This blogaround brought to you by typewriters.
Recommended Reading:
The Guttmacher Institute: New Infographic: Contraception Is Highly Effective
Pam: Pondering Action, ENDA, and Speaking Truth to Power [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of LGBT marginalization, privilege, racism, and misogyny.]
Zainab: Why White Guys Hate My Hijab [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of xenophobia, misogyny, objectification, policing, and harassment.]
Ruth: Of Scalps and Savages: How Colonial Language Enforces Discrimination Against Indigenous Peoples [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of racism, colonial language, and violent rhetoric.]
Transgender Law Center: Jesse Tyler Ferguson Supports Transgender Students [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of transphobia.]
BYP: Study Finds Blacks Are Nearly 4 Times as Likely as Whites to Be Arrested for Pot Possession [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of racism and police malfeasance.]
Jess: We Need a Better Way to Talk About Cunnilingus
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
Wednesday Blogaround
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Racism; gun violence; victim-blaming.]
"Right now, we can't stop. If we stop, the world will stop. We've got to keep fighting."—Tracy Martin, father of murdered teenager Trayvon Martin. From an MSNBC article titled "For Trayvon Martin's parents, a journey of grief and advocacy." Advocacy necessitated because of bullshit gun laws and racist victim-blaming by people who seek to put their slain son on trial.
George Zimmerman took their son, and his defenders and sympathizers oblige them to be activists while they mourn.
[Via Jamilah.]
Daily Dose of Cute
"All's I'm saying is: I'm not planning on getting up, but if you're getting up to get me a treat, then I will get up. However, if you are getting up to take a leak or something, I'm staying right here. Bone's in your court."
* * *
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
Shocking News
[Content Note: Racism, invasion of privacy]
On A17 of the New York Times there's this news that is definitely less important than the IRS hullabaloo:
The Transportation Security Administration has little evidence that an airport passenger screening program, which some employees believe is a magnet for racial profiling and has cost taxpayers nearly one billion dollars, screens passengers objectively, according to a report by the inspector general for the Homeland Security Department.(And by "little", and "some employees believe", The Times actually means "no" and "definitely.")
In August, The Times reported that more than 30 officers at Logan International Airport in Boston had said that the program was being used to profile passengers like Hispanics traveling to Florida or blacks wearing baseball caps backward.I never thought I'd say this, but maybe this country has a problem with racism.
The Happiness Police
[Content Note: Emotional auditing; shaming; fat bias; religious supremacy.]
In my earlier piece about being child-free, I mentioned the common experience, shared by most people who choose not to parent, of being told I can't really be happy—or even understand what TRUE HAPPINESS EVEN IS!—if I am not a parent.
This is a common refrain in my life, because I am part of several populations where Happiness Policing is routinely used to calculate as invalid any professions of happiness.
* I am not a parent.
* I am a fat person.
* I am an atheist.
There's other Happiness Policing that goes on in my life—"You can't possibly be happy living in a conservative state," etc.—but none that is quite so persistent, nor reinforced by a foundation of systemic marginalization, as the above. It goes like this:
* You cannot possibly be happy if you are not a parent, because being a parent is the greatest joy any human being can ever know. And even if you are happy, it's not as happy as you would be if you were a parent. Your happiness is inferior, if it even exists at all.
* You cannot possibly be happy if you are fat, because fat people are gross and ugly and unhealthy and no person could be happy being so gross and ugly and unhealthy. You are definitely unhappy and probably depressed.
* You cannot possibly be happy if you are an atheist, because you don't believe in anything and can't even understand goodness and are just mad at god. Your heart can't be full if you don't know god(s). No one who fails to nourish their soul with faith can be truly happy.
(These are, of course, only my experiences, based on my life and cultural identity. There are similar Happiness Policing narratives based on rejecting even the possibility for happiness used against people in same-sex relationships, trans* people, people with visible disabilities, etc.)
What we have here is a failure of imagination.
Some people cannot imagine themselves being happy without children, or a particular body shape, or religion, and so they cannot imagine that I am. They have put my lived experience through their validity prisms and decided that if I say I am happy in circumstances in which they could not be, I must be lying. Or in denial. Or using a bit of bravado in order to mask a secret unhappiness. Accusations of some flaw in me, to obfuscate a failure of basic empathy.
Sometimes, it's people who are themselves childless, or fat, or have had a crisis of faith—and the unhappiness they feel because of those things is so profound that they cannot imagine anyone being happy in similar circumstances. It may be genuine disbelief, or it may be envy, that invites their suspicion and repudiation of my happiness.
And some people who have children, or are thin, or go to church every week, claim these things make them happy, when in fact they are deeply unhappy. They hate parenting; they live a life of restriction and self-denial and hunger to unnaturally maintain a thin physique; they go to church only because they feel like they should. And they resent that they sacrifice so much shit to do what society tells them is "right" yet remain miserable, while I reject the imperatives to reproduce, to hate myself, to engage in religious ritual, and feel happy and free as a result.
There's no effective response to Happiness Policers, because there's no way to convince someone of your happiness when they are determined to believe otherwise. If you ignore them, they will interpret that as PROOF! that you are unable to refute them and thus they are right. If you insist you are happy, they will accuse you of "protesting too much" which is PROOF! that you are secretly unhappy and thus they are right. It's a losing game. Which is entirely the point.
It's tiresome. But the only thing to be done is to speak your truth about being happy in who you are, knowing the Happiness Policers will do their thing, and knowing that their hostility toward your emotional integrity says something about them, not about you.
Building Collapse in Philadelphia
[Content Note: Injury.]
A four-story building in downtown Philadelphia collapsed this morning at the corner of 22nd and Market streets. Ten people have reportedly been taken to local hospitals, and rescuers are searching through the rubble for at least two more people and maybe more.
The 4-story building, which was connected to a Salvation Army Thrift Store on the southeast corner, collapsed at 10:45 Wednesday morning.Holy shit. I am reading as-yet confirmed reports that the building being demolished essentially collapsed in the wrong direction.
The collapse brought down part of the thrift store and what appears to be converted row homes attached to the back of the building.
Bystanders immediately jumped into action, helping first responders to locate and assist the wounded.
... Emergency crews are on the scene continuing to work feverishly to find survivors.
It appears the building at 2136 Market Street, located next to where the collapse happened, was being demolished. However, there is no word if work there had any role in the incident.
My thoughts are with everyone involved—the people who were in the building, the people who love them, emergency crews, the hospital workers, helpful bystanders, the building's owner(s). Fuck.
Please feel welcome and encouraged to share additional/new information as it becomes available in comments.
In The News
[Content Note: Gun culture]
Show me show me show me how to do that trick:
A marriage equality bill has passed UK's House of Lords in a landslide vote. Neat!
Speaking of House of Lords, remember these hair farmers?
Soul singer Sharon Jones has postponed recording her next album after being diagnosed with cancer.
All that technology and it's still a shitty pizza.
In Steven Seagal news: The former movie star will appear in a new campaign to promote Russian weapons. Obviously.
The Wizard of Oz will be converted to 3-D and IMAX for a one-week theatrical run in September. Okay.
Welp: Buzz Aldrin and Thomas Dolby perform She Blinded Me With Science.
I Get Letters
[Content Note: Rape culture.]
Once upon a time, two dudes who write a web comic called "Penny Arcade" posted a strip that included a rape joke. Some people objected to this. It got nasty from there, in the same infuriatingly predictable way these things always get nasty. And then it got nastier, and more awful, and uglier, and more horrible, and worser, oof just so horrendo like whoa.
(The whole history is detailed here.)
The only thing that was certain is the only thing that's ever certain, which is that feminist survivors of sexual violence who don't find rape jokes funny are stupid, hypersensitive, rage-seeking missiles who want to censor the world. [sic]
Anyway. That was more three years ago. Last night, this arrived in my inbox:
I know this is really old, but I only ran across the post recently.Ran across what post? Who knows. Obviously none of the posts in this space that detail the joke (and subsequent jokes deployed in a double-down defense strategy). But even though this guy doesn't know to which joke I objected, he is certain that I'm wrong. Perfect.
When was there a "rape joke" in Penny Arcade? I only recall a joke about a guy in a video game having a horrible life that the player character didn't care about. In what way did that joke diminish or endorse rape? Rape didn't seem to be the punchline or object of mockery. In fact, the target of the joke seemed to be the player character's insensitivity. Isn't that the exact opposite of laughing at rape?
The fact that I am still getting emails about this shit three years later is pretty rich, considering that "get over it" is the go-to mantra of rape apologists.
See also: Fat Princess.
Pro-Choice: Choosing Not to Parent
So, you know that parenting narrative, the one about how being a parent mother is the most fulfilling thing ever and is totally fulfilling in and of itself and if you disagree, you're basically a child-hating monster…? Yeah. That narrative stinks.
It stinks for people who are already mothers, who find that they need more out of life than parenting to be happy and fulfilled, and are treated like traitors to their own children for saying so.
It stinks for people who never want to be mothers, whose choice is demeaned and whose lives are devalued with the invocation of the assertion that only motherhood begets true fulfillment.
And it stinks for people who aren't yet sure if they want to be mothers, who have access to all sorts of testaments to the comprehensive fulfillment of motherhood, but far fewer critical assessments of modern parenting from those navigating it, and fewer still stories of lives that are better because they have been parenting-free.
"I wish," said a female coworker of mine once, after a particularly rough day with her three kids, "that I had heard anyone say, even once, that happiness without kids was possible."
She is a great mom—the kind of mom that we should all be so lucky to have. She loves her kids, and she likes them, too, most days. And she wishes she'd never had them.
When she got pregnant with her first, soon after getting engaged at a young age, she'd never even considered not having kids. Having kids was just what women like her did. Even having been raised in a politically moderate suburb in a not-churchgoing household, born a decade after Roe was legal fact, she'd never encountered the idea that a straight, middle-class, cis woman who was married might elect to not have kids.
And be happy with that choice.
My life was full of aunts and older second-cousins who never had children. Aunt Betty. Aunt Lil. Aunt Marsha. Cousins Jane and Joy. And my Aunt Judy—a fat feminist executive who took her nieces on trips around the world, to make sure we knew what it looked like. She worked her way up from a mailroom to a vice-presidency; she traveled; she refused to be obliged; she spent lots of money (and saved lots of money); she drove a cherry red convertible with a guffaw for a backseat. She owned herself. And she told me, plainly, she didn't want children, even while I still was one.
Judy didn't worry about being cautious, lest an eavesdropping parent infer she was impugning their choice. She didn't worry about my potentially inferring she didn't like me, or my sister, or my cousins, just because she didn't want children of her own. If she worried about anything at all, it was making sure I knew that her life, a life that she knew I admired, was fundamentally incompatible with parenting.
Her life wouldn't have been what it was if she had been a mother.
"Having it all" is a questionable concept to begin with, especially when conjured outside a framework that meaningfully addresses privilege. But if among the things you want to "have" are tons of flexibility and lots of freedom, it's a comprehensively useless concept. Freedom and flexibility inevitably necessitate trading something.
I can't know precisely what my life might have looked like if I'd chosen to parent, but I know that building a career that took me from a reception desk to an executive office in six years would have been harder, if not impossible, if I'd had kids. I know that ending my first marriage would not have been as easy if we'd had children—both making the decision to end it, and the legal mechanics of ending it. I know I couldn't have picked up and moved to Scotland on a whim. I know I could not as easily hold firm boundaries with close family members, if I had children who needed and wanted to see them. I know I could not have built and maintained this space, because the demands on my time are too great.
There are people vested in shaming any woman who chooses not to parent who tell me that I can't really be happy, or that my happiness pales in comparison to the incandescence of the happiness uniquely conveyed by motherhood. But motherhood doesn't make everyone happy. What makes people happy is being able to fashion their lives into the shapes they want.
This is a reproductive choice we don't talk about so much, because it's inevitably inferred to be implicitly censurous of parenting and/or children. I am not anti-parenting. I don't dislike children. I am, however, deeply contemptuous of the bad faith interpretations that misconstrue child-free advocacy as one of many reproductive options to be inherently anti-parent/child. I talk about my happiness being child-free because I support a spectrum of equally valid reproductive choice, which includes parenting, too.
It's important for us, collectively, not to silence women who choose and are happy to be child-free—and not just because we're a useful demographic to defend the need for comprehensive reproductive choice and undermine bullshit gender essentialist, cissexist narratives about "natural instincts" and "what women are meant to do." It's important because there isn't really meaningful choice without a public discussion of all those choices, by the people who made them.
And an honest discussion: I am not going to be obliged to acquiesce that, sure, my life might have been even better with children. Never mind whether it's (in)accurate: It's irrelevant. My life is what I want it to be, as much as it can be, given my particular set of privileges, marginalizations, talents, and opportunities. And I am not going to be obliged to pretend that my choice is neutral: It isn't. I wanted to be child-free, and I am, and that is a better choice for me. We talk about these choices in a frame that exhorts us to recognize parenting as The Best Choice! and not-parenting as another choice. That isn't honest. Choosing to be child-free is the best choice, the happy-making choice, for a lot of people.
So. Let me be one voice for anyone, of any gender, who doesn't have an Aunt Judy to tell them the same: It is possible to be happy without children. It is possible your life will be better without them. It's not true that anyone who chooses not to parent and says they don't regret that decision is "protesting too much." Not parenting is an option, and sometimes it's a very good one.
Question of the Day
What's your favorite movie poster?
My favorite is the French poster for one of my all-time favorite films, Harold and Maude:
I mean, that's just fucking spectacular. Of course, it's enhanced by how much I adore the film, too.
FYI
[Previous FYI: Rick Astley; Eddie Murphy; The Eurythmics; Eddie Rabbit; Sinéad O'Connor; Was (Not Was); Bon Jovi; Kenny Rogers; Bobby McFerrin; Starship; Dead or Alive; Right Said Fred; Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians; Salt n Pepa; Nelson; The Cure; The Soup Dragons; Europe/BushCo; Elton John; Eddie Money; Human League; Glenn Frey; Van Halen; Alanis Morissette; Depeche Mode; The Beatles; The Proclaimers; Bruce Springsteen; Meat Loaf; Cyndi Lauper; Cole Porter; Tina Turner. Hint: They're better if you click 'em!]
Saxby Chambliss is the worst.
[Content Note: Rape culture.]
Shut the fuck up, Saxby Chambliss. You are the worst.
THE WORST!
Photo of the Day
[Content Note: Gun violence.]
Figo, the canine partner of fallen Kentucky police officer Jason Ellis, paid his respects at the officer's funeral by placing a paw on his partner's casket. A photo of the moment, taken by photojournalist Jonathan Palmer, went viral over the weekend. [Via]Officer Ellis was "shot in an apparent ambush in the early morning hours of May 25. Police believe the suspect laid debris on an exit ramp, and then shot Ellis when he got out of this car to remove the debris." Figo was not with him at the time he was killed. He has been retired and will live with Ellis' widow and their two sons.
All the blubs.
My condolences to Officer Ellis' colleagues, friends, and family, including his dog.
Welp
[Content Note: Misogyny.]
So, Republican Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant said today that working moms are responsible for US educational failures. Ha ha of course they are.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) said Tuesday that America's educational troubles began when women began working outside the home in large numbers.Yes, women working is a terrible thing blah blah yawn.
Bryant was participating in a Washington Post Live event focused on the importance of ensuring that children read well by the end of third grade. In response to a question about how America became "so mediocre" in regard to educational outcomes, he said: "I think both parents started working. And the mom is in the work place."
I especially love this dinosaur scat being dragged across the carpet of public school education, given that nearly 80% of full- and part-time public school teachers in the US are women, most of whom are also mothers.
Well, Governor Bryant, I guess we could send all of those teachers back to their kitchens, but, gee, then you'd have to replace them with men and actually pay teachers what they're worth, and I know how much Republicans hate paying teachers. WHAT A CONUNDRUM.
Whoops the UNM Psychology Department Response to Fat Hatred
[Content Note: Fat hatred.]
Yesterday, I posted a (quickly redacted) fat-hating tweet published by an evolutionary psychology professor at the University of New Mexico. In comments, Shaker ladydreamgirl shared that the tweet's author, Geoffrey Miller, has since claimed the tweet was part of "a research project" which consisted of sending out "provocative tweets" in order to gauge people's reactions to them.
Even if that's true (and I am extremely dubious that it is), given the demonstrable capacity for harm of public body shaming, such a project would be extremely unethical. Personally, I find a psychology researcher claiming he was deliberately provoking fat people by publicly shaming them significantly more disturbing than publishing an insensitive tweet reflecting personal bigotry.
UNM Psychology Chair Jane Ellen Smith has given a statement in response to the controversy, in which she notes that Miller's claims of a research project are being investigated. She also had a few other things to say:
Text Onscreen: Prof. Jane Ellen Smith, UNM Psychology Department Chairwoman.Okay. I don't know anything about Professor Smith or her work, but I would be surprised if whatever work she's doing "in the body image and eating disorder and obesity area" is Health at Every Size-based, given her use of "normal weight" as distinct from "underweight" and "overweight," thus suggesting it's never "normal" to be fat. I also note that her Center for Health Policy at UNM bio notes: "Dr. Smith specializes in both substance abuse and eating disorders/obesity." Which suggests that fat is pathological and all fat people are compulsive eaters.
Text Onscreen: What was your reaction to Prof. Miller's tweets?
Smith, a middle-aged thin white woman, standing in front of a bookshelf: I started getting lots of emails from very concerned people yesterday afternoon, and, when I discovered what it was about, I was really surprised, I have to say. Um, the idea that the psychology department here at the University of New Mexico, or any department at UNM, would be discriminating against people because of their size or shape—it's just outlandish. That's nothing we would ever do.
Text Onscreen: How does this tweet touch on your own area of research?
Smith: Actually, one of the main areas of my research is in the body image and eating disorder and obesity area, and so it really hits close to home, because not only do I do research with people who have a lot of concerns about their body, you know, regardless of their size—underweight, normal weight, overweight—but you can see the devastation it causes.
Text Onscreen: Is UNM planning to take any action?
Smith: Well, we're first going to find out exactly what happened—um, I've had some contact with Professor Miller about this; he claims it's part of a research study. He's a social psychologist, um, does work in the evolutionary area, and, uh, claims that he's been sending out provocative tweets over a number of months now to measure people's reactions to them, and so we'll be investigating that.
And then there is her incredible claim that it's "outlandish" to imagine there's any discrimination against fat people in any department at the entire University of New Mexico. I've never been to the University of New Mexico, so I had no idea it exists in a void! How truly extraordinary that there is no fat bias to be found anywhere at a university that operates in a culture otherwise rife with institutional fat hatred, including well-documented employment discrimination!
Claiming that X bigotry doesn't exist in a community where a member of that community just expressed X bigotry is: 1. Bullshit; 2. Hostile to the basic concepts of how culture works and how bigotry is transmitted; 3. A deflection of communal accountability; 4. A pretty good indication that no meaningful examination of community standards will happen; 5. A harbinger of a failure to facilitate institutional change.
Somehow I don't feel reassured.
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Rape culture.]
"The commander's ability to preserve good order and discipline remains essential to accomplishing any change within our profession. Reducing command responsibility could adversely affect the ability of the commander to enforce professional standards and ultimately, to accomplish the mission."—Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey, in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, arguing that addressing sexual violence in the US military via the chain of command is integral to preserving order, discipline, and professional standards.
Presumably, that's the same order, discipline, and professional standards that led to an estimated 26,000 sexual assaults of servicemembers last year, only 3,374 of which were reported, and only 238 of which resulted in convictions.
"I urge that military commanders remain central to the legal process," said Gen. Dempsey. To which I can only respond: Why? Why would anyone who cares about really and truly addressing this problem urge that the chain of command structure currently failing a vast majority of victims be retained?
That's rhetorical.
Daily Dose of Cute
[Click to embiggen.]
OMG! I grew a beagle in the garden!
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
