This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, publishers of the joint memoir Deeks & Liss: A Couple of Real Sad Bums.
Recommended Reading:
Bri: 23rd Down Under Feminist Carnival
Renee: Dr. Phil Takes on the Fatties
Echidne: On The Death Threats Against Senator Murray
Fannie: The Heterosexist Agenda: Separate and Inferior
Cara: Texas Prisons Have Nation's Highest Rates of Sexual Abuse
Ouyang Dan: The Importance of Being Bellatrix Lestrange
Julianne: Is This a Trick Question?
Leave your links in comments...
Wednesday Blogaround
Not Trenchant As Hell: NYTimes.com Features Exclusive Sexist, Racist, Transphobic Content
by Shaker EastSideKate, a feminist teacher/scholar/mother/partner/derbygirl from Upstate New York.
[Trigger warning for voyeurism, transphobia, illusions to trans panic.]
I still haven't figured out the New York Times' "Opinionator" section. As far as I can tell, it's a catch-all for material someone at the Times thinks readers might like, but doesn't want to take responsibility for. While the section has had its highlights, Alec Soth's April 1 photo essay [warning: creepy] "Ash Wednesday, New Orleans" (part one in a dude-part series) was not one of them.
Here's my quick summary. According to the text, "Soth explores cycles of sin and redemption in the aftermath of Mardi Gras." In the opinion segment, we learn that Soth will spend the afternoon in his hotel room. There's a photo of his bare legs spread on a hotel room bed, followed by shots of the TV, followed by a photo of cans of lite beer in the hotel sink.
Soth goes out after midnight, where he shoots photos of "the aftermath." Many of these photos consist of passed out people, including several photos of women's disembodied legs. The photos look like they might have been shot by a guy who just spent the day in a hotel room drinking beer.
Soth follows this with a series of Wednesday afternoon portraits of people with ashes on their foreheads. The last segment includes photographs of a Latina woman he re-encounters that evening. He invites her up to his hotel room, where he takes some awkward video. The montage ends with the text "while I was taking her picture, I realized R. was a man."
Okay then.
Shorter summary: Soth is a dudely dude, here are drunk and/or poor people, here's some Jesus stuff (which is totally profound), here's a Latina woman (how exotic!) who turns out to be a Latina trans woman (too exotic! ewwwwww....)
First, as someone who plays with cameras, I have to say I'm unimpressed with most of the photographs (maybe it's a hipster thing). Then there's the whole "cycles of sin and redemption" thing. How do the passed-out folks fit into this? Did Soth get their consent? If they were drunk, could Soth get their consent? Why do I get the sense that this is the point? It's like hipster, rape-culture inspired, poverty porn.
The setting in New Orleans (or at least the French Quarter) doesn't strike me as particularly original or comforting, either. BTW, the audio during the hotel scene included a segment of a newscast about Haiti's infrastructure. Get it?
And the trans woman. In the hotel room. Who Soth proceeds to out. This apparently also has something to do with "sin and redemption"? What, precisely, am I supposed to make of a photo essay that ends with a trans woman in a hotel room with a strange man who is eerily fascinated with taking her picture, and then is shocked to discover that she is, in his words "a man"? I've heard stories of that sort of thing happening, and, yeah... I really didn't need to see that.
In any case, the whole thing was very hip and edgy and profound and not at all sexist, racist, transphobic, or otherwise exploitative.
I can totally wait to see the next installment of Soth's project. Also, I'll be asking the Times what the hell they were thinking, and requesting that they reconsider Soth's place in Opinionator lest I cancel the subscription I cancelled years ago.
[Via Helen and Gina.]
I Just Don't Know What to Say Anymore
Greenwald (emphasis original):
[In January, The Washington Post's Dana Priest reported] that Obama had continued Bush's policy (which Bush never actually implemented) of having the Joint Chiefs of Staff compile "hit lists" of Americans, and Priest suggested that the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was on that list. The following week, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the "right" to carry out such assassinations.
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.
...No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.
Instead, in Barack Obama's America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens -- and a death penalty imposed -- is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone's guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America's newspapers -- cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they're granted -- to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist. It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist "involved in plots." These newspapers then print this Executive Verdict with no questioning, no opposition, no investigation, no refutation as to its truth. And the punishment is thus decreed: this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done. ...Barack Obama is claiming the right not merely to imprison, but to assassinate far from any battlefield, American citizens with no due process of any kind.
...All of this underscores the principal point made in this excellent new article by Eli Lake, who compellingly and comprehensively documents what readers here well know: that while Obama's "speeches and some of his administration’s policy rollouts have emphasized a break from the Bush era," the reality is that the administration has retained and, in some cases, built upon the core Bush/Cheney approach to civil liberties and Terrorism.
I Don't Think You Understand...
Dear Jami Bernard,
When writing an article about the ableism on display in Burger King's "Crazy King" ads, it is not clever or hilariously pun-ny to state "Mental health advocates are not too crazy about" the advertising campaign. Neither is it somehow better to use "crazy" in the following context:
But perhaps what they should be complaining about is how crazy it is to tout such cholesterol-laden food to a public that is collectively headed for a heart attack.It is not cool to equate peoples' outrage over the campaign with "political correctness"... twice.
And I know you might not have chosen your headline, but really? "Mental health advocates not so nuts about cheesy Burger King ad?"
Jami, maybe you should've passed this one on to someone else.
Sincerely,
elle
Lost Open Thread
Last night's episode will be discussed in infinitesimal detail, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, move along...
Imus Strikes Again
Yesterday, Elle sent me this article under the bitterly amusing subject line "Newsflash: Don Imus is a jackass." Bitterly amusing, you see, because it's really, really, really not a newsflash that Don Imus is a jackass. Though he is most famously a jackass for referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos," an incident for which he was fired by NBC (later landing on his feet at CBS), he's an equal-opportunity bigot, with as much homophobia and transphobia and disablism and fat hatred under his belt as his more well-known racism and misogyny.
But, in fairness to Imus, misogyny really does seem to be his favorite toy in the box.
[Emmy-award winning journalist Cokie Roberts] made the point that women in public life are still spoken about in a demeaning way that men rarely are. She was responding to a point I raised, about an exchange on Imus' radio program.What rakish rapscallions! Boys will boys, amirite?!
Imus asked Fox News host Chris Wallace, who was looking forward to interviewing former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, if he would conduct the interview with Palin while she sat on his lap. Wallace replied, "One can only hope."
I made the point that Palin is also a Fox contributor and a member of the "Fox family" as it were, but that didn't spare her from being subjected to this sexist palaver, and Cokie made the point that the lure of the boy's club often trumps ideology.
It seems that Imus and Wallace did not appreciate our remarks: Imus accused Cokie of being "hysterical," and Wallace — whose office was next door to mine and down the hall from Cokie's when we all worked at ABC News together — pretended not to remember who she was.
It's actually difficult for me to even write anything serious about this infuriating exchange, because I just can't even get past WHY THE FUCK DOES DON IMUS STILL HAVE A GODDAMN FUCKING CAREER?!
I quite genuinely wonder if there exists a level of misogyny that can cost a white man his job. I don't think there is.
Broadcasters like Imus, talkshow hosts like Jay Leno, professional athletes like Ben Roethlisberger, actors, comedians, authors, politicians, any highly privileged white man in a public career can literally talk about women on a daily basis as nothing but fuckholes, as second-class citizens, as hysterics and sluts and sexual objects, as less than men in every conceivable way, with special condemnation for women who deviate from the white thin straight cis young able-bodied neurotypical Beauty Standard in any way, can make rape jokes and domestic violence jokes and murder jokes and Lorena Bobbitt jokes and deceptive tranny jokes and feminazi jokes on a nonstop basis, can malign men by comparing them to women, can demean women day in and day out, using gendered slurs right on the air because "bitch" is just A-OK according to the FCC, and he can even personally rape or hit a woman, maybe a couple, all without any fear of consequence in his professional life.
Post-feminist society!!!!!!!!11!!!1!!eleventy!!!!1!!!111!!!
Understand, I'm not playing the Oppression Olympics here. This isn't an argument that racism, or any other bigotry, is dead—or even that the same people can't get away with a heaping fuckload of other kinds of bigotry, too.
Quite the opposite: Much of the bigotry expressed in these same venues is tied to misogyny. "Nappy-headed hos." "Tranny or Fatty." Militant Michelle. Ann Coulter is a man. John Edwards is a woman. Feminists are dykes. Brown-skinned immigrant women are breeding machines. Welfare queens. Fat bitches. Dumb sluts. White women are all this. Black women are all that. Latinas are all this. Asian women are all that. Bitches are all crazy! Heather Mills doesn't have a leg to stand on HAR HAR. Et cetera et cetera ad infinitum.
If I were a more cynical type, ahem, I would suspect that the dirty little secret of broadcasting bigotry with impunity is: Just make sure it's intersectional bigotry—tie your hate to a little high-larious sexism and you'll get away with it a lot easier.
But back to Imus.
The objectification here is so simple. The idea that an interview of a famous woman would be conducted while she's sitting on the male interviewer's lap. And the retribution is so simple, too. The pretense that an incredibly successful woman is invisible, forgettable, nobody, nothing at all.
It is nothing but the message: Remember, Ladies—You can spend your entire life working at something, learning, practicing, training, honing your skills, building your talents, giving every piece of yourself, your nights and mornings and weekends and every spare minute you have, keeping a laser-like focus on your ultimate goal, inch by inch making your way to the top of your field, becoming the best there ever was, maybe the best there ever will be...and whether you're a presidential candidate or America's best female skier, we can still put you in your place with a single slur, a single touch, a single image, a single shared chuckle over your nothingness.
And now I'm once again back to: WHY THE FUCK DOES DON IMUS STILL HAVE A GODDAMN FUCKING CAREER?!
Fuck.
Texting! With Liss and Deeky!
With special guest star: Spudsy!
Deeky: I love ginger fucking ale.
Spudsy: Me too.
Deeky: I like to get nekkid and pour it on my head and have sexxay ginger times.
Spudsy: Hawt. Put it in a turkey baster and squirt it in your butt.
Deeky: Okay, that made me LOL for real.
Spudsy: Fizzy!
Deeky: That sounds dangerous.
Spudsy: Yeah, dangerously AWESOME!
Deeky: If you're into carbonated ginger farts!
Spudsy: LOL!
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker themiddlevoice: What moment has changed your life—either good or bad?
I can pinpoint two moments that fundamentally changed my life for the better: 1. Exactly nine years and 22 days ago on March 15, 2001, I sent a private message on a now-defunct community site to a random stranger in Scotland about an Oscar Wilde quote in his profile. 2. On October 5, 2004, at 12:54 PM, I posted the very first post at this blog.
There are moments that ostensibly changed my life for the worse, several of them well-known to readers in this space, but I don't feel inclined to talk about them at the moment—in part because I'm not actually certain they changed my life for the worse. I'm still working that out.
Make lemonade, and all that.
OMGOMGOMG
[Image of a tweet from Lost producer Carlton Cuse reading: "Tonight a new chapter in the season commences."]
OMG You Guys
I just woke up in a parallel dimension in which the internet already existed in the 1950's and the archives are still available online!
That must be the explanation for the existence of "6 Reasons Guys Might Think You're Easy," in which gracious and knowledgeable gentleman writer Rich Santos explains to ladies how they can avoid being thought of as "easy" by men, which is, of course, a negative thing because nothing is less attractive in a woman than sexual agency.
That's got to be the explanation. Because the alternative is just too horrifying to contemplate.
[H/T to Shaker Rainbow Brite.]
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
In Which I Substitute an Email Conversation with Liss for a Post
elle: Have u seen the U by Kotex commercials?
Here (Transcripts at bottom):
and here:
and this one (from Australia, it turns out) with the actual BEAVER (it took me a moment to get it--don't tell anyone :-):
(not the one I showed list--turns out, these have been running for a while in Australia and there's a bunch of 'em)
Liss: I hadn't seen them! So, my awesome response is... On the one hand: YES. On the other: NO.
LOL.
It's like, yeah, I hate those "my period makes me spin in happy circles with my face to the sun" ads. But tampon makers *just not making them* is sufficient. Mocking them strikes me as just an attempt for women to distance themselves from something which has been, rightly or wrongly, associated with femininity and womanhood. Which comes across as just mocking womanhood.
Blurgh. Or am I overthinking this?
elle: you're not overthinking it at all! That second one especially gave me a similar feeling.
As a sidenote: I wonder if the whiteness of those commercials (backgrounds, clothes, etc.) is mocking the association of white with pure and clean OR just the white-ness of the old commercials. (I already know the answer, don't I?)
And that second commercial, with the "attractive," "racially ambiguous" woman taps into something I've seen black women bloggers and writers discuss, where "racially ambiguous" often serves as something other than/better than "black." I don't have the background to discuss this fully yet, but particularly in the hip hop world, with the racially ambiguous "video vixens," you can see it. Seattle Slim explains a lot more here:Every video or every movie role where a black woman is required seems to go to lighter skinned women. I have no hate towards these women. It makes no sense. I love all of our shades. We are all beautiful. My animosity is to the industry that attempts to pit us against each other and sends the message that anything mixed with white or some other "light-skinned" race is what is acceptable, and even beautiful; full on black is not.
One of the commenters there notes how (black) rappers often rap about their desire for women who are "half" something else.
And I won't even touch the fact that they used the phrase "good hair."
My attempts at transcripts:
Commercial One (Reality Check):
Opens with a young woman sitting in a room, ostensibly being interviewed about her period, while soft music plays in the background.
Woman One: How do I feel about my period? Uhh… We’re like this. (crosses her index and middle fingers)
Cut to a scene of a smiling woman, glancing at butterflies over her shoulder. Back to Woman One.
Woman One: I want to hold really soft things, like my cat.
Cut to a scene of a decidedly unhappy cat. Housecats don’t snarl, I know, but this cat is doing an impression of that. Back to Woman One, who now has her hand over her chest to indicate “emotional,” or something.
Woman One: Makes me feel really pure
Cut to a scene of a woman, dressed in white, releasing butterflies. Back to Woman One.
Woman One: Sometimes, I wanna just run on a beach.
Cut to a scene of a woman running and frolicking on the beach where the waves meet the shore. Back to Woman One.
Woman One: I like to twirl.
Cut to a scene of a woman, twirling in a white dress while clutching flowers. Back to Woman One.
Woman One: Maybe in slow motion.
Cut to a scene of a woman twirling in a white dress on the beach. Back to Woman One.
Woman One: And I do it in my white spandex.
Cut to a scene of a woman, dancing in white spandex. She’s holding a red ball while doing a standing split. Please note: the red spot is in her hands, not in her white-spandex-covered crotch (sorry, couldn’t resist). Back to Woman One.
Woman One: And usually, by the third day, I really just want to dance.
Cut to a scene of three women, dancing randomly. Everyone has on white bottoms. Back to Woman One.
Woman One: The ads on TV are really helpful. Cuz they use that blue liquid.
Cut to a scene of a side by side comparison, in which disembodied hands pour blue liquid on the seats of two pairs of white panties a la the old pad commercials.
Woman One (nodding): And I’m like, “Oh, that’s what’s supposed to happen!”
Screen goes black and the words: “Why Are Tampon Ads So Ridiculous?” appear. Then, boxes of the new U by Kotex products appear with the words “Break the Cycle”
Voiceover: U by Kotex. A new line of pads, tampons, and liners.
Commercial Two (So Obnoxious):
Open on a commercial with a woman, clad in white, walking amongst swirling white curtains.
Woman: Hi, I’m an unbelievably attractive, 18 to 24 year old female. You can relate to me because I am racially ambiguous.
More walking and swirling.
Woman: And I’m in this commercial because market research shows, girls like you love girls like me.
Cut to scenes of her bouncing around in white room with white curtains while wearing a white leotard, then a white cheerleading outfit (complete with white pom-poms).
Woman: (As images of her from several angles flash) Do all these angles make me seem dynamic? (Scene of her blowing bubbles and smiling) Now I’m going to tell you to buy something. Buy the same tampons I use. Because I’m wearing white pants… (The background steadily changes during this time, but it’s always all white) … and I have good hair. (She swings said “good hair.”) You wish you could be me. (said with an attitude and a head snap. Are we supposed to think she’s less racially ambiguous now?)
Screen goes black and the words: “Why Are Tampon Ads So Obnoxious?” appear. Then, boxes of the new U by Kotex products appear with the words “Break the Cycle”
Voiceover: U by Kotex. A new line of pads, tampons, and liners.
Commercial Three (from Australia):
Alarm clock goes off and starts playing a song with the words “New you” sung repeatedly. Camera pans to a dress and necklace on the floor. Camera circles the room long enough for us to identify it as “feminine” (Pink covers, pillow, pink and purple things hanging up, etc). Finally the occupant of the bed is revealed.
IT’S A BEAVER! AS SUBTLE AS THESE ALL CAPS!
Beaver is wearing a sleeping mask and resisting getting up.
Voiceover: Sleep easy with maximum protection. U overnight ultra-thins. For the ultimate care down there.
Beaver’s hand/paw/claw is slapping at the snooze button. A bag of “U” pads rests beside the clock.
Ungodly
[Trigger warning for clergy abuse.]
If someone had asked me if the Catholic Church's institutional sex abuse conspiracy could get any worse, I believe I would have been hard-pressed to come up with an answer—because how could it get any worse? Well. Once again, I despair to report that evil is more vast than my imagination.
Brendan Kiley has written a comprehensive investigative piece for The Stranger, which details the allegations by indigenous Alaskans that the Catholic Church used "their remote villages as a 'dumping ground' for [known pedophile] priests."
On the morning of January 14 in Seattle, Ken Roosa and a small group Alaska Natives stood on the sidewalk outside Seattle University to announce a new lawsuit against the Jesuits, claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in isolated Native villages where they could abuse children off the radar.Roosa, along with his associate Patrick Wall, "a former Benedictine monk who once worked as a sex-abuse fixer for the Catholic Church," know of 345 cases of sexual abuse in Alaska by 28 predator priests, which is a concentration of sexual abuse that is "orders of magnitude greater than Catholic sex-abuse cases in other parts of the United States."
"They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police," Roosa said to the assembled cameras and microphones. "It was a pedophile's paradise."
Kiley's article explains the historical context in which Catholicism came to be such a powerful force in the area, but the former fixer Wall succinctly sums up why the area subsequently became a dumping ground for sexual abusers: The predator priests were sent to the isolated Alaskan villages "to get them off the grid, where they could do the least amount of damage," defined by the Church in terms of its own public relations, not in terms of damage to children.
And the reason that the villages made such a spectacular waste containment site for sex predators is the same reason that the predators found themselves in a "pedophile's paradise":
[T]he villages of Northwest Alaska were only accessible by plane, boat, or dog sled. Many still are. For the most part, they didn't have public schools, cops, or telephones. Many of the houses were one room and lacked food and consistent heat in the below-zero weather. "The perps would soften up their victims with food and warmth," Wall says, "because that's what the kids didn't have. 'It was always warmer in the rectory,' they say. 'There was always food in the rectory. There was always candy.'"I just don't even know what to say about the depravity of the perpetrators, about the callousness of their enablers, who cared more for nurturing and maintaining a public image than about the safety of children. And many adult women, whose victimization is also discussed in this article.
Flo Kenny, a 74-year-old survivor who spent the morning of January 14 in Seattle, participating in a press conference announcing a new lawsuit, began her story thus: "I am Flo Kenny. I am 74 years old. And I've kept silent for 60 years. I am here for all the ones who cannot speak—who are dead, who committed suicide, who are homeless, who are drug addicts. There's always been a time, an end of secrets. This is the time."
May it be so.
[H/T to Shaker Museclio.]
Dear Divorce…
by Safa Samiezade'-Yazd, a writer, a performer, an American-Iranian, a nude art model and a soon-to-be-bride who is currently the author of the blog Naked Lady in a White (Silk) Dress, which looks at the engagement process and wedding culture from the point of view of a burgeoning feminist.
My parents are divorced. They separated when I was twenty-one, and the divorce was finalized about five years later. Worse than that, they had a very unhappy marriage. I remember growing up, knowing as a child that they were completely wrong for each other. I remember the day I realized their marriage was going to end. I was eleven at the time.
It took them ten years to finally end the misery, and by that time, it was old news to me because I had already seen it coming. Yet the fighting is still going on. And the mind games. Even though they live in separate homes and my mom now lives with her boyfriend. Still, sometimes it feels as if my parents are still unhappily married to each other. They keep on fighting over my younger siblings, as if these kids are live collateral for all the broken promises and hurt feelings that still rage between the two.
Their twisted marriage wasn't the only bad one I was raised by. In fact, when you look at all the marriages I grew up around, only one didn't end in divorce. My grandparents, on my mother's side. Theirs was an unconventional one. My grandma lived and raised the kids in St. Louis while my grandpa bounced back and forth every week between home and his job at the Pentagon.
My aunt on my mom's side is divorced. My uncle on my father's side is divorced. Even my father's parents are divorced, which was extremely rare during the Shah's reign in Iran, but the domestic abuse was severe enough that the divorce wasn't actually initiated by my grandmother, but by the state itself.
Most of my parents' friends in St. Louis were very much like them—American wife, Iranian husband. In each marriage, the husband was extremely religious (I did grow up thinking Khomeini was a superhero—that childhood myth has since been debunked), and the wives all converted from their Western upbringing, veiled themselves more severely than most women in Iran do, and some even gave up their birth names. Life would get so confusing, because in the women's sphere, they would be called their American names, and in the men's sphere, they would be called their Arabic names. Even the kids sometimes would go by different names, depending on the context.
I kept the same name, but my behavior was constantly changing in check with wherever I was. In my elementary school, which was about fifty-percent international, I could blend in as one of the other kids, and in my grandparent's house I could act like some vestige of an American kid, but in Iranian circles, I tended to either stick out or keep to myself, mostly because I couldn't keep all the behavioral changes straight. Kids would play tag around the mosque, but because boys and girls weren't allowed to touch each other, we would throw sticks or pebbles to "tag." It was absurd to me.
I remember practicing my violin in private, because playing music was okay with one parent, but to another, it was a ticket straight down the highway to hell.
My father even had a plan for me: Study engineering in college, get married to an Iranian boy of his choosing somewhere between 18 and 22, go to medical school, and then become a three-quarter Iranian baby-pumping housewife. When I was born, my father and his sister actually started orchestrating an arranged marriage between my cousin and myself. My actual engagement isn't acknowledged on that side of my family. Not only is Rene an artist, he's also not Muslim. When we start having children, I'll be pumping out three-quarter Catholic babies.
Slowly the couples began breaking up, and my mom was the last woman in our community to leave her husband. Of course, in each divorce, what everyone fought over were the kids. For the women, it was their maternal birthright to keep them. For the men, it was their paternal entitlement. In some ways, I lucked out, because I was already an adult by the time the custody mess happened, but sometimes, I wonder, because now I have to watch it all as I get ready for my own first marriage.
David Popenoe, a sociology professor at Rutgers University and co-director of the National Marriage Project, wrote:
Marriages of the children of divorce actually have a much higher rate of divorce than the marriages of children from intact families. A major reason for this, according to a recent study, is that children learn about marital commitment or permanence by observing their parents. In the children of divorce, the sense of commitment to a lifelong marriage has been undermined.
In Iran, there is such a thing as a temporary or pleasure marriage. For some women, it's a way to legally work as a prostitute; for some men, it's a way to have premarital sex and feel religiously okay. For some couples, it's the only way they can date and get to know each other before making a lifetime commitment without getting arrested for adultery.
This was how my parents began their relationship. They met in the mosque, went out on a date to see Gandhi, and then started a temporary marriage, I think so that my father could feel okay losing his virginity to an American woman. That night, I was conceived, and my mom was pregnant with me when they finally decided to make their marriage legal or permanent. The reasoning wasn't so much for love, but for obligation and to make my birth legitimate in their eyes.
What followed, of course, was the saga that I call their marriage, with many of its problems blamed on me by my father, because, of course, they wouldn't be in that situation if I weren't born. More kids kept coming, and of course they stayed together, even though they started sleeping in separate bedrooms when I turned fifteen, because good religious Iranian children don't have divorced parents.
The whole dynamic really did a number on me in terms of relationships, and even though I started sneaking around and dating boys when I turned eighteen, I didn't really let myself really feel love for one until my senior year of college. Even then, as wonderful as he was, and as good friends as we still are, the timing was completely wrong, and it wasn't until I met Rene that I realized I had been attracted to guys who were as unavailable as my father was in his marriage. And I dealt with it by making myself just as unavailable.
I was happier in long-distance relationships than I was in local ones. I remember one long-distance relationship where I thought I was falling for the guy, but as soon as I saw him in person, I suddenly was over it and ready to ship him back to New York. Rene was the first guy I dated who actively and assertively pursued me, and I have to admit that every time he wanted me to take our relationship to the next level of commitment, I freaked.
It took a proposal for me to realize that he wanted to share his home with me, even though I was already living with him. Rene gave a great deal of thought into our relationship. At 45, he had other chances to propose or marry other women, but he waited, held out to the point where people were wondering if he would become a lifelong bachelor, because he wanted to make sure that his first marriage would be the right decision.
Why did I freak, and why was I so resistant? I think it's because, with the exception of my grandparents, I grew up around marriage after marriage where commitments fell through, and I began to see promises and vows as temporary fixes to legitimize whatever's going on in your life at that point. I was never really taught what it means to have a relationship where the people want to be committed to each other, not have to be.
I don't talk to my father anymore, but I am still close with my mom, and it's always been a mission of mine not to repeat the mistakes they made. Part of that means I have to visit their unhappy marriage and the disturbing memories that have partially shaped who I am today.
I keep telling myself that my marriage will be different, but let's face it, it's not like my family history really has the greatest track record. It's my greatest fear, to wonder if divorce is somehow genetic in my family, and if I'm going to wind up no different from my parents. I don't know how my father is, but I sometimes see my mom having to justify herself through her relationships now, and I want so badly not to feel like I need to do that in mine. I remember watching how easily she lost her self-identity in my father, and the idea terrifies me, which is probably why I'm so insistent on Rene and I complementing each other, not completing each other.
And yet I wonder—would I be this aware of the implications of commitment and marriage if I weren't raised by those consequences themselves? It's a toss-up sometimes to think if my generation of brides, who grew up around divorce in some matter or another might unconsciously use the immediacy of broken-up marriages as models for their own commitments or consciously as tools of how heavy of a decision their wedding really is.
[Cross-posted.]
You Know...
...David Brooks' last column was quite genuinely abysmal, but this week's might be even worse:
Relax, We'll Be FineA grown-ass man feeling obliged to write for the paper of record, to be read by other grown-ass adults, a column that could be shortened to "Turn that frown upside down!" without losing any of its meaning, is bad enough.
According to recent polls, 60 percent of Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction. The same percentage believe that the U.S. is in long-term decline. The political system is dysfunctional. A fiscal crisis looks unavoidable. There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy.
But if you want to read about them, stop right here. This column is a great luscious orgy of optimism. Because the fact is, despite all the problems, America's future is exceedingly bright.
But even worse is the reality that this educated, wealthy, white, straight, cisgender, thin, able-bodied, neurotypical, highly privileged American man speaks as though every resident of the US will equally benefit from the trends he believes will ensure the country's continued dominance.
When he says, "Relax, We'll Be Fine," what he really means is: "Settle Down, All You Malcontents, Lest You Upset the Apple Cart That Keeps People Like Me Doing Just Fine."
America being the best place it can possibly be for educated, wealthy, white, straight, cisgender, thin, able-bodied, neurotypical, highly privileged men does not de facto mean it's also the best place it can possibly be for an un/der-educated, poor, fat, disabled, trans lesbian of color. That seems like it ought to be obvious, but, as evidenced by Brooks' column, it's anything but.
Cloaked in his privilege of "normalcy"—male is the norm, white is the norm, straight is the norm, etc.—and fully invested in the idea that he is not merely the "normal" human, but a specimen of humanity to which everyone aspires, Brooks can do nothing but blink gormlessly at any suggestion that individual humans don't want to deny their intersectional identities and contort themselves to fit into the world that privileges him.
He doesn't understand (or won't) that the world was designed to his specifications, and trying to fit into his tailored culture is the emotional equivalent of wearing an ill-fitting suit every day for one's entire life.
"This suit which was tailored to my body's measurements fits me just fine! I don't know what your problem is!"
Brooks, like most conservatives and a hell of a lot of liberals and fauxgressives, don't understand that fighting for what's best for "America" (meaning the ideal America for privileged men) isn't the same thing as fighting for the equality of marginalized people.
In fact, they are frequently in direct opposition.
And Brooks' presumption that being "fine" for him does not take into account that "fine" is subjective—and even if it's true that America itself will be "fine," America rarely gives all its members equal consideration.
When we hear that something will be good for "everyone," it generally means it's going to be good for educated, wealthy, white, straight, cisgender, thin, able-bodied, neurotypical, highly privileged men—and hopefully lots of other people, too! The problem with this paradigm is that it's usually espoused by the people with the most existing freedom and opportunity, who are looking to procure more for themselves, or restore something they've lost, or protect that which they are anxious about losing.
This is the social counterpart to the conservatives' beloved theory of trickle-down economics: Make everything as splendid as possible for those at the top and the benefits will "trickle down" to everyone below.
Well, it's bullshit when we're talking about tax cuts, and it's bullshit when we're talking about equality and opportunity.
Great, swell, awesome that America will be "fine" and everyone like David Brooks will be "fine," as if that matters to people who won't be "fine."
As if it matters to the people who aren't fine now, and never have been.
"Relax—you're still going to be treated like a second-class citizen!"
Forgive me if I don't join in your "luscious orgy of optimism," Mr. Brooks. You privileged wankstain.
The Not Quite Daily Teaspoon Report – T100406
Time for another Teaspoon Report! Why? Cause I want to! Yay!
Leave comments here that describe an act of teaspooning you encountered or committed. They don't have to be big, world-shaking acts; by definition, a teaspoon is a small thing, but enough of them together can empty the ocean.
If you would like to discuss the teaspoons here reported, or even offer congratulations or your admiration to a fellow Shaker, we ask that you do so over here in the Discussion Thread for today's NQDTR.
Shaker bgk has been kind enough to get a Twitter-pated version out there for you young twittersnappers (and by the way, get off my lawn, you meddling kids! *shakes cane*). You can find the details about the Tweetspoons project right here. That runs all the time, as far as I'm aware (*grumblenewtechnologygrumble*), and we encourage you to let other people know that there's at least one tweetstream talking about just going out and doing good things for the human species.
Teaspoons up, let's hear 'em, Shakers!
ô,ôP
NQDTR Discussion Thread – T100406
Hiya, Shakers, time for another Discussion Thread for the Not Quite Daily Teaspoon Report!
This is the thread in which you may offer congratulations or admiration for a teaspoon or teaspooner. If you're posting with just congrats or admiration, though, do take a moment and check the thread to see whether other people have said so a number of times already. Remember that no one is required to read here just because they posted over there, so there's no guarantee you'll get a response to a given comment.
