What is your favorite musical instrument to listen to? What is your favorite to play, if you play any?
I like to listen to the violin—you know I can't play it, though! What I can play is da bass. Not the stand-up rockabilly bass, but the kind you find in the hands of forest wizards like Geddy Lee.
Liss: Who's Geddy Lee?
Me: The lead singer of Rush.
Liss: He's the lead singer and the bassist?
Me: Yeah.
Liss: That's unusual.
Me: That's why Rush is so amazing.
Liss: I didn't even know you liked Rush.
Me: I don't. They're the worst.
Question of the Day
Man, Oh, Man
As you know, I am not only the Most Humorless Feminist in all of Nofunnington, but also the Most Pedantic Feminist in all of Literal Land, so it will come as no surprise to you that I had a caustic little chuckle about this headline on CNN:
"Female athlete dominates Ironman."
It links to an article about Chrissie Wellington "add[ing] another impressive half Ironman win to her resume."
Another.
I'm going to go ahead and start thinking of it as the Ironperson competition, if it's all right by the Patriarchy.
Number of the Day
$5,539. The amount of money the Church of Latter Day Saints has been fined for failing to promptly report $36,928 in contributions to the 'Yes on 8' committee, which organized against same-sex marriage in California.
As you may recall, the Mormon church was one of the key funders of the Prop 8 repeal, which stole marriage rights away from same-sex couples in CA after a court had granted them.
America 2.0
Arizona pol wants immigrant 'tent city': "Arizona state Treasurer Dean Martin, a Republican candidate for governor, called on Tuesday for the creation of statewide tent cities to house the expected increase in the number of illegal immigrants expected to be arrested under the state’s controversial new immigration law."
Of course he does.
*fumes*
[H/T to Shaker SamanthaB, who hat tips Matt Yglesias.]
Wednesday Blogaround
Sociological Images: The Growing Wealth Gap Between Blacks and Whites
- Lisa blogs about a study of this expanding gap in the U.S., whose authors point to public policies which help to create and sustain it. Bonus: A white guy immediately shows up in comments to whitemansplain where the real problem lies. Because he is concerned.
Sociological Images: Vintage Men's Magazines and a Pre-Consumerist Time
- Lad's mag covers from when Men were Men and Women were, well, pretty much the same, in this particular context.
Womanist Musings: Spark of Wisdom: Gay Love for Straight Titillation
- Regular Wednesday Muser Sparky on the I'm-not-A-Gay-I-just-play-one-for-the-straights phenomenon.
Womanist Musings: 'Tis the season
- What is America's Greatness composed of? Renee's guest RavenScholar can tell you, because she has been so fortunate as to receive a brochure from those who know.
Womanist Musings: Dear White Feminists Stop Erasing my Womanism
- Renee speaks for herself.
Womanist Musings: Too Disabled To See Your Children
- TW for really shameful and distressing treatment of a disabled mother.
NOLA.com: Oil Spill Gulf of Mexico 2010
- filling all your news-of-the-omnivorous-petrolosaurian-nightmare-which-will-be-with-us-for-a-long-long-time information needs.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Anatomy of a Slur
- Ta-Nehisi makes several excellent points while illustrating something much valued at Shakesville - how to be wrong, rightly.
Tiger Beatdown: THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE: Advice for Deleted Commenters, From a Puppy
- Lest he know not the delights of internet friendships, I would like to introduce to Dudley Q. McEwan one Hektor, An Adorable Puppy. Hektor enjoys eating, and going Up, but not Down. He also does a smokin' takedown of Chivalrous Gentlemen who feel obliged to explain to Ladies, on their own blogs, what The Deal Is.
Pam's House Blend: The White House and Pride Month . . Who's on the list for its reception
- Pam notes that the White House's celebration of Pride Month will entertain a select list of guests, and a select list of issues.
Pam's House Blend: California Transgender Advocacy Day: No Slackactivists There
- Autumn posts audio* and video* interviews with (mostly) trans people who talked with their state representatives on California's first Transgender Advocacy Day in May, and writes about why she thinks these records are important.
* The video is about 24 minutes long, and the audio quality is variable as the interviews were done in public spaces. There is no transcript and I'm sorry but I can't manage one. The approximately-12-minute audio-only interview is with the mother of a trans child and the audio quality on that is much better. I will try to transcribe that now I have the Blogaround up. I will add it to this post, below a fold, when done.
ETA: And, dang! I keep forgetting to invite y'uns to drop links in comments. I'm so glad you know that already. But, for anyone who's new here, links to your own posts or posts you'd like to share are welcome in comments to the Blogaround.
UPDATE:Transcript of Autumn Sandeen's interview with Alicia, who participated in California's first Transgender Day of Advocacy by joining in lobbying CA state legislators for trans rights, in support of her child and other trans people, is below the fold.
This transcript is of a trans woman interviewing the parent of a young trans girl. The video linked to above, on the other hand, consists of interviews with trans people who participated in the lobbying action. I apologize for transcribing the voice of a parent while not transcribing the interviews with the trans people themselves. As I said, I couldn't do the video, but I thought this interview would nevertheless be of interest as Alicia is the mother of a trans girl who has, I believe, just finished the 1st grade, and how trans children are being parented is a matter of significance to trans people.
(I don't know the correct spelling of Alicia's name; I'm just using the spelling of this name which I have seen most often. I apologize to Alicia if I've gotten it wrong. I looked up the names of the CA state legislators mentioned in this interview and am pretty sure I named the right ones and spelled them correctly, but if anyone sees a likely error in that or anything else, please point it out.)
Autumn: Hi! This is Autumn Sandeen, with Pam's House Blend, and I'm here with . . .
Alicia: Alicia.
Autumn: And Alicia, you're the parent of a trans youth, right?
Alicia: Yes.
Autumn: And we're here today at the Transgender, um, Advocacy Day, right after the Transgender Leadership Summit that we've just had for the last three days. And we've been advocating for, well , today, at the Advoc - at this Advocacy Day, we've been lobbying, uh, our state legislators about legislation that we're concerned about. So, first of all, talk about, you know, did you - how many legislators did you meet with today?
Alicia: We met with three of them today. Fortunately for me, 'cause this was my first time, we met . . .
Autumn: So you're a first time lobbyist?
Alicia: . . . friendly ones. Oh, yes. I have never darkened the door of this capitol.
(both chuckle)
Alicia: Uh, yeah, uh, we, uh, we went and we saw Fiona Ma's assistant, and we saw Mark Leno, and Tom Ammiano at the end. So . . .
Autumn: Wow, you did meet a gr - friendly group, there. I mean . . .
Alicia: Very friendly.
Autumn: I hear Mark Leno's name and I'm like, that's a pretty friendly, um, yeah - he's written, like, AB 96, so, that - you can't get more friendly - which is the one that gave the first housing and, um, employment protections in our state, back in 2003, 2004. So. Yeah, you can't have met a friendlier group, there. Um, talk about why it's important to you. Why, why, why are you here - you're not trans, so . . . (laughs)?
Alicia: No, but I have skin in this game, too.
Autumn: So what's your skin in the game?
Alicia: Well, I have a young child in elementary school who, uh, has been noticeably gender-variant to us, uh, since about age 3 ½ to 4 and, um, a lot has happened in the past year. We, uh - the child has been very gender-fluid up until, um, the last year or so, there was a shift, where she basically says, "Mama, I'm - I'm mostly, mostly, mostly girl." Last year, it was, "I'm both boy and girl" and I heard all these stories about her earnestly trying to explain to her friends on the playground the concept of two-spirit. We used to tell stories about, um, we had heard the fable of Bat, in Aesop's fable, it was turned into an Indian legend? And we, uh, when we were listening to it told, it was all about how Bat, you know, was in two worlds - neither a bird, nor a beast, and, uh, we hadn't heard the story before and we thought, oh, this is good, this is gonna be about middle people, and their value, and then the end of the story becomes: (mock-preachy voice) and they threw him out, and that's why Bat to this day lives in a cave and has no friends!
Autumn: (laughs) That's kind of a hard story, too.
Alicia: It, it was. So I spent weeks wracking my brain, usually at four o'clock in the morning, trying to figure a way to reframe that story. And, uh, we did come up with one, um, where Bat becomes a mediator, thank you very much, between the birds and the beasts, and she was happy and drew pictures of it. But she was framing herself for a long time as having one foot in both worlds, and then the reality of first grade hit. Kids were not getting it, were not going along with it. It was, kid, ya gotta be one side or the other. Ya go with the girls or the boys. And, so, the decision gelled over the summer that, you know, it was time to really socially transition. Um, it's the best thing for her. So, we have progressed now to where, fortunately we didn't have to change the name because it was one of those names that goes both ways - except for the legal name. We had to, uh . . .
Autumn: Right, you changed the legal name, but not . . .
Alicia: We changed the legal name . . .
Autumn: But the spelling is . . .
Alicia: Yeah.
Autumn: . . . you know, different, but the, the name is the same, you know . . .
Alicia: Yeah.
Autumn: You didn't have to change the name, how you refer to your child. It's just . . .
Alicia: Yeah, yeah. The decision to do that came up real clearly when the school photos came out. And, uh, yes . . . (sigh) other parents: watch out for those outsourced photo vendors . . .
Autumn: Yeah.
Alicia: . . . 'cause they just get a dump of file from the school district which gives the legal names.
Autumn: Ah . . .
Alicia: It, it can hit you so many ways, um, where the child gets outed constantly and you never kind of know where it's going to come from. So we thought, look, the most expedient thing is, do the legal name change now, and it gives her - she doesn't have to have that history, that paper trail as she moves into adolescence and adulthood.
Autumn: Right, and as we all kind of move around, it's not going to be like, it's not going to follow her as much as it u - you know, as much as, in the old days, it would have followed. So . . .
Alicia: Yeah.
Autumn: Um . . . so, when you m - how did you feel going in to different legislators and advocating on behalf of your child? What kind of difference did that kind of make for you, and did you see any kind of legislator response?
Alicia: It got easier with each visit, for sure. It's funny, I, I knew ahead of time who we were going to see - at least two of them, uh, they added the third one today. Um, but . . . I knew, I knew already that, I mean, heck, the bill I was, uh, mostly speaking about, the Mental Health At-Risk Youth bill, was written by one of the guys I saw today, and yet, I tell you, last night I could not sleep. It's, I think, partly, it's just not being used to this kind of role. Um, temperment-wise, I'm a back-of-the-room sort of person, and this is one - I think, one of the things I've learned, just - I think it is about being the mother of a gender-variant child, is - first they, first they scramble your gender-schema all around, and you have to tear your g - , tear it down and rebuild it, several times. And I'm a data- analyst, so, um, I'm familiar . .
Autumn: Oh, there you go, you're used . . .
Alicia: . . . with what happens when you have to tear apart your schema . . .
Autumn: And you've got wonderful black-and-white thinking going, with the data stuff you know . . .
Alicia: Well . . .
Autumn: . . . to a certain extent.
Alicia: Well, fortunately, I don't. Uh, I work in fuzzy data.
Autumn: Oh, ok.
Alicia: But it's still - I know that, um, at the data, at the database level the, the schema is rigid.
Autumn: Right.
Alicia: I actually did find myself - one time, talking to, I'll just say a large bank that we were doing some data merges with and, uh, they wanted me to give them a dump of, not just the names and the SSNs of all of our employees, but also their gender. And I said, "What? What the hell do you need that for?" 'Cause we were just merging systems that were about access. And I said, "We don't have that. We don't keep that. What are you, crazy?" And, and I said, "Oh, don't tell me. Don't tell me it's also a binary syntax?" Oh, yeah. And I said, I'm sorry but we don't have that. You're going to have to . . .
Autumn: Adapt.
Alicia: Yeah, you're going to have to figure out some other way to merge.
Autumn: You're going to have to adapt to us, rather than the other way around.
Alicia: Uh, but yeah, I - but it's still - the rearranging is the first thing you have to do. So, um, and it's, it becomes, actually - it's a growth thing - you're like, whoa . . .
Autumn: But it's your own child, so you're like fighting for your own . . .
Alicia: Yeah, it's a combination of oh, you know, " O brave new world, that has such people in it", and at the same time, you are at the gut level terrified, because we're all aware of how trans people are treated, and if you haven't even been living, you know, close to the trans community . . .
Autumn: You still know (chuckles).
Alicia: . . . you have an even more - yeah, and you also have, I think, um, you know, the stuff that comes, that stuff that comes to your mind when you, you know, if you flashed a bunch of pictures in front of us, we're remembering the real, real hard, hard stuff, 'cause that's what gets into the news.
Autumn: Right.
Alicia: You don't get nice . . .
Autumn: You're hearing, right, you're hearing about Angie Zapata, and Gwen Araujo, and, um, oh my gosh . . .
Alicia: Yeah.
Autumn: . . . I can think of some other names . . . uh, you know, but it's just one of those kind of, that's what you hear about, and of course, as we're relating statistics, uh . . .
Alicia: Umm.
Autumn: . . . at this event, I mean, one of the horrifying statistics is 67% of trans people, uh, have talked about, um, facing employment discrimination at their jobs; only one in five of them are actually fighting back, um, and then, 19% of our population has at some point been homeless. So, it's kind of like when you're dealing with statistics like that and then applying them to your own child, that's kind of a . . .
Alicia: Yeah.
Autumn: . . . it does kind of put you in a position where you've got to elbow for some room for your child, don't you?
Alicia: Yeah. So you kind of split yourself into - one part of you is just, well, by God, it's not going to happen to my child. Things are going to be different. It's a different generation; we have more support now. We can make stuff happen, we - because we have to. Then the other, dark side, that usually comes and visits in the wee hours of the morning, is that, that fear come back. You have to hold it at bay, all the time. I mean, when somebody said, somebody, today, in the press conference, mentioned Gwen's name, and it's like a Pavlovian response for me, I just start to tremble.
Autumn: Yeah, I know. In my case, it's like, I covered the Angie Zapata trial, so this is like . . . 18-year-old young woman, you know, killed. And it's, same thing as Gwen Araujo.
Alicia: (softly) Yes.
Autumn: You know, just became very personal and very . . . and of course, when I look at my peers and just think, how many names are on the Transgender Day of Remembrance list each year, you know, who could be next?
And you never know, you know, how people are going to react. And so it is kind of like - you know, it's your own child. I can only imagine, I mean, I imagine, I know how much - you know, it just, I can only imagine how much this would be very, very hard to be the watch - the watchful person over somebody else knowing that they're in a position where something bad could happen, but you having to fight to make sure nothing bad happens to them.
Alicia: (softly) Yeah.
Autumn: Am I pretty much summing it up right? (laughs)
Alicia: Yeah. No, until I became a parent I had no idea the depth of my parents' love for me.
Autumn: (quietly) Yeah.
Alicia: (quietly) I mean, you don't . . . you just can't concieve it. It's, um . . . there's not a word for it.
Autumn: Yeah. It's very hard. Well, anyway, well, thank you for meeting with me, Alicia, and talking about your experience. Um, it's really important to know that when we're talking about legislation that protects, um, gender identity and expression, this is not just adults we're talking about. We're also talking about elementary school-age children, like your child. And, she needs the same protections and, if she is going to come into a better world than the one that's there now, um, we're going to have to fight for it to make sure it happens.
Alicia: (quietly) Yes.
Autumn: Well, thank you again, Alicia.
Alicia: Thank you.
Autumn: And this is Autumn Sandeen with Pam's House Blend, signing out. Bye.
On The Radio
Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, was on The Brian Lehrer Show today on WNYC. Shirky mentioned Liss and Shakesville (as well as Sady Doyle and Tiger Beatdown). It was a pretty nice shout-out, not only to Liss, but the community as a whole.
Anyway, the show is available here, if you want to download and/or give it a listen.
(Transcript after the jump.)SHIRKY: Nick's...what -- what Nick [Carr in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"] is saying about the individual human mind is I think the piece of that book we need to deal with. What he -- where he and I, I think, might disagree, is that I have great faith in humankind's ability to create social structures that take the possibilities of new media, and make them civically valuable, not just endlessly distracting.
[snip]
LEHRER: But you -- historically, to go back to the Gutenberg, you know, the dawn of the printing press, analogy, you said widespread literary education was the necessary response to the huge in-- huge increase in essentially bad information that, you know, the mass medium of books, uh, was starting to spread around the culture, centuries ago. What's the equivalent cultural response today?
SHIRKY: Well, there are a couple-- there are a couple of cultural responses. Uh...one of them, you know, one of th-- one of the things that people don't realize about the rise of the print revolution, is it wasn't until after print became abundant that we started separating fiction from nonfiction. That wasn't a division that existed until there were so many stories that people could start sorting that-- out that idea. So one of the things we need to teach kids to do is to understand something about the context in which work is produced. So, here is a blog by an individual on a particular topic, uh, and...are there any signs that that person is knowledgeable about that topic? If so, you can take that at--you know, as, as some kind of evidence. If not, you, you just, you-- you, you pay less attention to that person's opinion, until you see it corroborated. And so, in a way, we have switched, right, the, the-- there's always been this great tension between, you know, Socratic and Platonic ideas of authority, right? And Socrates is, "get the smart people together and get them to keep talking." Plato had a more, sort of, "we can identify the authorities and put them in charge," right, no poets in the land of the Republic. We're all moving to Socratic norms, now. Which is to say, we're all moving to a position where we're like the editors of peer-reviewed journals, we have to assess things probabilistcally. Instead of saying, "this person is an authority, that person is not, I am only listening to A," now we're really having to say, on the balance, "you know, this is a strange story I just read, but I've seen it-- I've seen it written about three, from uncoordinated sources, so I'm gonna start to take it seriously. And what, what [previous caller] Jim said is, you know, the, the first thing we have to do is to educate children that not -- and in fact educate everyone, educate ourselves, that not all pieces of information are created equal. And after that the social problem becomes: how do we teach people to get that kind of probability signature for the value of information, rather than "this is an authority, that is not an authority."
LEHRER: I see this show in that context, that, since we started before the internet, it used to be much more experts, with certifiable knowledge, coming on to impart that knowledge to a receptive audience. Over time, it has become much more of a hybrid of the wisdom of the crowd, if you will, interacting with the wisdom of experts, not competing with it, necessarily, but interacting with it--
SHIRKY: Sure.
LEHRER: --And the, kind of, fact-checking process, and larger peer-review process, goes in all directions now.
SHIRKY: Right. No no, that's, tha-- and I think the ability of surprising voices to be surfaced is one of the great and profound advantages of this medium. My-- my friend Naomi Wolf, many years ago, wrote a book called The Beauty Myth, uh, and, and--
LEHRER: And she was here to talk about it, at the time!
SHIRKY: Oh, (unintelligible) well, yes! So, in, in that book, she looked at the role of women's magazines, as a potential place where women could have a conversation with one another, unshaped by larger social forces. And the way that women's magainzes almost completely failed to live up to that possibility, because of the demands of cosmetics companies for "beauty-friendly copy." And so the possibility of discussing real and deep issues of sexism was driven from the one place that, that provided this public conversation. Now, when you look at Melissa McEwan on Shakespeare's Sis-- on Shakesville, or Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown, who's my favorite-- favorite blogger, uh, they are doing what Naomi imagined. They have a public space to not just say what they think, but to convene a conversation among their commenters, without having to go, hat in hand, to the cosmetics company, and have beauty-friendly copy. They can finally have the discussion out in the open.
[Thanks to Scott Madin for the transcript and DW for letting us know.]
Thindeath/Fatdeath and Deathcorn
[Hiya! For some reason Liss graciously offered me the opportunity to become a contributor. Sometime soon I hope to post an introduction that explains who I am and why I won't get off the internet (It feels so 80's to be political). In the meantime, here's something I wrote about my lungs, in case society's been wondering about them.]
I thought I'd spend some time talking about my body, given that this is the internet, something primarily designed to enable discussions about bodies and celebrities. Or both! More on Amy Winehouse later.
So. After examining chest x-rays for an unrelated roller derby non-injury, my doctor told me she suspected emphysema (or COPD, basically a non-threatening acronym for emphysema and/or bronchitis). An initial round of tests appear to support my doctor's inference.
There are more tests to come, and plenty of conditions to rule out (including pulmonary excellence, something I suspect is a strong possibility). Frankly, society isn't particularly invested in my body, either. At least not my lungs. *ahem* However, after scouring the internet for fun facts, I have a couple of observations.
First, just as deathfat! isn't necessarily as deadly as some would have you believe, thinhealthwhoooooo!!!! isn't axiomatic, either.
Some people are just thin. In the absence of eating disorders. Not only are there plenty of health conditions (I dare say most of them) that can afflict otherwise healthy-seeming and thin individuals, but thinness in-and-of itself can sometimes also present problems. Those of us who are really tall and really thin may have weak spots in the tops of our lungs, which may rupture as a result of air pressure changes, violent yawning, whichever. Collapsed lungs aren't the worst thing in the world, but they're hardly pleasant.
Y'all knew that, though.
A second observation (or proposition) is that the cultural dialogue about lung impairment shares a lot of space with fat hatred.
Emphysema is almost entirely preventable.
Emphysema is a result of your bad life choices. Ms. Winehouse?
Your lungs are ugly and unglamorous, and you've brought this upon yourself. Ms. Turlington?
Yes, smoking is bad for you (more on this later). However, regardless of my situation, it's entirely possible for otherwise fit, athletic, young people to develop chronic pulmonary issues. There are conditions (e.g., Alpha-1) that often lead to emphysema or other pulmonary unpleasantness in previously healthy, non-smoking, young people.
And of course, smoking matters. So does exposure to toxic chemicals at work, at home, and in the air in one's neighborhood. Sadly, breathing clean air is a privilege correlated to having other privilege. Patterns of asthma incidence, for example, bear this out.
And about smoking. It's bad for you. And most smokers know this. I suspect all of the horrifying information out there about emphysema (thank you, BTW) is a crude attempt to encourage smokers to quit (or never start). While smoking cessation is a laudable goal (and my lungs thank you), it would behoove the medical community to acknowledge that smoking exists within a cultural context. The American Heart Association contends (with evidence!) that the tobacco industry disproportionately targets minorities and women. In the US, LGBTQ people are substantially more likely to smoke than their straight counterparts. Showing people pictures of smokers' lungs and portraying people with emphysema as pitiful is not a comprehensive, (nor in my opinion desirable) anti-smoking strategy.
Smokers are not infants in need of teaching, they're people targeted by corporations that wish to sell an addictive and deadly product. Fat people aren't infants either (although ZOMG!!!!11!). And they don't necessarily make bad choices, either. They may eat well. They may exercise regularly. They may have quit smoking. Yet you wouldn't know it from OMFGDEATHFAT!!!!!11!! 1!!!1!
But what about those folks who do eat horrifying processed food? There's a huge industry that manufactures HFCS-laden food, which is eaten by plenty of smart people. Kraft Foods, for example, at one point had an interest in keeping folks' stomachs filled with Velveeta, KD, Jell-O, and Kool-Aid, with perhaps a Marlboro cigarette for after dinner. The consumers of these empty calories, are disproportionately poor, and otherwise disproportionately unlikely to have access to healthier alternatives. In other words, the manufactured food industry and the tobacco industry target the same populations.
Meanwhile, HFCS is taking its tool toll on our lungs, the oil required for industrial corn farming migrating across the gulf, trucks and trains filled with well-traveled food rumbling past our homes.
Because Kids Pay Attention to Military Policy
Rep. Ike Skelton [D(ouche), MO] has a completely new, never thought of it before, of course this makes sense reason concerning the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
Didn't see that coming, didja?
According to the Associated Press, Skelton told reporters that repeal of the policy could put families in a difficult position because it could prompt children to ask about homosexuality.Yes, Jebus forbid kids ask questions about homosexuality. You know, when they come back from battle or boot camp or whatever, because apparently 7-year-olds are in the military right know, so they'll totally see tons of queerz in the barracks.
“What do mommies and daddies say to their 7-year-old child?” he asked.
Skelton, one of the 26 Democrats who opposed repeal in the House, added that his “biggest concern are the families.”
Having openly LGBTQ folks in the military is what puts the issue right in front of kid's faces, folks. Not, you know, fighting the repeal tooth and nail, making it an "election issue," and forcing the topic into every news broadcast, every newspaper, every news website, etc. etc. etc. Apparently, that would be how you hide the subject. We can't have kids asking questions. Dangerous questions. Those lead to thoughts.
Tell you what, Skelton. When you can discuss parents without referring to them as "mommies and daddies" as if you were addressing a room full of preschoolers, rather than a room full of reporters; when you recognize that queer folks have families too (and that some "traditional" families aren't populated with homophobes), maybe I'll give you the time of day.
Of course, you'll still be wrong...
(Transcript: Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons cries, "Won't someone please think of the children?!?)
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 (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Apple Refusing to Serve Asians in Some Stores
New York Attorney-General Andrew Cuomo* is investigating whether Apple, makers of the iPad, has been discriminating against apparently Asian customers, fearing that they may be Chinese citizens trying to take the machine into the PRC, where it is not yet sold.
The Attorney General's's civil rights bureau was tipped off by an Assemblywoman from a Chinese-American section of Queens, who complained publicly last month that her constituents were being asked unusual questions when they sought to buy the devices. The iPad was not yet for sale in Asia at the time of the complaints in May.Apple is reportedly cooperating with the investigation.
Call it Just Another Day in Totes Post-Racial America.
* A white, apparently hetero and TAB cis man.
Assvertising
Shaker Jean forwarded me Philips' latest newsletter to its subscribers, which features the following image at the top of the email:
[If you can't view the image, it's a picture of a thin white woman lying on her back behind a Philips laptop. She is wearing clothes that are the same colors as the laptop and the image on its screen, and the majority of her head and face are cropped out, leaving only her mouth viewable. The text reads: "Latest Product News. Anywhere, anytime. Enjoy the full range of Philips Notebook and Netbook Accessories anywhere, anytime.]
So, I guess we're meant to understand that an essentially disembodied woman's torso is also a Philips accessory that can be enjoyed anywhere, anytime...? Swell.
Too bad. I had a Philips television I really liked that I may have replaced with another one. But I guess they don't want my business. Fair enough. I'll take it elsewhere.
Contact Philips.[Assvertising: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 105, 106, 107, 108.]
America's Got Talent
So, I don't usually watch "America's Got Talent," because UGH Piers Morgan, and UGH Howie Mandel, and UGH the exploitation of nice people blissfully lost in their delusions of grandeur, but I happened to see part of it last night, when I was introduced to a soft-spoken and baby-faced 32-year-old store clerk named John from Virginia (pictured at right).
He explained: "I've had a lot of day jobs to pay the bills, but what I really want to do is to be a singer. I've been singing my entire life, ever since I can remember, but I'm not from a musical family; my parents really didn't know what to do with me. When I sing, I'm definitely able to forget about my troubles, my day-to-day struggles. If I could be able to sing for a living, and quit my day jobs, it would be a dream come true."
Oh, Maude. He was so sweet, and so charming, and so earnest, and I desperately wanted him to be good. Even this shitty show couldn't set up a guy so seemingly decent and gentle for humiliation, right?
When John walked onstage, to the sound of a scratching record, he had transformed into Prince Poppycock, "the prince of a fantastical realm," clad in 18th-century French court dress and kabuki-drag make-up, to perform "Largo al factotum" from The Barber of Seville. I held my breath.
The audience went wild. Sharon Osborne gave him a standing ovation. At home, I cheered for him. Howie Mandel, ever the helpful bozo, told him, "This is a show about finding great talent—and THAT was talent!"
I'm sure that people who are experts in such things are already aching to point out the flaws in his performance, but I don't particularly care that it wasn't perfect. It gave me chills and made me smile. I hope John feels like he is a singer today.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker Esme: If your life was a movie, who would narrate (and no, Morgan Freeman can't narrate everyone)?
(As the allure of this question may be lost on some hearing impaired Shakers, please feel welcome to adjust the question to who would write the movie of your life, or who would star, if you prefer.)
If I couldn't do it myself, with my weird amalgamated New York-Hoosier accent and peculiar drawling cadence and idiosyncratic lexicon, which I can't imagine anyone being able to approximate, I'd choose Patricia Clarkson, because she's got just an awesome voice.
I Write Letters
Dear Straight Cis Male Movie Reviewers:
I have not seen Sex and the City 2, but, based on the marketing, it appears to me to warrant some legitimate criticism about excess and privilege (multiple sorts), and perhaps some valid criticism of the writing, or direction, or costuming—you know, the usual stuff movie reviews are made of.
But I'm really going to have to call bullshit on the ubiquitous, reflexive, nasty, and usually gleeful contention embedded in nearly every negative review I've read (and I'm not alone in noticing) that Sarah Jessica Parker is ugly. Not only is it mean and irrelevant; it's simply not. fucking. true.
Actress Sarah Jessica Parker arrives to attend the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) fashion awards in New York June 7, 2010. [Reuters.]
I don't give a shit whether you don't want to fuck her. And I don't give a shit whether your dicks get hard about the other women of Sex and the City 2, either—because your titillation isn't the point.
Of course, that's the real issue, isn't it? The whole this-movie-wasn't-made-for-you thing. The first one brought out the misogyny and homophobia in heaping fuckloads, and now we're getting the sequel of that hot retrofuck mess. This film even brought out the inner misogynist in Roger Ebert, who couldn't help but reductively refer to Samantha, one of the few iconic female characters with total sexual liberation and agency, as a "sexaholic slut."
And even those among you who manage to stick to justifiable complaints about the film's celebration of consumerism or perpetuation of racist tropes are acting like it's the FIRST AND ONLY AND WORST EVAR!!!elventy! film that's ever done such things, because it's white women and white gay men doing it.
But a bunch of white straight men get together and produce two hours of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism, fat hatred, and every other conceivable bigotry laid against a backdrop of heinous rape jokes and treating WOMEN as a commodity (at least the SATC girls and gays are buying SHOES and CLOTHES, which are ACTUAL COMMODITIES), and Judd Apatow's considered a comedy fucking genius.
Which is not an argument that the makers of Sex and the City be held to a lower standard, but offering the suggestion that perhaps everyone ought to be held to a higher standard, even the filmmakers and actors who look like you, who make you laugh by treating characters that look like the SATC gang (minus the haute couture) like sex objects and punchlines.
Because, seriously. The double-standard is truly, truly breathtaking.
Fail all around, friends.
Contemptuously,
Liss
"Get Back to Normal"
It's just suddenly hit me why the commercial for Tylenol Rapid Release bugs me so much. It's always about various apparently TAB people taking a couple of OTC pain meds, and being able to "get back to normal", as the repetitive jingle has it.
Y'know...pain is the normal for me. On Sunday, for the first time in I really, really can't remember how long, I woke up, and my meds were able to give me a day that was more or less painfree (I played soccer later, and was so much more mobile I actually made my knees hurt the next day). It was, honestly, glorious.
But that's not my usual day. My usual day is:
1 Wake up.
2 Take pills.
3 Wait.
4 Try to stand.
5 If not standing, go to 2.
6 Do some activity.
7 Get horizontal for a while, then go to 2.
8 Feed self.
9 Do some activity.
10 Get horizontal for a while, then go to 2; if it is past 02h, skip this step next time and go to 12 instead.
12 Sleep for a while, til the meds wear off.
That's normal for me, Tylenol. So thanks for putting a commercial on my TV that reminds me on a daily basis how abnormal I am, because hey, no healthy amount of your product will let me approach the normal you show.
But I'm sure the majority of people taking your meds aren't people with differently-abled bodies, right? After all, who could expect any of us to maybe need pain meds?
Good Reporting. Well Done.
This article in the Telegraph is a total trainwreck. Two (unscientific) polls of pregnant women have found, unsurprisingly, that commuters don't generally give up their seats to pregnant women.
From there, the surveyors seemingly extrapolate (and the Telegraph unquestioningly repeats) the conclusion that the reason commuters aren't relinquishing their seats is "because they are uncertain if women are really pregnant or not."
From where did this assertion—important enough that the subhead of the article reads "Pregnant women are being left standing on public transport because commuters are too afraid to offer their seat in case they are simply overweight, researchers claim"—actually come, if the people polled were pregnant women and not people who refused to give up their seats?
The way the article is written, it appears the "researchers" simply pulled the explanation out of their asses, and I'm not sure they didn't. (The Daily Mail article, which the Telegraph cites as a source, is, naturally, no help, either.)
Anyway, irrespective of whence came the claim, there it is: People don't offer their seats to pregnant ladies, because they can't tell them apart from fat ladies (I like how those are mutually exclusive categories in this framing, btw), and they don't want to risk the embarrassment of accidentally offering their seat to a fat lady who they assume will axiomatically be offended.
There's so much shit wrapped up in that, I don't even know where to begin.
I will say this, though: The fat woman who gets loudly offended on public transit because someone has offered her a seat thinking she's pregnant strikes me as the straw-woman star of an apocryphal tale.
I took public transit twice a day for 10 years during Chicago rush hour, and I never once heard anyone offer a woman a seat by explicitly saying it was because she was pregnant. "Would you like my seat?" That's how it happens. I offered my seat to pregnant women dozens of times, and never once did I reference their pregnancy in any way.
The legend of the fat woman who gets loudly offended on public transit because someone has offered her a seat thinking she's pregnant only works if the offerer somehow communicates "I think you're pregnant," which is improbable, at best.
Almost as improbable as a fat woman making a scene that calls attention to a humiliation related to her fat. (Not that being mistaken for a pregnant woman is objectively humiliating, but someone making a scene about it would clearly regard it so.) Fat women who suffer humiliations related to being fat don't generally cause huge public fusses about it (even when we should), despite what slapstick exploitation comedies starring men in female fat suits would have us believe.
So color me dubious that there are legions of people who've experienced offering their seats to a fat woman who gets loudly offended on public transit because someone has offered her a seat thinking she's pregnant. I strongly suspect she is a conjured figure, used to justify keeping one's ass firmly planted where it is, her existence never questioned because we are so used to telling lies about fat people to make them our scapegoats for a host of social ills and inconsideracies.
Daring to Discuss Women and...*Yawn*
Shaker Candace forwarded this piece the always charming John Tierney penned for The New York Times about women in science. I'm not sure I have anything to say on this that hasn't already been said by Anna, or Janet, or Christiana. For that matter, I think the "daring" idea that women are innately inferior to men at various Important Things--and indeed the preposterous notion that the idea is "daring" to begin with--has been answered quite competently in the past, recently by Deborah Cameron. A brief snippet from The Myth of Mars and Venus:
Writers in this vein are fond of presenting themselves as latter-day Galileos, braving the wrath of the political correctness lobby by daring to challenge the feminist orthodoxy that denies that men and women are by nature profoundly different. Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of The Essential Difference, explains in his introduction that he put the book aside for several years because "the topic was just too politically sensitive". In the chapter on male-female differences in his book about human nature, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker congratulates himself on having the courage to say what has long been "unsayable in polite company". Both writers stress that they have no political axe to grind: they are simply following the evidence where it leads, and trying to put scientific facts in place of politically correct dogma.
Yet before we applaud, we should perhaps pause to ask ourselves: since when has silence reigned about the differences between men and women? Certainly not since the early 1990s, when the previous steady trickle of books began to develop into a raging torrent. By now, a writer who announces that sex-differences are natural is not "saying the unsayable": he or she is stating the obvious.
Cosmologist Sean Carroll ably addressed the infamous Larry Summers talk over five years ago in these three posts: Sex and science, The scientific method, and Bell curves. That Tierney is still writing about the Summers talk as though it's fresh material says a lot.
And of course, Stephen Jay Gould's 1994 response to Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve is relevant here, as Summers et al.'s argument is just the old bell curve bit. Gould's 1981 masterpiece, The Mismeasure of Man, remains relevant as well.
Some very smart folks have been pointing out the flaws in essentialist arguments for a long time. The New York Times expects us to ignore that fact. And as long as we continue to ignore that fact, a few workshops won't close the gender gap in STEM.
Share your thoughts and links in comments.
