Pluto Misogyny Showdown at City Hall

Ojai City Council Series Part I

This………………………

“It’s much easier to fall into misogyny than it is to act to resolve the crisis unfolding here in Ojai and everywhere.

There seems to be a faction in Ojai that believes if we bring more money into our valley via development, building, Short Term Rentals, and more tourism this will solve what has been long broken. This mostly benefits a smaller group as opposed to the community as a whole. This, in my opinion, is just another version of trickle-down economics, a policy that has had disastrous consequences for most of us and has contributed to the widening of the wealth gap and more and more of us falling beneath the poverty line.

We need leadership and a planning commission that are willing to take the seemingly brave and bold steps of turning toward those most in need and creating structures, literally and figuratively, that will support them.

(Name Redacted) was appointed by elected officials who are no longer in office and therefore, in my opinion, is not currently in alignment with the will of the voters. Due to this, along with the use of misogyny in campaign ads and emails along with what appears to be a power grab and attention-seeking behavior, I support his removal from the planning commission.

I ask that the council appoint someone with the appropriate qualifications who also shows a willingness to support the creation of policies and a community that tends to everyone in Ojai across the economic spectrum, along with asking the council themselves, to continue to put your attention here as well.

Until we all are cared for here, none of us are truly cared for.”

………………….is what I said at Tuesday evening’s city council meeting.

I’d been taking a back seat where politics are concerned since working on both of Bernie’s Presidential campaigns other than doing my civic duty as a citizen and voting in the 2020 and 2022 elections. I’ve got to admit that I experienced some serious burnout after my time on Bernie’s campaigns and the COVID timeline, and I just had not felt impelled to take more direct action anywhere else other than to use my voice where various issues are concerned especially the distortions of fear manifesting in forms of hate like misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, racism, etc.

In 2022 we had a gruesome mayoral and city council election in Ojai. Although I have an Ojai zipcode, I live in an unincorporated part of the county about a mile outside of the city limits, meaning I am not eligible to vote in the city election, a city (populated by about 8000 people) which determines much of the tone of the entire valley (populated by around 30,000).

In 2020 Betsy Stix was elected as Mayor of Ojai. We’ve had female mayors in the past, but this was due to a rotating mayoral position. One of our five elected city council persons would get to serve a two-year mayoral term and was chosen only by the sitting council at the time.

In 2014 Measure A passed changing our governing body to four city council members, each serving a four-year term, and a generally elected mayor serving a two-year term. Johnny Johnston was our first elected mayor in 2016 and won his seat again in 2018. Mayor Johnston served his second term and then retired.

2020 saw Betsy Stix running for mayor, a newcomer to our political landscape here in Ojai, against then-seated city council member W. She beat him with 64% of the votes giving Ojai its first-ever female mayor winning in a general election.

The rumble of misogyny began early on in her tenure. How dare a woman run for office, win, and then use the power she was elected to use!?!?

SHAME ON HER! (literal language being used against her)

We, like many communities, have political clubs. As the 2022 election neared, Mayor Stix, along with three out of the four council seats came up for election. Suddenly beings aligned with younger and female bodies jumped into the race in a way that I had not seen before, perhaps spurred on by our national politics and the need to redistribute power more equitably from majority white, cis-gendered, heterosexual male rule to a more diverse playing field. Perhaps Saturn hanging out in Aquarius at the time had something to do with this as well.

A celebrity (yeah, Happy Days) announced he’d be running against Mayor Stix, and the Ojai Valley Democrat Club (OVDC) saw fit to endorse him along with a slate of candidates for the 3 open city council seats. The president of the OVDC also happens to be the city planning commissioner mentioned in my letter above. He serves on a couple of other planning commissions as well as serves as an officer in the Ventura Democrat Club. He was appointed to the planning commission in the summer of 2022 by then-sitting council member W as he was preparing to vacate his seat. Yep, the same council member W who had lost to Mayor Stix.

At this point, the misogynistic attacks against Mayor Stix became more than a rumble, they became deafening to those of us paying attention. She was publicly attacked, shamed, and humiliated by The Celebrity, our local newspaper, and the OVDC in their campaigns both for The Celebrity and against Stix. The ugliness was palpable as stories were tossed around about Mayor Stix and her affiliations, all as a way to mask the actual misogyny taking place, fueled, it seemed, by the aforementioned planning commissioner.

She won her seat, narrowly, as did two others out of the three that the OVDC campaigned against. They had created a slate of candidates that ran as a block and only one of them won her seat, again narrowly.

It came out about a week or so ago that said planning commissioner had written an email back in early August of 2022 and in it, he referred to some of the beings running as “weak, young, female opponents”. One of the beings he was referring to in this email is psychic medium and astrologer Rachel Lang who did win her election to the council and is our first out LGBTQIA council member. His email also reads as if he had a very specific agenda for our community some of which potentially sits at odds with his place on the planning commission as his position there is to carry out the will of the council.

The shit hit the fan in our community, especially on social media, as this email spread like wildfire and other examples of potential abuses of power on his part came to light. Pluto retrograding its way through Capricorn taking patriarchal rungs out one at a time. The Mayor added an item to the council meeting agenda to have him removed and the showdown began. To this meeting, I felt impelled to go, partly due to everything I had been observing since Mayor Stix had first been elected, partly as a voice for those underserved in our community, partly as a female-identifying feminist, and partly to support those on our council, including Mayor Stix. Jon chose to be present as well.

When it was my turn to speak, there were a lot of us speaking at this one, with more of us there in support of his removal than against, I walked up to the podium, prewritten statement in hand, and immediately felt nervous.

Damn

It’s been a long time since I have gotten up to speak in front of others at an event that is not mine. Facing our city council triggered in me my issues with authority regardless of the fact that I know most of them personally.

I took a breath, steadied myself, leaned into the microphone, and spoke. Each member of the public making a comment is given three minutes and there is an easily visible countdown timer projected on the wall. I got through it with 45 seconds left and thought, “Phew, great, I did it,” and started to take a moment to check in with myself to see if there was anything else I needed to communicate.

At this point, one of the council members (she was the one from the slate of candidates endorsed by the OVDC) decided to step into me, which was not at all what I had expected to happen when I signed up to speak. Sometimes a council member may ask a question of someone making a public comment for clarity, but this was not what was happening.

I could feel her energy and tone trying to steamroll me as I began to feel condescended to. She spoke directly to me for 42 seconds (the public comment clock had been stopped when I stopped speaking, so my 45 seconds remained there). At this point, the mayor interrupted her to remind her that we were still in public comments as the council member seemed to just be making her own points.

Said council member raised her voice just a bit to our mayor, the person who has been repeatedly attacked and denigrated by the OVDC and others, including people who had stepped up to the podium that night and said, “No, I understand that. Thank you, Mayor. I am going to finish. You don’t need to interrupt me,” and at that very moment, I reached my limit.

With my voice raised I spoke extemporaneously beginning with an instruction to the city council member that I did not need a lecture from her and then proceeded to share my perspective on how the person up for removal from our planning commission was a central figure in creating the ugliness in our political environment due to his pitting them against one another along with his misogynistic attacks against out mayor which began during her tenure as mayor, gained momentum during the 2022 election and were reverberating within city hall that very night.

I had not intended to go off-book. It wasn’t even the way she spoke to me. It was the way she spoke to our mayor, who throughout the entirety of the public comment section of the meeting sat calmly with a neutral and open expression on her face even while being publicly humiliated, thanking every speaker once they had finished. Meanwhile, the two members of our council who sit opposed to her were animated and even disruptive throughout some of the public comments that they did not agree with.

The quietest moment of the night was when the one sitting male council member enumerated his many well-researched and fact-based line items for supporting the removal of the commissioner. He spoke at length, and it is not lost on me that while misogyny was on trial there, only the male council member seemed to fully garner the quiet and respect that was due everyone that night.

After a 5-plus hours-long meeting, there were a few other things on the agenda, the vote was three to two in favor of removal.

I am reminded of the theory that our actions are returning to us more and more quickly in this lifetime than they ever have before. We used to play the karmic long- game and it seems that this is evolving as we are living in a time of accelerated change. One need only look at the fact that we have our first-ever former President in the U.S. indicted for multiple crimes. Misogyny is also a tool he has used to claw his way into more and more power.

I, along with a number of other women who spoke out at the meeting, am currently being ridiculed on an Ojai Community Facebook group by a, *checks notes*, yep, cis-gendered, heterosexual, white male.

Pluto retrograding its way through Capricorn destroying the patriarchal constructs bit by bit is a bear. I’m all in for poking the bear whether the misogyny is being outwardly expressed or internally expressed. Internalized misogyny is just as destructive to the yin as the outwardly expressed version is.

I woke a few hours after going to bed that night with the intense pain of a charley horse rippling through my right calf. The yang dominant side of my body was struggling after sitting for hours on end in a tense environment and speaking out knowing some of those behind me and in front of me absolutely hated what I had to say. I did some reiki on myself and relaxed my muscle back into place.

The next morning, Jon and I put the pack into the car and headed to the beach to play, heal, clear out, and free ourselves to face the next moment.

Read Part II Here