🗞 Your Towards Thriving Newsletter: What 4/20 Means for Gender Violence | At Your Cervix

April 20, 2023

TOWARDS THRIVING

YOUR NEWSLETTER FROM

THE IDAHO COALITION AGAINST

SEXUAL & DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

a white background has 5 multicolor, collage-based people who resemble Black and brown people with distinct features; the tallest person is in the center of the image. small text at the bottom of the image credits the artist, Favianna Rodriguez.

A stock photograph of someone is a white full-body suit and blue medical gloves holding a large cannabis plant and examining it with tweezers

What 4/20 Means for Gender Violence

People around the world use this date, 4/20, as a reason to smoke & celebrate the cannabis herb, especially as more states & nations begin to decriminalize & legalize weed. However — like most things that are criminalized & stigmatized — weed impacts gender-based violence in very acute, complicated ways.

Today, let's add meaning behind 4/20 and examine what this date means in relation to our roles in ending gender violence:

Over the years, we have collectively learned more & more about what weed can mean to survivors, advocates, and the movements we fuel for liberation. For example, we now know that weed can be a healing tool for people, especially survivors of gender violence who are living with PTSD. We also know that weed can be exploited by others to facilitate sexual assault and other acts of violence. Further, we know that people often carry shame for fear of repercussions for disclosing instances of domestic abuse while weed was present. In immeasurable ways, weed plays a pivotal role in our understandings of gender violence.

In the fall of 2022, a news story came forward & brought light to a relatively little-known or seldom-discussed narrative about weed's relationships to gender oppression. This story met at the crossroads of the cannabis industry & the vile industries of human trafficking. (Check it out! It's linked below.)

As states & nations continue to decriminalize & legalize weed, the new weed industries that develop must be intentional about preventing human trafficking and all forms of gender-based abuse. Systemic oppression has thoroughly saturated every industry with gender oppression & systemic harm, which can be evidenced by sexual violence in the workplace or patriarchal pay gaps.

It doesn't need to be this way, though. A world without systemic oppression is possible; thus, a weed industry without gender violence is possible, too.

There are many ways to acknowledge the impacts of weed on survivors of gender violence. Today, we can begin to invest in a new meaning behind 4/20 by intentionally considering the acute, complicated ways that weed impacts our work as advocates against abuse, our beloved communities, and our individual lives. By addressing the interconnections of weed and gender-based abuse, we live further into the many possibilities of preventing & repairing gender violence.

Click the "Read More" button to read last fall's story (referenced above) about Human Trafficking and the Marijuana Industry:

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At Your Cervix

At Your Cervix is a new film (recently approved for PBS broadcast) about OBGYN education. The film exposes the unethical & traumatic ways that medical & nursing students are taught to perform pelvic exams, often on anesthetized patients, without their consent. This practice is still legal in 29 states.

It's important to talk about how this unethical practice disproportionately impacts women and genderqueer people, especially individuals who are Black & brown.

At Your Cervix cuts to the core of so many issues which are on people's minds right now: consent, racial justice, patient rights, reproductive justice, and equal access to care. As we reach the end of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, we would love to continue finding ways to come together to address medical assault.

Click the "Read More" button to stream the film's trailer video:

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An Ode to Survival

"In a time of proliferating wars, sobering environmental disasters, ongoing and looming pandemics, so-called cultural deaths, AI-inspired humanitarian crises, persistent land co-optation, and inexhaustible doomscrolling, it seems that we endlessly discuss the end of the world at the same time that we don’t discuss it enough.

In Alive at the End of the World (2022), Saeed Jones unveils a paradox: How can you be alive if it is the end? Is it really the end if you are alive?

In Jones's new collection, what it means to be alive, what it means to be at the end, and what it means to be alive at the end of the world — as a Black queer body, navigating personal grief & collective historical traumas — turn impossibility into new possibilities of radical survival."

Click the "Read More" button keep reading of Christos Kalli's article: