Shakesville

Pro-Choice, Part Wev in an Ongoing Series

Not twenty minutes after I published the previous piece was this posted on Twitter:

screen cap of a tweet posted by The Frisky reading: 'Let's hear from the moms out there! Is liveblogging birth appalling or intriguing? #ThisorThat @TheMamaFesto @TheMamaBee @HuffPostParents'

So now we can have dueling discussions on whether it's "ethical" to liveblog death and "appalling" to liveblog birth. PERFECT.

Let's just make this easier for everyone: Women should STFU about everything always. Y/N?

I am tired to my very bones of the ubiquitous failure to embrace the simple idea that individual people should be allowed to make individual decisions for themselves.

And I am more committed every day to being pro-choice in all things.

What is this article?

[Content Note: Choice policing; terminal illness; disablism.]

There aren't sufficient words to describe my reverberating contempt for the fact that this article was written and published: "Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?"

The article, written for the Guardian by Emma G. Keller, is about the Twitter feed of Lisa Bonchek Adams, a woman with terminal stage 4 breast cancer which has metastasized to her bones, joints, hips, spine, liver, and lungs. She has long been documenting her illness, her life and her death, on Twitter, and on her blog, and Keller wants to have a discussion about the "ethics" of that choice.

One may wonder why anyone would raise a question regarding the ethics of publicly speaking about one's own terminal illness. The answer appears to be that the author of the piece is deeply conflicted about being drawn to the twitter feed of a dying woman.

As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn't stop reading – I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?

"Why am I so obsessed?" A better question might be: Why am I tasking Lisa Bonchek Adams with the responsibility for my obsession?

Jessica Luther, who gave me the heads-up about this piece, asked on Twitter: "Your piece on @AdamsLisa, @emmagkeller, made her own personal journey towards death ALL ABOUT YOU. Why even do that?" That's a pretty good question, too.

After carefully detailing the quantity of Lisa Bonchek Adams' tweets ("Over the past few years she has tweeted more than 165,000 times (well over 200 tweets in the past 24 hours alone."), Keller further goes on to audit the quality of her tweeting:

It's clear that tweeting as compulsively as Lisa Adams does is an attempt to exercise some kind of control over her experience. She doesn't deny that. She sees herself as an educator, giving voice to what so many people go through. And she is trying to create her own boundaries, flimsy as they might be. She'll tell you all about her pain, for example, but precious little about her children or husband and what they are going through. She describes a fantastic set up at Sloan-Kettering, where she can order what she wants to eat at any time of day or night and get as much pain medication as she needs from a dedicated and compassionate "team", but there is no mention of the cost. She was enraged a few days ago when a couple of people turned up to visit her unannounced. She's living out loud online, but she wants her privacy in real life.

…Will our memories be the ones she wants? What is the appeal of watching someone trying to stay alive? Is this the new way of death? You can put a "no visitors sign" on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch. Would we, the readers, be more dignified if we turned away? Or is this part of the human experience?

Everything, everything, about that is contemptible.

Where an individual person decides to draw one's boundaries does not make them "flimsy" boundaries, if they're not where someone else thinks they ought to be. Lisa Bonchek Adams' pain is her own experience to share; she needs only her own consent to speak about it. What her children or husband are going through is not hers to tell. That doesn't seem like a "flimsy" boundary to me; it seems like a firm, clear, appropriate, and generous one.

Additionally, there is no ethical conundrum here: "She's living out loud online, but she wants her privacy in real life." Setting aside the false distinction between "online life" and "real life," any person can draw whatever lines they like about who has access to them, in what space. Plenty of people, myself among them, give access to online readerships to certain parts of our lives, some of them incredibly intimate, while wanting to retain privacy in offline life. The only ethical problem here is publicly policing those choices, as if one is entitled to complete access to another person's life.

Whether to "turn away" or immerse oneself in Lisa Bonchek Adams' public narrative of her illness is not an ethical question, nor one of "dignity." It's just another choice, like her choice to share her experiences.

Personally, I want to know how to do things. One of the things I want to know how to do is die. Every death is particular and unique, but I am grateful to people who share their deaths, who give me the best opportunity I have to learn how to do something I'm going to have to do one day.

Not everyone need share that perspective.

There's nothing inherently "dignified" or "undignified" about either choice. It is, however, pretty goddamn undignified to publicly question whether a dying woman, whose Twitter feed and blog no one is forced to read, is being self-indulgent—or whether she's being self-indulgent in the wrong way. For fuck's sake.

Quote of the Day

What I confirmed during my couple months as an undercover candidate for US Congress is what the data clearly tells us and more importantly what the hard working families of my Kentucky 2nd US Congressional District have been telling me: We have an economy in which people and our families have become expendable. We no longer have an economy that rewards hard work or playing by the rules. We are increasingly becoming a nation of declining fortunes for the majority and a nation in which the American dream is increasingly beyond reach and social mobility is one direction—down—for a growing majority.

...The ever-widening disparity in America is unethical, disrespectful to working men and women, dishonorable, and completely lacking in integrity—and is absolutely unsustainable. If America is to maintain our position in the world, we need leaders not looters.

—Ron Leach, Democratic candidate for Kentucky's 2nd Congressional district, who spent the last few months working as an air handler for UPS in Louisville, Kentucky, where he found he "could not have survived the past couple months at the 'entry level' of America's economy in which an increasing majority find themselves trapped."

I encourage you to read his entire account, in which he documents his experience and notes how some of his privileges (like already owning appropriate work boots from his time in the military, and having healthcare coverage) made things easier for him than for the average person.

[H/T to my friend Ben.]

It's Not Just You

Again, Disqus is being glitchy, and it's not just you seeing 0 comments on threads where there are comments. I notified Disqus this morning. I've received no response yet, but hopefully it will be resolved quickly. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Daily Dose of Cute

image of Matilda the Blue-Eyed Fuzzy Sealpoint Cat looking up at something

"Whassat?"
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.

True Facts

[Related Reading: Today in Fat-Hatin', Fat News!, Headline of the Day, Chris Christie's "Secret" Weight Loss Surgery.]

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

The Rentals: "Please Let That Be You"

In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today!

Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is "embarrassed and humiliated" over lane closures on the George Washington Bridge last September, which "appear to have been designed to punish a local Democratic mayor who declined to back Christie's re-election" and thwarted emergency responders. Christie has fired one of his top aides, deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly, who sent an email authorizing the closing, and he claims no previous knowledge, which Michael Tomasky thinks is bullshit. Relatedly, this story has brought out the fat-haters, because criticizing Christie for being an unethical, bullying jerk using facts is apparently too much work.

[Content Note: Discussion of gender policing] Kole starts "an 'on the ground' conversation about social construction of what it means to be a man or a woman outside of academia and within community" with a great post.

[CN: Misogyny] Meryl Streep, self-proclaimed "rabid man-eating feminist," calls out Walt Disney's sexism in a speech honoring Emma Thompson.

[CN: Gun violence] Former Congress member Gabby Giffords goes sky-diving to mark her three-year anniversary of surviving being shot.

Wow: "The first female law firm in Saudi Arabia launched last week, founded by the first Saudi female lawyer Bayan Mahmoud Al-Zahran. Saudi Arabia issued law licenses to Al-Zahran and three other female lawyers in October 2013, the first time the country issued such licenses to female law graduates. Al-Zahran told Arab News that her law firm's objective will be to fight for Saudi women's rights and to get women's cases heard in court. 'I believe women lawyers can contribute a lot to the legal system,' she said. 'This law firm will make a difference in the history of court cases and female disputes in the Kingdom.'"

Graphs by MIT Students Show the Enormously Intrusive Nature of Metadata. Whoa.

[CN: Antisemitism; violence] Mein Kampf has become an ebook bestseller. 1. Gross. 2. What is up with that? I hardly believe it's just a sudden upsurge in curious amateur historians. I am reminded of the recent findings that there's been an uptick in antisemitism in Europe, and I am inclined to take this news very seriously.

Whooooooops Your Garbage Poverty Stats

[Content Note: Class warfare; misogyny; food insecurity.]

Jordan Weissmann: The Poverty Line Was Designed Assuming Every Family Had a Housewife Who Was a 'Skillful Cook'.

The official poverty line, as I wrote yesterday, is a dated and crude statistical concept that in many ways fails to capture America's historical success at fighting economic need. It was based on the cost of food in 1963, mostly because the Department of Agriculture had some idea of what a basic grocery budget should look like, whereas there wasn't any real agreement on what families needed to spend on other essentials. Since then, it's mostly just been adjusted for inflation.

Keep that history in mind while reading this passage, which I found in a 1992 report by the Social Security Administration on how the poverty threshold came to be:

When the hypothetical family cut back its food expenditures to the point where they equaled the cost of the economy food plan (or the low cost food plan) for a family of that size, the family would have reached the point at which its food expenditures were minimal but adequate, assuming that "the housewife will be a careful shopper, a skillful cook, and a good manager who will prepare all the family's meals at home."
...What I think this passage shows...is that when we try to capture abstract concepts like "poverty" in a statistic, we inevitably end up wrapping a certain set of values and social expectations into the package, which can then become very outdated. As we dwell on America's successes or failures fighting poverty 50 years after Lyndon Johnson declared war on it, remember that the stats we use in that conversation are almost never as simple or straightforward as they seem.

Even at the time, the assumption that every family looked basically the same was bullshit. There have always been communities in the US, especially communities with endemic poverty, where many families were headed by multiple generations of women, most or all of whom worked outside the home, often in service work for privileged families who fit the "hypothetical family" model.

But it's exponential bullshit now to imagine all families fit this neat model, or to imagine that even in families which look like 1963's "hypothetical model," two opposite-sex parents + kids, it's reasonable to assume there's a stay-at-home mom to be "a careful shopper, a skillful cook, and a good manager who will prepare all the family's meals at home."

Which of course is to say nothing about food deserts. This fantastical assumption about Sous-zie Homemaker makes no accommodation for lack of access to affordable food.

The presumptions on which the federal poverty line is based were garbage in 1963, and now they are impossibly outdated garbage. And yet this is the baseline we're still using. Meanwhile, the national conversation is about how poor people are lazy and entitled and blah blah blah bootstraps.

I Would Like to High Five Senator Dick Durbin

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Republicans to stop reading Ayn Rand books and help Democrats pass legislation aimed to give struggling Americans a hand.

"I say to my conservative friends, put down those Ayn Rand books for a minute and take a look at the real world," Durbin said on the Senate floor Wednesday. "If we can't stand behind those who are struggling in life, who are we; what are we?"

Durbin was marking the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty speech.

PUT DOWN THOSE AYN RAND BOOKS! LOL! Awesome.

Unfortunately, it's hilarious because it's true. There is perhaps no one more reluctant to take a look at the real world than a modern conservative politician. The real world is just a thing that gets in the way of creating their own reality.

Open Thread

image of actor Matthew Lillard in a baseball cap

Hosted by Matthew Lillard.
Today's Lillard Fact: Matthew Lillard attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena, California, with fellow thespian Paul Rudd.

Question of the Day

Suggested by Shaker themiddlevoice: "What is the best unexpected thing you've ever received?"

[Got a good suggestion for a QotD? Drop it into comments here.]

Quote of the Day

"We have sighted an eastern bearded dragon at one of our telescopes, observed dragonflies, and even measured body temperatures of the mallee dragon. But our work has never ventured into dragons of the mythical, fire breathing variety. And for this Australia, we are sorry."—From a statement by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia's national science agency, in response to a letter from a 7-year-old girl named Sophie, who wanted to know if the scientists at the CSIRO could make her a dragon.

[H/T to Misty, who saw it at The Mary Sue.]

The Wednesday Blogaround

This blogaround brought to you by slippers.

Recommended Reading:

David: [Content Note: Class warfare] The Right Can't Handle the Reality of the 21st Century Economy

Amanda: Just a Reminder

Flavia: [CN: White supremacy; silencing] Side Eyeing Feminism and Undoing the Harm

Renee: [CN: White supremacy; racist apologism] Ani DiFranco and the Problem with Hero Worship

Veronica: #365FeministSelfies and My Mother

Atrios: Governor Fucks with People's Lives for Petty Political Revenge

Leave your links and recommendations in comments...

Whut.

[Content Note: Violent crime.]

I've never read Leif G.W. Persson's Backstrom books, so I have no idea what the tone of the books is, but the description of this television show based on the series is raising all the red flags:

The series centers on Detective Everett Backstrom (The Office's Rainn Wilson), an offensive, irascible detective, as he tries, and fails, to change his self-destructive behavior. Throughout the series, Backstrom leads his team, the Serious Crimes Unit, as they navigate Portland's most sensitive cases.

At this point, I wonder: Has comedic actor Rainn Wilson been cast in a serious drama, or is this basically Law & Order: SVU reimagined as a comedy? And apparently it's the latter.

"[Bones creator/exec producer] Hart Hanson and Rainn Wilson are the perfect combination of creative vision and on-screen talent to bring this one-of-a-kind character and story like Backstrom to Fox," said Fox chairman Kevin Reilly. "I've been in business with Hart for a long time, and not only does he have a rare gift for infusing darker themes with relatable humor, he's one of the best showrunners out there today." Added 20th TV chairmen Dana Walden and Gary Newman, "There are so few creators out there with the genuine ability to mix great procedural storytelling with humor, and Hart Hanson is one of those guys. Getting another show on the air with him has been a top priority of this company."

Backstrom reunites Wilson with his Office co-star Mindy Kaling, who toplines Fox's The Mindy Project, and Reilly. "Fox is the perfect home for this fun and disturbed piece of entertainment," Wilson said.

A "fun and disturbed piece of entertainment" about "the Serious Crimes Unit" and "Portland's most sensitive cases." Sure. It's about time we had an entire series that was one giant rape joke.

[Related Reading: Oh, Crap.]

Liss & Deeks Talk About Intelligence

[Content Note: Spoilers for the premiere episode of Intelligence. Imagery of gun below.]

image of actor Josh Holloway holding a gun during a tense scene at a paintball field

You had us at paintball.
So, last night was the premiere of the new CBS drama Intelligence, starring Josh Holloway from Lost. Long-time readers will recall that Deeks and I were massive Lost fans, so we decided we needed to watch Intelligence together, even if it did look like The Six Million Dollar Sawyer Bourne.

The thing is, it turned out to be good fun, despite its admittedly silly premise ("A drama centered on a high-tech intelligence operative who is enhanced with a super-computer microchip in his brain, and the director of the elite government cyber-security agency who supports him."), and there were a lot of lady characters! It passed the Bechdel Test within the first five minutes of the show.

Below, our text conversation during and after the show...

Deeky: Intelligence is on in ten minutes.

Liss: Oh I'm ready!

[fifteen minutes later]

Deeky: I think I've figured it out. Sawyer is the Bourne Identity but with a bionic brain.

Liss: It's like he's got Google Glass on the inside of his brains!

Deeky: Right?

Liss: Hello, Marg Helgenberger! Welp, it's already passed the Bechdel Test!

Deeky: She's great.

Liss: Cyber Command!

Deeky: LOLOLOL Cyber Command!

Liss: Is that dude the kidnapper doctor's boyfriend?

Deeky: LOLOLOL the guy in the glasses? No, it's his son.

Liss: Oh. Boring. Is this second chip going to be used to create Sawyer Bourne's nemesis?

Deeky: No doy it is! He'll also be played by Sawyer but will have a goatee.

Liss: LOLOLOL. Okay, that paintball scene kinda kicked ass, lol.

Deeky: Yeah, I think that's when I really decided I liked it.

Liss: It's way better than I expected!

Deeky: I was like, okay, this is a stupid show, but it's fun.

Liss: [in a flurry of excited texts] He's cyber rendering! I knew that Amos hipster fuck was up to no good! This agent has the same backstory as Kate! The doctor sniper!!! Love! This guy's eMacGuyver!

Deeky: LOLOLOL

Liss: His nemesis is awake! And it's not Sawyer Bourne with a goatee, but another female character! And a woman of color! Woot! That episode proved way more fun than I anticipated.

Deeky: Okay. So he can upload to a fucking satellite but he can't send a text message to his boss saying he was kidnapped?

Liss: LOLOLOL! Prolly AT&T was down. Also: I love how people with manslaughter charges can become secret service agents apparently.

Deeky: Right? How's that not an automatic disqualification?

Liss: I do kinda hate how Agent Riley Neal's backstory is of the "abuse turns women into superheroes" variety. I hope that doesn't become A Thing.

Deeky: Grody. Such unoriginal dogshit. Can't a female character be a badass just because?

Liss: For real. So, in summation, the premise is very silly and there are some problems, but overall it's good fun and very stylish. I enjoyed it!

Deeky: Me too. So it'll probably be cancelled.

Liss: LOL right? We like it way too much for it to stay on the air!

Deeky: Also, during the break there was a commercial for a new episode of NCIS: Los Angeles. How is THAT still on?

Liss: LOL I have never seen one episode of that show, but I totally believe it to be terrible.

Deeky: NCIS: Los Angeles is the Milton of TV shows. It's probably been canceled but a glitch in accounting keeps sending the producers money.

Liss: LOLOLOL the Milton of TV shows!

Deeky: The agent assigned to protect him was pretty cool.

Liss: I dug how she still kicked ass even after being shot. Hell yeah. I also love, like looooooooove, that he's married and the agent is all in on finding his wife, so there's no imminent romantic garbage subplot.

Deeky: Well, I was kind of thinking they brought her in to keep him in line with the power of her vag. Because obviously.

Liss: Women do tame men. Think how out of control you'd be without my domesticating influence.

Deeky: LOLOLOL! Yeah, good job. I had a boy over tonight. Top-notch work, June.

Liss: "It's because Liss is a hobag."—James Taranto, probably.

Deeky: LOLOLOL!

Green Light for Fat-Shaming

[Content note: fat hatred, food policing, mention of ED and disordered eating.]

Welp, this sounds like a wonderful idea not at all likely to promote fat-shaming! Via CBC: "Traffic light food labels promote healthy, lasting choices: Putting red, yellow and green labels on foods could help reduce obesity, U.S. researchers say."

Traffic light food labels! How awesome is that? Well, according to the researchers, it is somehow totes awesome! (I am less sure of that!)

The labels modelled after a traffic light break down the choices this way:

Green: fruits, Vegetables and lean sources of protein.

Yellow: Less nutritious foods.

Red: Foods with little or no nutritive value, and high fat or caloric content.

...In Tuesday's issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers in Boston say they found the proportion of sales of red items decreased from 24 per cent at the start of the study to 20 per cent after 24 months.

What's more, green sales increased from 41 per cent to 46 per cent after two years.

"These results suggest that simple food environment interventions can play a major role in public health policies to reduce obesity," Dr. Anne Thorndike of Massachusetts General Hospital and her co-authors said.

Hmmm. 4% and 5% over two years don't sound all that dramatic to me. I'm also wondering about their control groups. Were there any? What happened in cafeterias that didn't use the labeling? And more importantly: what evidence is there that these changes in sales actually helped anybody's health?

Maybe next time they need to hire a Food Traffic Police Officer for their nifty study! "STOP right there, fatty! You'd better GO over to the GREEN labels!" *whistle* "Come on forward, thin person, you can probably handle the complexities of YELLOW!"

Or maybe they can just rely on the fat shaming, both internal and external, that goes on when one is Eating While Fat. Because that shit is super, duper, HEALTHY. And we definitely need more of it! Maybe by using big, obvious, glaring food labels! Sure.

Look, I appreciate having lots of information about foods. I would like to see more informative labels, especially in cafeterias! Better designed! Non-judgemental! Easy to read! But I don't appreciate the pre-packaged assumptions about what is healthy or unhealthy, based on the food's alleged connection to fatness alone.

For example, dietary fibre information is apparently not addressed in this study (although aren't fatties supposed to eat lots of it? Tsk.) But it's a nutrient for some people, a health hazard for others. Normally, I try to eat 5 or more servings of fresh fruits and vegetables per day; I also seek out higher-fibre grain choices. But sometimes IBS and endometriosis pair up to turn my "innards" into "outards," ahem. At those times, fibre is definitely not a healthy choice for me, so I avoid it. And I might need more calorie-dense foods at that time than I usually eat, since it's hard for my body to absorb any nutrition at all.

None of that, not a bit, is covered in a study that apparently frames acceptable vs. non-acceptable foods solely in terms of their alleged links to my body's weight. Nor the concerns of people with food allergies, who may be forced to pick pre-packaged "red" items because of contamination concerns.

And certainly, in the case of those recovering from eating disorders or disorderd eating, the red light/green light dichotomy can be actively harmful. Labeling food "good" or "bad" based on calories is not exactly conducive to promoting healthier thought patterns about eating.

And the list could go on.

But it's all about health, right? Which means ignoring everything that could possibly go wrong with this approach, and the active harm it engenders. Because that sounds completely and totally healthy. Sure.

Daily Dose of Cute

image of Sophie the Torbie Cat standing on me, kneading my belly, with her ears lit up by the sunshine

"Esscuse me, I just needs to knead you right here, Two-Legs."
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

TV on the Radio: "Golden Age"

Another Republican for Child Labor

[Content Note: Child exploitation; class warfare.]

Joining the illustrious ranks of Newt Gingrich, Ray Canterbury, and Jack Kingston, Republican Maine Governor Paul LePage says that children should be allowed to work, because failing to support child labor is "causing damage to our economy."

"We don't allow children to work until they're 16, but two years later, when they're 18, they can go to war and fight for us," LePage said. "That's causing damage to our economy. I started working far earlier than that, and it didn't hurt me at all. There is nothing wrong with being a paperboy at 12 years old, or at a store sorting bottles at 12 years old."

Sure, there's nothing wrong with it. Except for how lots of kids who do have jobs while they're still in school are constantly tired and/or don't have enough time for their schoolwork.

This is, naturally, also an issue of privilege. A middle- or upper-class kid who wants to do a paper route, or mow lawns, or whatever, for a little extra pocket money is in a fundamentally different situation than a kid who takes on whatever work zie can get out of necessity, because hir basic needs aren't being met, because hir parents have been out of work or can't find a job with a livable wage and their government is failing them with a catastrophically underfunded social safety net.

Is it really not letting kids work that's "causing damage to our economy," or garbage conservative policy and bootstraps bullshit that's doing the job?

And, listen, I don't know what the deal is in Maine, but I can tell you that in Indiana, a 12-year-old who wants a paper route is shit outta luck in a lot of places, because they're already taken by adults who are trying to make ends meet. I can't even think of the last time I saw an actual teenager bagging groceries.

Governor LaPage was 12 years old in 1960. Things have changed.