"I haven't forgotten about Benghazi. Hillary Clinton got away with murder, in my view."—Republican Senator and world-class dirtbag Lindsay Graham.
In The News
[Content note: Gun violence, transphobia]
Woensdag Nieuws:
A white Georgia man shot and killed a young Latino who accidentally pulled into his driveway.
Maryland lawmakers introduced a bill that would ban anti-transgender discrimination in the workplace, housing and public accommodations.
Hey look! Someone is saying that fat is not the same thing as illness. Radical!
Shippensburg University will be allowed to keep its Plan B vending machine.
Israel attacked a convoy on the Syrian-Lebanese border last night "as concern has grown in the Jewish state over the fate of Syrian chemical and advanced conventional weapons."
Former Illinois Governor George Ryan leaves prison and enters a halfway house. Good luck, George Ryan!
Hasbro unveils Star Wars Black Series action figures. Neat!
The Shaggs, a 60s rock band formed by three talentless sisters, are going to be the subject of a new film. Oof.
Is this the best horror preview voice-over ever?
Jim Nabors got married. Awesome. Totally awesome.
YouTube will introduce paid subscriptions for individual channels later this year.
Where were CD revenues up in 2012? Japan.
Also: The most beautiful record stores in the world.
New Girl!
[SPOILER WARNING: There are all kinds of major spoilers from last night's episode of New Girl in this thread, so if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to skip it.]
Who wants to talk about last night's episode of New Girl with me? Because OMG NEW GIRRRRRLLLLL!!!!!! There were so many things I loved about this episode! Let us discuss ALL OF THE THINGS!
{ That is a bulletpoint of Nick's turtleface. I know it's really small, but I hope you will just enjoy that a Nick's turtleface bulletpoint exists in the world.
True American is the greatest game of all time, right? What are the rules? WHO KNOWS! There is definitely not a print-out of the rules, though, so don't even ask!
"Damn it! I've been trying to get something going with myself for a full hour. It's like a taffy pull on a hot summer's day!"
"Pipe talk's boring!"
"Holly, he's really happy! He's got a 401k and a six pack!"
I know I have said this before, but I love Jess' and Cece's friendship. I also love how even though they are the primary ladies on the show, all the other ladies are still treated as human beings, even the weird ones. I really liked Winston's date in last night's episode; I hope she sticks around.
Jess running around the apartment bored. THE ROBOT! Amazing.
Melon head Nick!
Love the way Sam reacted to Jess' and Nick's predicament when he arrived at the party. So not threatened. In a good way. But also kind of in a bad way? It felt like a perfect navigation of that space in which someone is so cool for deservedly trusting their partner, but is also just that little bit too detached to see some truth about their partner they should probably be able to see. Sam is doomed, but it's not because he's terrible, or because Jess is terrible; they're just not quite right.
[Seriously. I'm warning you about the spoilers! Last chance!]
Love the way the show has handled the relationship between Jess and Nick. It's been so thoughtful and so honest. The characters have been allowed to talk bluntly about their attraction to one another, and it's been this thing that is part of their friendship. It's so refreshing to see an arc like this one (and who knows where it's going; WHERE IS IT GOING?!) that avoids the typical stupid conceit that one person is COMPLETELY UNAWARE that the other is mooning desperately over them, and then there are all these absurdly implausible circumstances that keep them apart interminably. The narrative of their relationship has been natural, and, crucially, both of them are equally invested in it.
THIS. ♥
Discuss!
Seen
[Content Note: Religious supremacy; reference to clergy abuse.]
![image of a church sign reading: 'A person committed to god provides the best modle [sic] for us'](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v642/shakespeares_sister/shakes6/churchsign1.jpg)
Yes, this is the same church where "Christian" was recently misspelled, too, but whatever. Not everyone's a great speller.
Most people, however, have the capacity to understand, even if they evidently lack the willingness, that posting a public message that people with god-belief are axiomatically good people, and people without god-belief are inherently less than is some real bullshit. (And abuse-abetting, to boot.)
I'm guessing if I walked into that church and asked which god-committed person provides the best model—Jim Jones, Nechemya Weberman, or Osama bin Laden?—I would be instructed they mean Christian people, and if I then asked which Christian god-committed person provides the best model—Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard, or William Lynn?—the No True Scotsman fallacy would be invoked without a trace of irony.
There is no truth to this statement. It is not true that any old person committed to god is "the best" model for everyone. This is just another casual bit of Christian Supremacist bullying that conflates god-belief with ethical behavior. Believing in god is itself not a moral act.
It gets really fucking old being an atheist in this neighborhood.
Today in Fat Hatred
[Content Note: Fat bias; medical malfeasance.]
From the Whoooooooooooops I Diagnosed You as Fat Files: Brian Harms was diagnosed as fat and told to lose weight if he wanted to feel better. Turns out he had a cyst deep in his brain that nearly killed him, of which uncontrollable weight gain was a symptom. Whoops!
Thank Maude that Harms lived.
But when people like me say "Fat hatred kills people all the time," this is what I mean. It's not hyperbole. It's a terrible truth.
[H/T to Shaker Carol.]
Discussion Thread: When I Was Brave
After posting "Women Are Brave" yesterday, I had a request from Shaker koach for a thread in which Shakers can share stories of when they were brave, by every definition. So here it is. Share a time when you were brave. Share all the times!
Question of the Day
What was the last play you saw (dramatic or musical)? If you've never seen a play, please feel welcome to offer what play you'd most like to see.
The last one I saw via the magic of television was Anna Deavere Smith's amazing one-woman show Let Me Down Easy, video of which Deeks has here. The last one I saw live was a local high school production of Footloose, which was surprisingly terrific.
Feel the Kentucky Homomentum!
Vicco, Kentucky (pop. 335) has passed a ban forbidding discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.
The New York Times' coverage, while not perfect, has a good description of the process, and of the role played by the city's openly gay mayor, Johnny Cummings. In addition to shepherding through this equality measure, Mr. Cummings has been active in trying to improve the town's infrastructure and civic pride:
As mayor, Mr. Cummings inherited a skeleton-crew city that could not afford to keep all the office lights on. What’s more, the creaky pipes in its water system, which generates money for the city through sales to area customers, were leaking more than 40 percent of the water, or revenue.“How do you fix this?” Mr. Cummings remembers thinking. “I’m just a hairdresser.”
He began by making amends with government agencies that had long since written off Vicco, hiring back the maintenance whiz who knew the city’s pipes better than anyone and securing public grants to pay for the work. Now, he says, the repaired pipes are creating enough revenue to hire more workers and restore some color to Vicco’s dreary black-and-white.
For example, he paid $600 for the bold blue metal bench that now sits in front of City Hall, emblazoned with the city’s name. He also hired the city’s first police officer in years: Tony Vaughn, a former detective and one of Mr. Cummings’s protectors back in high school...
...This place-in-progress called Vicco was one of a handful of municipalities to receive a request last year from the Fairness Coalition, a Kentucky-based advocacy group for people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Mr. Cummings happens to have a sister, Lee Etta, who is active in the coalition.
The coalition’s request: to consider adopting an anti-discrimination ordinance.
The city’s forward-thinking attorney, Eric Ashley, trimmed the coalition’s 28-page ordinance proposal down to a couple of pages. Then the mayor and the four-member Commission, all heterosexual men, met in December for a first reading and a discussion that ended with a 4-to-0 vote in favor of adoption.
Congratulations to the people of Vicco!
Two Bits of News
1. The Senate has confirmed John Kerry as the next Secretary of State.
2. President Obama gave an address on immigration reform earlier today. The full transcript of his speech is available here. He did not say anything in his remarks about bi-national same-sex couples, but that will reportedly end up in the proposed legislation.
Promoted from Comments
[Content Note: Cultural misogyny and gender essentialism.]
Shaker AnnaAnastasia in comments on An Observation (About Tokenism), shared with her permission:
I relate to this a lot. One of the things that made a difference for me is feminism (SHOCKING I KNOW) and really internalizing the reality that women are not a monolith. A lot of what I thought was an awkwardness in interacting with other girls and women for many years was really just being friends with women who didn't share my (allegedly unfeminine) interests.That we are mysterious, that we are an impenetrable and unrelatable monolith, that our communication and interaction with each other in real life is so inscrutable that it cannot possible be deciphered and reproducedAnd you know what's a weird byproduct of this for me as a woman? That for as long as I can remember, I've been intimidated when engaging in friendships with women (in groups or one-to-one) because I've internalized that they're inscrutable, even though I am one.
Even from elementary school, girl-only slumber parties felt like checklists - did we paint our nails? Check. Eat a pint of ice cream? Check. Call boys? Check. I didn't even know whether I liked those things, and I certainly didn't know how to suggest doing things that were coded as less "girly" like digging in the mud. I just knew the script, because that's what I was told that girls do, so I played along. In university, I felt far more comfortable living in a mixed-gender unit than I did when I lived in an all-female unit, simply because I thought there was a script for living solely with other women. (To this day, I don't quite know what I expected, only that I expected something.)
Even today, I can't tell you the number of times that a female friend or friends have asked me to go shopping, or to the movies, or to hang out, as humans often do, and I become nervous and wonder how to "act" with another woman. I use "act" intentionally, because it feels like an act: I stand outside myself and wonder how a group of women would act in this situation. Should we pick the "girly" romantic comedy, or will she be disappointed if I suggest the action movie, because women don't watch those (even if I do)? What if I want to go shopping in a record store, not a lingerie store? Is that weird, as a woman, to find that more interesting? Of course not, but it doesn't stop me from feeling awkward. Being with a group of mixed gender friends is so much easier for me.
I guess what I'm saying is that we live in a really messed-up patriarchy when as a woman, I've mentally put myself in the role of a male scriptwriter who doesn't believe he knows how to depict relationships between women, even though the script I'm writing is my own life as a woman.
Women Are Brave
[Content Note: Misogyny; harassment.]
There are a million garbage misogynist narratives demeaning women as less than—women aren't funny, women can't get along with each other, women can't achieve the extraordinary genius (or the depths of depravity) that men can, etc.—all of them self-evident crap to anyone who has interacted with women and cares to move beyond patriarchal narratives of institutional diminishment.
It's an impossible task to rank the capacity for rage-making these Myths of the Lady Monolith, but one of the tropes that most infuriates me, every time I have the misfortune to stumble across another of its endless iterations, is that women are weak—and its rubbish corollary that women aren't brave.
In order to maintain this illusion, bravery is typically defined in ways that have traditionally favored men. But even using traditional narratives, there are women who demonstrate courage: Among the staff and commentariat of this blog are women who have served or are serving in the military, female cops, female firefighters—women in a number of professions that require they put themselves in harm's way in the commission of their daily jobs.
If we expand the traditional definitions of bravery to include that which requires courage based on a circumstance of potential harm, all the women who publicly disclose concealable identities in public spaces where they may risk retributive harassment, physical abuse, employment insecurity, familial estrangement, community ostracization, or face other meaningful consequence are brave: The women who come out; the women who transition; the women who identify as feminists, womanists, atheists, survivors; multiracial women who can pass as white; women with invisible disabilities, including and especially mental illness; women who have had abortions; women who provide abortions.
That is hardly a comprehensive list, because it takes gumption just to walk out every day into a world that hates you.
Sure, there are female cowards, who are cowardly about some things or lots of things. But the point is not that there are no women who are cowards; the point is that there are women who aren't.
My friend Ari recently celebrated her 40th birthday. Shortly after, she got up onstage, in front of a packed house, and did stand-up comedy for the first time. And then, last Friday night, for the second time.
Now, despite my bias, I will tell you that Ari is a hilarious woman, who can make me laugh until tears roll down my cheeks. She has the capacity to command attention in a way I cannot fathom, and when she finds all eyes on her, she has the tremendous gift of elevating everyone in the room.
But on Friday night, it was not as remarkable that she was funny (although she was!) or charismatic (that, too!), but that she was one of five comedians, the rest of whom were all straight white men whose acts can collectively be paraphrased as: "Women are the worst, amirite? I am definitely a stalker. Also: I HAVE A PENIS! Goodnight!"
The only other woman onstage that night was a waitress, beckoned by the headliner to bring him a shot from the bar, then sexually harassed as he instructed the audience to check out her ass as she walked away.
Ari, a woman of color, smack in the middle of the group o' dudes, stood on the stage in pursuit of her longtime dream—and she told jokes that were not cruel, jokes that were not self-hating, jokes that celebrated female bodies, jokes that demanded the audience see her as a confident, strong, sexual, smart woman. She didn't compromise or conceal herself: She challenged us to love her, just as she is, in a space that was explicitly hostile to women in multiple ways.
It's not dragging someone off a battlefield in a hail of shrapnel, but I defy anyone to tell me that shit ain't brave.
My kingdom for a world in which women's bravery is celebrated in its every expression.
(Full Disclosure: I do not have a kingdom.)
Fatsronauts 101
Fatsronauts 101 is a series in which I address assumptions and stereotypes about fat people that treat us as a monolith and are used to dehumanize and marginalize us. If there is a stereotype you'd like me to address, email me.
[Content Note: Fat bias; dehumanization.]
#17: Fat people's choices are always dictated by their fat.
This is not as obvious a narrative about fat people as something like "All fat people eat enormous amounts of food and never exercise," but it is just as pervasive in the lives of many fat people.
It's a common narrative of oppression: Anything a woman does can be attributed to her femaleness; anything a person of color does can be attributed to hir race; etc. Intersectionality only throws a wrench into the words so much as bigots have to decide whether a lesbian, say, is doing this or saying that because she's a woman or because she's gay. Sometimes: Because she's a gay woman!
It's a ubiquitous way of marginalizing people via their identities, frequently "justified" by evo-psych studies that argue X people's habits can be explained by how they had to fend off the wolfosaurs or whatever. It's in our DNA!
Anyway. This shit, generally minus the evo-psych science because fat is viewed as a behavior, happens to fat people all the time, because fat is such a visible part of a person's identity. Whatever explanation there might be for a fat person eating a salad, the axiomatic conclusion is that it's because zie's trying to lose weight. Whatever explanation there might be for a fat person avoiding airplanes (y'know, like the very common fear of flying), the reflexive presumption is that it's because zie can't fit in the seat. Whatever explanation there might be for a fat person having a bad knee, many people will simply assume that the injury is a result of one's fatness, not because of, say, a tumble on an icy sidewalk or a bad twist during a friendly soccer league.
I get this all the time. If I pass on fried food, someone may comment, "Oh, yeah, I know it's so bad for you; I should be watching my weight, too," though I'm passing because it upsets my stomach to fuck. If I mention walking the dogs, I am likely to hear what great exercise it is, though I primarily walk my dogs because they need to piss and shit, not for my own health (which isn't to say there aren't also health benefits). If I don't want my picture taken, it must be because I am fat. If I don't want to wear a particular style of clothing, it must be because I am fat. If I don't want to do a certain activity that requires physical exertion or getting onstage, it must be because I am fat.
(And, as an aside, there are legitimate reasons why a fat person might not want to do some of those things for reasons specifically related to fat bias. But not wanting to do something because I'm fat and not wanting to do something because fat people get harassed and bullied in those situations are not actually the same thing.)
Probably 99% of my life, I don't wear a wedding band, and, when I do, it's one of four different rings: My great-grandmother's wedding band; the wedding band Iain put on my finger at City Hall; the ring I chose when we updated our rings after Iain's band fell down a vent; and the ring I chose when we got new rings for our 10th anniversary. They all fit; I love them all very much; I'm just not someone who's keen to wear a wedding band all the time, for various reasons having nothing to do with my feelings about my relationship and my husband, and some things to do with my feelings about maintaining my individual personhood with people and culture outside my marriage.
I have a complicated relationship with my wedding band! Is what I'm saying. Which is a whole other post.
But despite this complexity, it has been assumed, out loud, to me, that I don't wear my wedding band because it doesn't fit anymore.
I'll allow you a moment to appreciate the irony of my not wearing a wedding band because of reductionist assumptions about married women, only to face reductionist assumptions about fat people.
...
Here's the thing: Fat people are people. (Still a radical concept!) We are denying fat people their comprehensive, individual personhood when we assume everything a fat person does can and must be explained by their fatness. The name for that is not "common sense," as it is so often euphemized, but dehumaniztion.
-------------------------
Previously:
#16: You are helping fat people by shaming them.
#15: Fat people hate having their pictures taken.
#14: All fat people are unhealthy.
#13: Fat people looooooooooove Twinkies!
#12: Fat people don't like/want to see media representations of themselves.
#11: No one wants to be fat.
#10: Fat people need you to intervene in their lives.
#9: Fat people don't know how they look.
#8: Fat people don't deserve anything nice.
#7: Fat people are permission slips for thin people to eat what they want.
#6: Any fat person eating a salad or exercising is trying to lose weight.
#5: Fat is axiomatically ugly.
#4: Fat people eat enormous amounts of food.
#3: Fat people are jolly/mean, and fat people are shy/loud.
#2: I can tell how someone eats all the time, because of how they eat around me.
#1: Everyone who is fat is fat for the same reason.
Feel the Hoosier Homomentum!
Here's marriage story that made me smile:
Bloomington Mayor Mark Kruzan is conducting a wedding ceremony Thursday for more than a dozen LGBT couples, in a move meant to protest a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage.
The ceremony coincides with the 10th anniversary of the PRIDE LGBTQ Film Festival in the city, and will take place at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater at 10 p.m. following the opening night of the festival.
Along with Kruzan, six members of Bloomington's city council and two members of Monroe County Council are expected to attend and pledge support, according to a news release. Local clergy will also be at the ceremony.
All my best to Mayor Kruzan and to the happy couples, for Thursday and for every day.
Daily Dose of Cute
Changing Your Name at Marriage? "That Only Works For Women."
As we have discussed previously on this blog, the decision to change one's name--or not--upon marriage is fraught with a lot of cultural baggage. People have all kinds of good reasons to do so, or not.
However, if you're a man, the state of Florida figures that your reason is fraud. And that makes you a criminal:
Lazaro Dinh was initially issued a new license after presenting his marriage certificate at his local DMV office and paying a $20 fee, just as newly married women are required to do when they adopt their husband's name."It was easy. When the government issues you a new passport you figure you're fine," he said.
More than a year later Dinh received a letter from Florida's DMV last December accusing him of "obtaining a driving license by fraud," and advising him that his license would be suspended at the end of the month. Ironically, it was addressed to Lazaro Dinh.
"I thought it was a mistake," he said.
But when he called the state DMV office in Tallahassee he said he was told he had to go to court first in order to change his name legally, a process that takes several months and has a $400 filing fee.
When he explained he was changing his name due to marriage, he was told 'that only works for women,'" he said.
WHISKEY. TANGO. FOXTROT.
I would say more, but my brain is stuck on the "boggle" function.
In The News
[Content note: Homophobia, gun culture, murder]
Martedì Notizie:
Reports are spreading that Chick-fil-A has ended its donations to antigay groups. But that's not the whole story.
The State Department has closed the office tasked with closing the Guantánamo Bay prison.
Comcast sucks.
Pro-gun fuckfaces shout at father who lost his son in the Newtown shootings.
Who's signing up for this? [NSFW.]
A Virginia inmate will get a full court hearing on her lifelong quest for sex-reassignment surgery.
Tower of Power's Rick Stevens, paroled after 36 years in prison, is back on stage.
Google releases detailed map of North Korea, gulags and all.
Two Facts
1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.
2. In this week's offering, which is about what's wrong with the GOP, Brooks manages to write this:
Since Barry Goldwater, the central Republican narrative has been what you might call the Encroachment Story: the core problem of American life is that voracious government has been steadily encroaching upon individuals and local communities. The core American conflict, in this view, is between Big Government and Personal Freedom.—and then fails to address even obliquely that the "apparent flaw" is actually the profound hypocrisy of the Republican Party, who continue to narratively position themselves as the defenders of Small Government and Personal Freedom while recklessly spending enormous amounts of taxpayer money on bullshit and trying to use the power of government to compel forcible childbirth, deny basic equality, and crush workers' right to organize.
While losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, the flaws of this mentality have become apparent.
The GOP isn't even honest about who they are when they're navel-gazing. Americans expect politicians to lie to us, but we expect them at least not to lie to themselves.
