just US. Yeah, yeah, although I have codes for other places. But that, you know, it makes it I tried to make sure with my publisher, and they were so good about this, that they made this book, inexpensive enough that the people that I wrote it for can purchase it. So it that puts the book under $18 for anybody who wants to buy it so hoping people do and I'm hoping Most of all, my goal in writing anything as an anthropologist, isn't really my analysis. It's to allow the people who I who are my informants for their story to be heard. And my mostly, I hope I do justice to the story. Heather Warburton 32:41Thank you so much for being here today. It's been a pleasure talking to you. To my listeners, thank you so much for joining us today. Hope you enjoyed this interview. I hope you go out and buy Lori's book. It's definitely we barely scratched the surface of some of the stuff that she goes into in this book. It's it's a good read. It's not a fluff book at all. She really dives into stuff so I think you'll enjoy it if you do go out and get it. Thank you so much for listening to us today. We would not be here without you guys. The future is yours to create. Go out there and create it.

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In this episode of Wine, Women, and Revolution, Heather interviews Micah Rasmussen from Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Ryder University about the Zwicker bill to institute Ranked Choice Voting here in NJ. They discuss the pros and cons that may come with ranked choice, as well as other possible voting systems besides ranked choice and first past the post. They discuss how this system could encourage or discourage marginalized voters and marginalized candidates. There are over 20 cities that have passed ranked choice voting as well as the state of Maine. They are leading this experiment in democracy that has to be better than the failing system we have. (Transcript Auto Generated) Micah Rasmussen 0:00runoff elections are notorious for screening out minority candidates who do well. This is Wine Women and Revolution with your host Heather Warburton. Hi and welcome to Wine Women and Revolution. I'm your host Heather Warburton coming at you here on Create Your Future Productions. It's my brand new home and my brand new website. You can find us online at your future creator.com and great news. Breaking News just today I am pretty much anywhere that you get your podcasts from now you can find Wine, Women and Revolution. They're in our new home and new format. So if you can click on follow, give us likes give us ratings really helps me out since I'm just starting out this new venture on my own. And I'm very excited about what the future is gonna hold. So today we have a great topic. one's definitely important to me. I think most people listening to me today would agree that the state of our electoral system in this country is kind of rough. Like we have vote shaming we have division, we have some of the least inspiring candidates for president that the duopoly has probably ever run. Voter apathy is that one of the all time highs barely more than 50% of people vote. So we kind of need some sort of solution. And my guest today, I think maybe has one of those possible solutions. And it's a solution I've been talking about for a couple years now that I really think is the best possible solution. And that's ranked choice voting. So I'd like to welcome to my show today. Micah Rasmussen. Thanks for having me. So let's get a little bit about your credentials. Why am I having you on to talk about this today? Unknown Speaker 1:50So I'm the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Ryder University. And so, I've spent most of my career as a practitioner of politics of New Jersey politics in particular. And I was governor McGreevy's press secretary was the last job that I held in politics. I also have managed a number of campaigns, I worked in the state legislature, I worked at the Department of Transportation. So I've seen a lot and done a lot. And really the strength that I bring to my students and to my work at the Institute, is that I bring that practical political experience and try to leverage it for the students advantage. And so there aren't too many people who study New Jersey politics in particular, Dr. Rebovich, the guy that the institute is named after was my mentor, when I was a student here at Ryder. And I'm so happy to be continuing the work that he did, and to do the same for new students that he was able to do for me. Micah Rasmussen 2:51And so today, we're talking about ranked choice voting. And I think people have probably heard about it. Now, there's a couple of states that have been trying to get it on the ballot. And here in New Jersey, we actually did have an assembly person put forth proposal to try to get it on the ballot here in New Jersey, right? Yes, Andrew Zwicker. He is an Assemblyman from the Princeton area. He represents parts of Princeton, parts of some parts of Mercer and Somerset County. He is sort of the intellectual heir apparent of a Rush Holt. We have actually two politicians in New Jersey who have been rocket scientists. So he's a thinker. He tries to bring a scientific based approach to decision making in the state legislature, and he's working with colleges and universities across the state to bring evidence based decisions to government. And to that end, he has offered this proposal to move to a ranked choice system of voting in New Jersey. And, and so what it would do is it would allow voters to rank candidates in their order of preference. And then if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, it automatically transfers their next choice votes to the candidates who have the highest number of votes, okay, so you're not forced to vote for every candidate. You don't have to rank every candidate you can if you want to. And very simply, if a candidate gets a majority of first choice votes on the first round of voting, and then they win the election very simply. But if there's no majority winner, then the last place candidate is eliminated. And any voter who had that candidate as their top choice would have their votes automatically transferred to the next choice, and their votes will be a portion to the candidates who got the more got more votes. This process will be repeated with successive rounds of voting until only two candidates remain. Then the candidate with the most votes will be the winner. Sometimes it's called an instant runoff system. Or if you can think about the process that we just went through in the spring with nominating the nominees for the Republican Partyor the Democratic Party for president, it's the way Iowa does things through their well known and sometimes controversial caucus process. But it would be an automatic caucus process where the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated. And then we have in the next round with the candidates who got over the threshold of votes. So you wouldn't have people have to show up in the same room and try to bribe people to your team with doughnuts, it would be different from that sort of caucusing. It's all done. You just vote sort of normally, like you vote now. Correct? Exactly. Right. Yes, it would be automatic. It would be done on the machines. And in fact, that's one of the one of the things that we'll probably talk about is infrastructure wise, you need machines that can handle it. And right now, the machinery that we use in New Jersey is not really equipped to handle it. And so what Assemblyman Zwicker has said there is we're pushing for machines that have paper backup anyway, so wouldn't be the end of the world to me if we had to get new machines that were able to handle paper backup and able to handle this new system of voting, Are there no counties in New Jersey that have a system that has paper backup currently. We do actually. And that's sort of the…that's sort of the weakness of that argument is we actually do have some counties that have invested in new equipment, have the new equipment, have paper back up. I couldn't tell you which ones off the top of my head, but I know that we have clerks, county clerks come in and talk to our students from time to time. I can tell you Warren County just invested in new equipment. There are a number of counties that have and they do have that paper backup. Yeah. Okay. So that Okay. So that would need either a software update or actually new physical equipment to be able to rank choices. It's just not set up that way. Currently. Yes. Exactly. And how and this is different than what we currently have? What we have currently is called first past the post voting, right? Yes, exactly. And, you know, this is this is what you it's not, it's not an entirely unfamiliar concept to us. But the part that you might be most familiar with the New Jersey is the concept of a runoff election, right? So I can think of several cities in New Jersey like Newark, or like Vineland, my hometown, where if neither candidate or for none of the candidates who are running for mayor achieve 50% of the vote, currently, now. There's a runoff election that's scheduled for the next month later. But you know, a lot of people think that this is always been a bad idea, because you're asking people to come out twice, you're trying to sustain interest. It's there's always a lower level of participation for that second runoff election. It's just, it's not that people aren't paying attention to their mayor's race, people pay a lot of attention to who's mayor of their town. But it's kind of tough to sustain that level of interest and that level of enthusiasm. So it's, widely regarded. And in fact, I will tell you, Heather, that I have some problems with the runoff process that I wonder how it would play out in an instant runoff process. For example. Runoff elections are notorious in the south, for screening out minority candidates who do well, right. So for example, if you've got a black candidate who does very well, and you've got two or three white candidate to do very well, in an election, that a runoff forcing the black candidate who doesn't achieve 50%, but does very well, forcing that candidate into a runoff can sort of force them into a situation where they not only have to do well now that they have to achieve over 50%. And this is what happened to Stacey Abrams, right. And her in her run for governor of Georgia, right, she did very well. But when the other candidates got dropped out, and we were down to Stacey Abrams versus Brian Kemp, white votes consolidated behind that, and he wound up winning the race. So I, I understand that rank choice voting can absolutely sometimes encourage independent and third party candidates to get into the race. And sometimes you'd get better candidates and better campaigns, because they're not you're not just going for the first choice now or the lesser of two evils. You're actually trying to capture people's imaginations so that you get those second round votes and those third round votes that can help you in the successive rounds. of the of the rank choice, voting the tabulation. But I'm also concerned that the runoff elections of the past have not always been the kindest to minorities. It's been an exclusionary tactic in some cases, Heather Warburton 10:20Right. And I kind of wonder if that would happen as much an instant runoff as it did with that delayed runoff, where everyone has to come back again. Because we all know that people from marginalized communities are already struggling to get out to the polls. So to ask them to come out again, twice, is really asking a lot from marginalized communities, where if it all happened at once, maybe some of that would be alleviated. Micah Rasmussen 10:46It's a good point. And you may very well be right about this, because we see a number of examples of urban areas across the country that are adopting rank choice voting like New York City just did. And I don't believe that there by any means the first. They are about 20th city across the country that is embarking on this, you know, this experiment. So you know, there's nothing to be lost by trying, you know, if New York City finds that it's not a good system, and it is an exclusionary tactic, that I'm sure that they'll move away from it very quickly. So I think, to some extent, we can say, we don't think this is what's going to happen. We don't see any evidence it's going to happen. But we have seen this tactic in the past with run offs. And you know, if we start to see it again, then we're going to want to move away from it, because we're certainly not going to want to see a situation where an innovation like this leads to, you know, discouraging people from getting involved. Heather Warburton 11:36Right Micah Rasmussen 11:36I think can happen, not just to a minority candidate, but I also think it can happen to third party candidates. I think I know, I know that one of the goals here is to increase participation. But I'm not sure that this does anything to change the chances of a third party candidate from winning, in fact, you not only have to do well now, but you have to give 50% now, right, so this, you know, under the under the current system, you don't necessarily have to achieve a majority unless the law says you do, you can win with a plurality of votes. Now, we're saying, We no longer want to achieve a plurality. That's a bad thing. We want consensus, which was one of the nice things about rancors voting, we do achieve consensus and that way, it helps us to achieve consensus, because nobody has any longer elected without a majority of the vote. That's a positive thing. That's a wonderful thing that we can now say that most of the electorate supported, every person who's elected is no longer possible to be elected without a majority of the vote. That's a good thing, except it raises the bar for a third party candidate. Heather Warburton 12:42I guess, as a third party person, you know, everyone knows I'm associated with the Green Party. I was the chair of the Green Party of New Jersey a few years back. And like, quite honestly, I think our best candidate, other than the ones who have won, you know, we have green people holding office here in New Jersey. But you know, we generally at max get five or 6% of the vote, and a lot of that is that lesser evil and fear and vote shaming. I mean, look at, you know, the presidential election this year. We have Joe Biden, we have Donald Trump, we have the Libertarian candidate, we have my candidate, Howie Hawkins, and openly saying that you're a Howie Hawkins voter definitely stirs up a lot of Oh, you're well, that's just voting for Trump. You know, that's kind of the myth, at least now, votes are never reassigned. My vote for Hawkins is never going to Trump, there's no way in hell I would ever vote for Trump. But this rank choice voting kind of eliminates that narrative, I think it does free people up to not be abused for their vote. Micah Rasmussen 13:49That's a really good point. And I think the third party voter, you're right, it does create the option that you can vote in the first ballot for the candidate that you really like that third party candidate. But at the end of the day, if that candidate does get eliminated, you don't have the fear that you've wasted your vote or that your votes been thrown away, because your vote is allocated to your next choice. So that's absolutely true. And I get that that helps participation that way. But I also think if you look at it from the other end of it, you know before let's let's look at the classic example, Jesse Ventura, Jesse Ventura would have had a much harder time being elected governor of Minnesota, if he had had to achieve 50% of the vote, instead of just getting a plurality of the vote. So this raises the bar for Jesse Ventura to win The governor of Minnesota Heather Warburton 14:44I think history will have to decide if that would have been a good or a bad thing. Jesse Ventura, not being the governor. But I guess what I did want to get into next in the conversation was that Maine, for example, this year is specifically going to have rank choice voting for their presidential election. So I think this is going to be a good experiment to see all these things that we're kind of theorizing about right now. We can see what they would play out, like, what percentage do the greens usually get in Maine? What percentage do the libertarians usually get in Maine? Does that increase to help the party grow? You know, does it eliminate voting out of fear? You know, it'll be an interesting experiment to say Micah Rasmussen 15:30it will. And the Supreme Court in Maine just decided within the last couple of days against the republican party that was trying to eliminate rank choice voting for president and said, essentially, for the first time just a few days ago that we will be deciding the presidential race in Maine by rank choice voting. They have had ranked choice voting for a couple of years now, in Maine. And actually, in the last congressional race in 2018, a house republican was ousted. In the second congressional district, that more conservative district in Maine, he was the winner on the raw machine vote. The first round, he had more votes plurality, but he did not have an outright majority. So that triggers again, exactly what we're talking about here, where, and it was Peloquin, Bruce Poliquin. He had more votes on the machine for the first choice, but not a majority of them. They go into the second round, and Jared Golden picks up votes from the independent. There were two independent candidates. They of course drop out because neither one of them reached the threshold. And their votes that they earned were reallocated. More of them were reallocated to Golden. So Golden actually picked up a couple of thousand votes, and was able to overcome that first round deficit that he had. And he was actually he filled the seat, he won the election Poliquin sued. He said that vote shouldn't be allocated this way. There's no provisional constitution. There's no provision in the US Constitution for this. And ultimately, it was it was rejected, the court said, Look, Maine has the right to set the rules for its election the way that Maine wants to set the rules for its election. And so you know, the extension now they moved to this system. Four years ago, they had the house races decided this way two years ago. And now they're going to try this for the presidential coming up. And the Senate in Maine as well, that this year, there is a green running a very strong campaign against Susan Collins, you know, one of those senators that we're hearing quite a bit about now with the appointment of the replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you know, we're hearing, she's in the news quite a bit. And Lisa Savage, who was just on our women's panel that we hosted last week, is running a really strong campaign. So it'll be interesting to see how she does there, it'll be very interesting to see. Because if you want to vote for her, you don't have any fear that you're spoiling the race between Collins and Gideon, you don't have to feel that you're throwing away your vote between you know, like, let's say that, you know, the third party Savage doesn't wind up winning. Um, and let's say one side of the other of the two major candidates winds up winning, you can still participate in that race with your second or third vote, that'll be reallocated, presumably, to either get in or to Collins. And so that will be very interesting. I do think that it'll go to two rounds, obviously, electronically. And I do think that those third party voters will have the chance now, to participate in that second round question between, you know, now that we've eliminated Savage are we going and I don't mean to be depressing to third party candidates. But if that's the way it winds up, then the votes get reallocated. Yep. Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how all this stuff does play out. And what would the percentage that the greens did end up with on the first round, it will be higher than what it would have been without ranked choice voting. And I think also in a state here, like New Jersey, it's kind of decided how the outcome we pretty much know how the presidential we're gonna vote blue in New Jersey, it's a pretty, it would take something really astonishing to happen to New Jersey not to go blue. So a lot of people your vote doesn't count in New Jersey, there's only so many people whose votes do count. So with something like rank choice voting, you might actually be able to make your vote count a little more. Yeah. And one of the things that , I participated in a story that Matt Freeman wrote about this worker proposal from Politico, and one of the things we both believe may happen is that it does increase. Here's where I really like ranked choice. Okay. And and, you know, the description we just had about the Maine Senate race is a good example. I love ranked choice for a jumble primary situation where you have a bunch of candidates, and you're trying to wittle the field down to one nominate, right? That's a great system because now you're really not just getting that first choice, but you're getting next preferences as well. It's a really nice way. And when you think about the way Iowa does it, or when you think about the way that Nevada does it with their caucuses, which we may lose now, because the problems that they had with implementing them this time around, we may not see them again. But there is a very nice element there, which is that you're not just getting that gut first round reaction, you're getting some depth of preference, you're getting some depth of of earning votes, right. You're getting a a richer, final outcome. Right. And so I like it for that, that that primary situation. And I think you could encourage more participation that way, let's face it, the parties in New Jersey are notorious for not having an open candidate selection process in their primaries, right? It's, you know, it's all done by party line, it's all done by party, boss, right? It's not an open process. This really has the potential to open up the process to candidates who want to get involved for candidates, the barrier to getting involved the barrier to having an impact to getting involved. If you don't make the next round, you don't make the next round, you're you're not feeling like you go out and vote in a primary. And the cost of voting for a third party candidate is so high that you would never contemplate doing it, you can still do it. If that's what you really like, without fear that you're going to have no impact on the final outcome of the race if that candidate is eliminated. Heather Warburton 21:45Yeah, so but I'm thinking Zwicker is not really getting a great support from his fellow colleagues for this bill. Can you kind of tell me what the reactions have been? Micah Rasmussen 21:55Yeah, it's been, you know, it's been? I would say that people say, Oh, it was an intriguing idea, right? Nobody says, nobody says I hate this. Nobody says it's DOA. Nobody says it will never go anywhere. But you know, all this. That's intriguing. That's a novelty. Right, treat it as sort of novelty. It hasn't, it hasn't moved legislatively. I don't know that it will move legislatively. It's a thinking person's idea. Right, quite frankly. And you need to be willing to set aside the existing way of doing things. And I guess it shouldn't come as much surprise to us that anybody in the legislature now has come through the existing process, and is part of the existing process, and has a vested interest in the existing process. And so therefore, they're not so eager to reject it, and to try something new. I wouldn't say he's going away, I wouldn't say the idea is going away, I would say it'll Hang in there. The more we see successes with other places trying it, the more we may say, let's try this once, you know, we had experiment, we've had electoral experiments before. In New Jersey, for example, people may not remember this, but we had a public financing option for a couple of legislative districts in New Jersey for a very short period of time. There'd be nothing wrong with trying this in a primary election at some point and seeing how we do we like it great. It'll be you know, an experiment we don't like it will come back to the old by their, you know, again, do I see that happening tomorrow? there? I don't. But the more we see successes in other places, the more we may lower the barrier to the level of resistance to it. Heather Warburton 23:40Right. And, you know, for people who are trying to change the world, then, you know, changing the electoral process is just another hurdle that we know is going to be a barrier. And we know it's going to be a challenge. But if we believe that change is important, and necessary, then it's just another thing we have to fight for change for. Micah Rasmussen 24:00Absolutely, yeah, no, I think now, here's here's sort of a little bit of a downside. And I know this may be discounted by proponents. But there is a significant potential for voter confusion because it's different, right? Because it's new. It doesn't mean that can't be overcome. It's nothing that education can't overcome. It's nothing that's showing people how the system works. When you explain it very simply, in you know, in one sentence, you allow voters to rank candidates and their choice a preference and transfer your votes. If no candidate gets more than 50%. How hard is that? Right? I think it can be done. I'm confident that that that that can be educated. However, we are we are now going through an election in which you know, I almost want to say it's cognitive dissonance , right? It's almost like where we want to be confused, right where we want to say that the new process of voting by mail is confusing to us. I don't think it's terribly confusing. I don't think anybody is really confused by it. But if one side or the other wants to be confused, then they'll be confused if one side wants to say it's chaos, and I guess it can be chaos, and this is a new way of doing things. So I think, you know, coupled with any experiment, and this coupled with any new system like this, you'd have to dedicate a significant effort to making sure that voters knew what was going on. Heather Warburton 25:23Well, that kind of brings me into the other thing I wanted to discuss today was, there are other options other than first past the post and rank choice. There are other methods of voting, we could have a conversation about, for example, approval voting, where you would just go in and you wouldn't rank This is my first choice, this is my second choice, you would just vote for everyone you like, as one option. And then there's also one that I think is a little possibly even more towards the voter confusion of Score Voting, where they give you 10 points, and you allocate those 10 points, however you want to any of the candidates. And I'm sure there's others that I haven't really thought of. But there are other options. And you admittedly, he said before the interview, he wasn't as familiar with these, but he kind of wanted to give a gut reaction when he hears about them. Would they hurt with voter confusion? Would they help? I know that with approval voting machines could accept that now because we are allowed to vote vote multiple candidates on things like school board already. Micah Rasmussen 26:24Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. No, you Yeah, let's say vote for three instead of vote for vote for five or vote for three year vote for two or whatever. Right. Exactly. That's, that's not a hard concept to grasp, right. And then, but I think people still have to understand what's going to happen to those choices. You want them to understand what's going to happen to those choices. So yes, I agree that that's possible. Here's the other thing, the more we are voting by mail now, instead of by machine, the more that's really theoretically possible, and you don't have hardware issues to overcome. The other thing that can be said about voting by mail, is that you're voting by main, you're voting at home, you're voting in your dining table, you are laying the ballot out in front of you, you're stopping to really digest things. I don't know about everybody else. But I know that when people go into the booth today, there's pressure on them to get in and get out, there's not a lot of time to sit and digest. That's why you have drop off when it comes to ballot questions that are on the side, because people think, oh, there's somebody behind me a lot, I better get the heck out of here, a better get done as quickly as I can, if you had the chance to really sit down and digest and say, Oh, I have 10 points here. Let me see how I want to allocate these right? Let me really stop and think about how I want to do this. If you're sitting down over the course, you know, a loved one, whatever, by yourself, whatever, you may really take the time to put some thought into this right, especially if there's some good instructions that come with it. So I think, you know if this is in fact, where we're moving to, and I realized we're in the middle of the virus, but I don't think we're going to go back to a day in which a lot of us aren't voting by mail. So I think the idea of sitting down and having the time to really plan this out, is a good way and a good time to have to introduce some of these complexities or some of these nuances or some of these new rules and ways of doing things. Right. And I mean, these those last two, I don't believe have been tried anywhere in the country, to the best of my knowledge. I don't think there's any towns that have used them yet. But you know, there's various ways and as long as we're having the conversation, we may as well talk about all the upsides and all the downsides of all the options we're talking about. You could theoretically try one in each county, you know, again, if you're talking about a primary, remember and generals. I think for the reasons I talked about, I put in a little bit of a different bucket. But there's absolutely no reason why a party Let's face it, a primary election is still a party affair, right until you open it up and make it a completely open primary, which is a different story as well, or, you know, completely open primaries, but there'd be no reason why you couldn't conduct some experimentation with different parties and different candidates in different counties trying different systems and getting some voter feedback on that. I think it'd be a good idea. Heather Warburton 29:20I know, our party does usually use rank choice within our party, the Green Party wherever they can. I mean, there's some states where you vote in a primary like California along with everyone else. But in states where the Green Party sort of runs their own internal primaries, we do generally try to use rank choice voting whenever possible. So it's a very small scale experiment. Micah Rasmussen 29:42No, I'm sure it works just fine. Yeah, absolutely. Let's see, what else did I want to bring up today? I think we've covered most of the topics I wanted to touch on today. Actually, I do. I think that's it other than I wanted to give you a chance for sort of a last word about ranked choice voting or voting in general, or words of wisdom you want to pass along to the listeners, if people do like these ideas, how could they learn more? Can they reach out to your center and get information from them? Absolutely. Anybody who wants to learn more, check out https://www.rider.edu/offices/services/rebovich-institute-new-jersey-politics I'd be glad to discuss it. One thing that I do want to say is that a lot of times with new proposals like this, it is important that we think through unintended consequences again, you know, I think it's a it's a great way to encourage participation, does it give a minority candidate full access? does it increase the potential of the possibility that it sort of screens them out before you get to, you know, those final two results? So that's the kind of thing you want to think through? And maybe you have to test and see how these 20 cities that are looking at it that are doing it? How is their experience going? Is that actually encouraging more people into the process? Or is it discouraging people from the process? And I think there's a lot of reason to believe that it's a latter. And let's see if that's what's happening in real time. Right? I mean, it's science, you create a hypothesis, this is going to be a better voting system. We test that hypothesis on larger and larger scales, until we reach the conclusion, yes, this is a better voting system. And I think we're into the steps of that experiment now. Yep, I agree. And listen, we can't do worse than the system we have. So it is certainly worth seeing what we can do better. Absolutely. To my listeners, thank you so much for joining us today. This was a really important discussion to have. And I know speaking as a third party organizer, it kind of seems sometimes like it's like our only chance at actual democracy is to have some sort of alternate system that's created with more openness in mind. There are a lot of barriers put on if you're trying to run or organize outside of that duopoly. There's already huge financial barriers placed against you. And then there's just some arbitrary barriers, like you've got to get X percent of the vote if you even want to have about wine. So something like this could kind of help deconstruct some of those things. 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A Is For Activism

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A Is For Activism

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A Is For Activism