Sticking it to the Man, Volume 1

As part of my weekly radio address "Feminism is Fun", I like to give helpful hints on how to stick it to the man. The core of feminism, (or at least the feminism that I believe in), is working against oppression and privilege. The whole world is full of inequality, and a true feminist will fight injustice not only within the confines of gender politics, but wherever she or he finds it.

I live in a building that is owned and run by my school, which, for reasons of legality, we shall refer to only as "U of Suck". It's a really big university that's really expensive, and most of the professors suck. We’re mostly encouraged to not actually develop our own ideas, but just recycle what famous academics have said, and then argue whether they were right or not, based on what other academics have said on the matter. It’s pretty ridiculous, but that’s what higher learning is all about. They (“they”! the bastards,) say that having a higher education helps you get a career, which is one of those things that rich people have. When you have a career, you sit at a desk all day and can never actually describe what you do at work when people ask you about it at parties. Careers seem so mysterious, I really hope to have one someday.

Anyway, this building I live in is a high rise built in the sixties, which was a long time ago, when the world started to become slightly less backwards than it was before. Sometimes when I imagine what it would be like to live in the sixties, I have really good memories of it. This building, however, is not one of the good things that happened in the sixties.

We’ve got what can only be referred to in polite company as “a cockroach epidemic”. I grew up poor and I've lived in some pretty bad neighbourhoods, but I had never seen a cockroach before I moved into this place. The hallways smell like the part of hell reserved for people who burn down orphanages while eating puppies and quoting David Frum, and on any given day, two of the four elevators are out of service. We’ve also got a problem where sometimes the fire alarm goes off all day and all night long, and my cats get stressed out, and then I go really crazy.

Then there’s the laundry room. It has a decent amount of washers and dryers, but unfortunately only half of them are working. That really sucks when you just finish washing four loads of laundry, and then you go to dry the stuff, and none of the available dryers are functioning. Then I go really crazy.

And now, they’re giving us a rent increase, as well as increasing the cost of the washers by 100%, during a recession, because they are assholes.

What makes me really mad about all this, is that every other building U of Suck owns is spotless and full of the latest technology. But this building is for families (or those living in sin, like me) and we get shafted.

So, one way I like to stick it to the man is by always paying rent a week late. This building (that is reserved for low-income student families) is falling apart, and the idea of paying punctual rent just offends the very core of my being. Not only do I pay the rent late, I also write really funny things in the ‘memo’ part of the cheque. Like “cockroaches/rent”, or “that smell in the hallway/rent”. Last month my partner wrote “Rent increase during a recession, thanks”, and for April I wrote a very simple, “broken dryers”.

You see, there are many ways that you can stick it to the man. If you love pets but your landlord is a jerk and says no pets, then get a pet! Because legally, he can’t say shit about it. I did that in my last place. It was really funny denying that we had a cat while he was sitting on the window sill looking out at the free world.

So, remember to stick it to the man whenever you see something that makes your spidey senses tingle in the wrong way. Know your rights, and defend them if they’re threatened by someone who probably thinks you don’t know how badly you’ve been given the shaft.

Oh, and bring back the sixties. We really knew how to stick it to the man back then.