The Thrift Store

New Start

2010-05-29T19:03:00.001-04:00

I will now be blogging here: http://athriftstore.wordpress.com/

I hope you'll check me out over there!

2010-03-29T07:21:00.002-04:00

You know what I need? I need a blog to read that reminds that I am trying, that we are all here trying and that while best intentions sometimes aren't enough (or don't count for everything), sometimes "not enough" has to be enough because that's all we've got (if that makes any sense).

So, if you are like me, and need a blog post that says it: here it is. Today, forgive yourself every time you think you've failed. And congratulate yourself on opening up your eyes, blinking, breathing in and out, and continuing to be in your body and in your head.

Life List Redux

2010-03-06T09:04:00.004-05:00

Recently over at Shapely Prose, snarkysmachine wrote a post called The Last Dragon where she discussed giving up things that were holding her back from true fat acceptance. I really related to one of them. Earlier this year, I went out and bought pants that actually fit me as opposed to trying to squeeze into pants that fit me several years ago.

I've been thinking about that shopping trip again recently for two reason: I am so sick of all my winter clothes and cannot wait to start wearing spring stuff and I'm having fantasizes about buying clothes that fit a different body.

In 6 months or so many friends from college will be coming back into town for reunions and for a mutual friends wedding. I've found myself scheming a lot for how I'm going to be a knockout (including losing lots of weight) by June. This morning it occurred to me how ridiculous I'm being to use the occasion of seeing friends to hate myself. My friends aren't going to care what I look like; they're going to care about catching up and whether or not I'm currently happy.

The last time I wrote here it was to poo-poo life lists (for me, not for anyone else) because I felt that they fed into my misguided conception of my body/life as a house that needs renovations. I am not a project. I am a person. And what I need from myself is love, not improvement plans.

Since I wrote my life list post, I returned the idea of the list and realized the problem isn't that it's a list of goals; the problem was *my* goals. I wrote one out for myself focusing on the idea that the list is to help me (1) incorporate things that I already love into my life on a more regular basis and (2) remain open to things that I think I *might* love, but have been scared to try. (The only really self improve-y thing that ended up on there was a goal to better understand my finances...)

This week I've been working on:
7. Try out 50 new recipes a year.
23. Make a CD, preferably with bands discovered that month, once a month for a year. Distribute. ("discovered" is a very loose term)

For my recipe goal, I am currently working my way through the soup and entree sections of the Better Homes and Gardens Vegetarian Recipes book and picking things out of the Best Recipes 2010 of Cooking Light. Last night I made the Bistro Braised Chicken.

Making the February CD was really good. It reminded me how much I like listening to new music and how much new music is out there. If you'd like a copy let me know.

I should probably retitle this blog to "And That's OK"

2010-02-02T19:40:00.003-05:00

My friend, who writes over at saepe, sent me a very nice note today about my return to blogging. So I thought I would keep a good thing going and write again tonight.

Somewhere on the internet recently I ran into one of those "bucket list" memes. Only instead of 101 things to do over a lifetime, it was 101 things to do in a year. You can see a variation of this over at Mighty Girl's Mighty Life List.

The idea of listing out 101 things to achieve and then going out and documenting their achievement appeals to me. A lot. So much so that as I was thinking about it tonight I was thinking, why not take it to another level and plan 101 things to do in a month! They would have to be small things! But that way I would have to get started right away! And every day I would be DOING! DOING in the sense of making things happen, improving myself, getting back on track, finally figuring out this big old mess of me.

I've lived long enough (and set myself up for failure enough) that I now know to resist these kinds of ideas. And to consider that maybe instead of doing, I should concentrate on BEING.

For me, "doing" very quickly turns into being a way to not deal. Dreaming of transforming myself into the kind of person who runs marathons, knits blankets, writes novels, and socialize three nights a week is an excellent way to delay accepting myself for who I am.

I don't think we give people enough credit for just being. There are times when I'm going to be able to take on an extra project (one at a time, rachel!), but there are also going to be times when feeding myself, dressing, and going to work is all I can handle. No matter how many to do lists I dream up. And that's OK.

2010-02-01T20:39:00.001-05:00

Sunday

2010-01-31T19:19:00.005-05:00

Why the Internet is Not Ruining Everything

2009-11-10T19:36:00.008-05:00

Last Thursday, the Times online published an article called "The Internet is killing storytelling." The author, Ben Macintyre argues,

The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing...
If the culprit is obvious, so is the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span: the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. Like some endangered species, the story now needs defending from the threat of extinction in a radically changed and inhospitable digital environment.

Macintyre's arguments do not ring true to me for several reasons.

First, he is unable to prove that email, texting, twittering, blogging, etc cannot exist side-by-side with more traditional forms of story-telling. In this very article, Macintyre claims that America's rapt attention to the Obama narrative this past fall indicates our "hunger for narrative." One could just as easily argue that our ability to sustain interest in Obama's life story indicates that narrative story-telling is alive and well.

Second, a story does not have to be long to be a good story. I really didn't like how Macintyre was really criticizing damage to the long narrative, but did not make that distinction consistently in his article. One might argue that our attention span has shrunk to a ridiculously short amount, making even the most simple narrative impossible to digest, but hour long dramas on television would beg to differ. Perhaps television or a four page email from Mom, isn't what Macintyre has in mind, but it reeks of snobbery to pretend that something has to be printed and the length of Moby Dick to qualify as a narrative.

Third, even if we presume that narrative story telling is in trouble, I don't think that there is good evidence at all that the internet is the source of damage to the long narrative. In Claude Fisher's book, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Fisher argues "telephone company management shifted advertising during the 1920's to reflect the demands of the private consumer. Prior to this shift, managers marketed the telephone as a practical, rather than social, tool. Once they realized more Americans were buying automobiles instead of telephones, the telephone companies changed their marketing strategies to reflect the predominant use of their product."

Consumers drive how content is developed and marketed. If internet technology is used to break communication down into smaller and smaller pieces, I don't think the technology that enables this is to blame. A better culprit would be societal forces that demand that people spend less and less time communicating and more and more time working or consuming.

Also, it's a little weird that a newspaper article is criticizing the loss of a long-form narrative. Pot calling kettle black, dude?

follow through

2009-10-13T22:12:00.003-04:00

Check out Jay Smooth's video "On Being First," which incorporates a concept he discusses a couple times at illdoctrine, The Little Hater.

My Little Hater tells me that I'm terrible at follow-through so why try to begin with (what a self-fulfilling prophesy...). It tells me that the things I write about are cutesy and predictable and that I fit really neatly into stereotypes. Basically, it tells me to STFU.

Do you have a Little Hater?

What the hell, Jezebel?

2009-09-30T16:30:00.002-04:00

All day long this post at Jezebel (regarding Penelope Trunk's tweeting about her relief over having a miscarriage (while at work) as opposed to going through the three week waiting period to get an abortion in her state) has been driving me crazy.

It's this part in particular

And, unfortunately for everyone, now that this has gone national, the context and way in which Trunk framed this confirms the worst and most fantastical ideas of the anti-choice movement: that women (especially career women!) who have abortions all do so casually and callously on their lunch breaks, the way one might get a manicure.

Here's the tweet:

I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

What makes Lindsay think that this tweet indicates a casual or callous attitude towards abortion/miscarriage? Relief about a miscarriage or lack of regret about deciding to get an abortion DOES NOT indicate that a woman hasn't thought carefully about whether or not she wants an abortion. Neither does talking about it openly.

I'm tired of people telling Trunk to shut up about her miscarriage or if she's not going to shut then to at least grieve. I mean how much difference is there really between a pro-lifer telling Trunk that she should cry for her "dead baby" and Lindsay telling her that tweeting about this shows a callous and casual attitude about abortion.

My pro-choice movement isn't about advancing women's reproductive rights only if they have "appropriate" stories ("the life of the mother was at risk," "she really didn't want to have an abortion, but had to because the baby was sick," "she cried for days"). My pro-choice movement is about women having the right to choose when they're going to have children, how many children they're going to have, and how they're going to raise those children.

Please note: All pro-life comments will immediately result in a 15 dollar donation to a pro-choice organization, so please don't bother.

2009-09-07T20:53:00.003-04:00

Arrived in CT around noon on Saturday. Sister et al were at the grocery store, but soon arrived. We all headed out on the boat for some swimming and sunning. Ate a late lunch and an even later dinner, BBQ ribs that Sis and her boyfriend made with a salad and read wine. Catching up before bed.

On Sunday we lazed around the house in the morning before heading back out on the water for tubing, swimming, and reading on the boat. I tried to teach H gin, but had forgotten everything except the most basic rules, so sis had to step in. H and I made Spinach-Feta-Pine Nut-Chicken pasta with a fry-up of zucchini, yellow squash, and corn on the side. Sis taught us a new drinking game involving dice called 3 men. Lots and lots of laughter.

Today H and I headed back to the grocery store to stalk up for the week. Now it's just the two of us as the gang had to return to their work/school weeks. We covered up the boat because it looked cloudy. Tonight we made breaded coconut shrimp and french fries for dinner. During the day I went on a five mile walk around the lake and caught up on podcasts. Tonight it's late tv and ice cream.

A good vacation has begun.

On anger

2009-09-04T11:32:00.004-04:00

I used to think that I had to choose between not allowing myself to feel angry and blowing up. Now I see that there is another option: I can choose to feel angry, but control my temper. Feel it, but then let it go.

I am still working on understanding that disagreements do not have to make me angry at all. And that losing my temper when someone is trying to tell me something means, essentially, ending the discussion. If I choose to stay calm and hear what someone has to say, the worst thing that could happen is that I still disagree, but that I understand their position better.

2009-08-06T19:03:00.002-04:00

Painting by Lucien Freud. From here.

Also, I'm reading Middlemarch and loving it.

Here and there a cygnate is reared uneasily among duckings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed.

I am

2009-07-24T10:15:00.005-04:00

I have been thinking about something lately. And it's probably the result of reading a lot of self-improvement blogs. Such as these, that L suggested to me.

What if I retired the phrase "I am" from my vocabulary? What I mean by that is the type of "I am" that lays claim to an idea of some aspect of myself as permanent and unchangeable.

Examples of some of the ones I've been thinking of ditching:

I am quick to anger.

I am not the prettiest girl here.

I am not good at trying new things.

I am too emotional.

Saying "I am" these things, allows me to see them as an integral part of *who I am*, things that others must accept about me if they want to be friends with me (and that I just have to accept about myself). But what if, instead, these are just ways I *can be* sometimes. Could I let go of them? Could I take responsibility for them as choices (maybe choices I am prone to, but still choices)?

I think it seems freeing to think this way.

2009-07-20T17:20:00.003-04:00

follicle talk

2009-07-12T14:56:00.006-04:00

I spent the weekend moving into my best friend's house across town. I've been gearing up for this for a long time, but the past two days were the final shove. H was a big help throughout it.

I love my new place, my cat loves my new place, and, for this blog at least, best of all, I now have internet at home.

***
Last week my sister sent me to this article from the NY Times, that discusses how body-shaving is now being marketed to men. I was particularly interested in two parts. Here's the first.

But now evidence from market research and academia indicates that more men are removing hair from their chests, armpits and groins. The phenomenon skews to mostly college-age guys or those in their 30s. Reasons run the gamut fromBecause My Girlfriend Likes It to a desire to flaunt a six-pack or be clean.

What interests me is the unexamined use of "clean." I think it's a common misconception that body hair is a sign of poor hygiene. Seems like these guys could use a refresher from KidsHealth. org, which explains:

The best way to keep clean is to bathe or shower every day using a mild soap and warm water. This will help wash away any bacteria that contribute to the smells. Wearing clean clothes, socks, and underwear each day can also help you to feel clean. If you sweat a lot, you might find that shirts, T-shirts, socks, and underwear made from cotton or other natural materials will help absorb sweat more effectively.

If you're concerned about the way your underarms smell, you can try using a deodorant or deodorant with antiperspirant. Deodorants get rid of the odor of sweat by covering it up, and antiperspirants actually stop or dry up perspiration.

The very next section in this grouping, Body Hair, explains, "You may want to start shaving some places where body hair grows, but whether you do is up to you. " Or, in other words, shaving is about personal preference with regard to appearance, not a hygiene issue.

Here's the other part of the original article that interested me:

Plenty of female commenters online dislike suitors with less body hair than they have. As Eleanorxjane wrote about a chest-shaving video on YouTube, “i want a real man, not one that’s trying to look like he’s 12 again!”
Having hair on one’s chest — as the expression suggests — signals maturity and boldness.

I think this section reveals how wide open body-hair choices are for men still. Shaving is presumably to make a man's body more "consumable" for sexual purposes. Not shaving on the other hand, indicates that a man has reached sexual maturity and has positive masculine characteristics. From this article, it seems like each option, shaving and not shaving, is socially acceptable for men (what you're doing just might not be the personal preference of your current sexual partner). Each way is just one way to be a man.

I don't think that is at all in effect for women. Women who don't shave their legs are often regarded as adopting masculine characteristics. And I wonder if the commentor above considers shaved women as representative of the fetishization of pre-adolescent girls.

These articles are often presented as evidence that modern men face just as much pressure as women in regard to beauty standards. Its true, I think, that there is increasing pressure on all of us to conform in appearance to a narrow standard. However, shaved or unshaved, a man's masculinity remains intact in our society's eyes.

Again and again and again

2009-07-09T13:04:00.003-04:00

H and I heard this song on the way back to Virginia from Connecticut last weekend and it's been in my head every since.

******

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent then before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

It's really weird that we still call him Czar

2009-05-15T15:34:00.006-04:00

My sister and I recently had a conversation about three-strikes-your-out laws and a legal system bursting at its seams. In my opinion, one of the functions of three-strikes-your-out laws (and mandatory minimum sentencing) is to speed up the sentencing process in an attempt to unclog our courts. Sis (and H) convincingly argued that it's not appropriate to ease the burden on our court system by taking short-cuts with defendants' trials and sentencing. Both of them proposed throwing more money at our legal system, but frankly, I don't think that's likely as there are a lot of things that need a lot of money right now. One of the solutions my sister and I discussed is the possibility of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs as a way to deal with judicial and prison systems that are completely overwhelmed. It turns out that recently her law school's chapter of the ACLU had hosted Jake A Cole.

Cole is passionate in his belief that the drug war is steeped in racism, that it is needlessly destroying the lives of young people, and that it is corrupting our police. Cole's discussions give his audience an alternative perspective of the US war on drugs from the view of a veteran drug-warrior turned against the war.

Cole is part of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), which recently featured a letter to our new head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske. While the letter voices some concerns LEAP has with some Kerlikowske's statements, the Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday about his plan to "end the war on drugs." The article states,

The Obama administration is likely to deal with drugs as a matter of public health rather than criminal justice.
Already, the administration has called for an end to the disparity in how crimes involving crack cocaine and powder cocaine are dealt with. Critics of the law say it unfairly targeted African-American communities, where crack is more prevalent.

The article goes on to say,

The drug czar doesn't have the power to enforce any of these changes himself, but Mr. Kerlikowske plans to work with Congress and other agencies to alter current policies.

I think it will take some major political capital to convince members of Congress who are up for re-election and worried about being smeared as weak on crime to get behind some of these changes, but I also think we're getting closer. Something to keep an eye on.

Also, did you know that the ACLU has a blog?

And finally, check out Lock-Up from This American Life.

I would jump of the bridge if it was on fire (and everyone was doing it)

2009-04-16T13:54:00.005-04:00

Via Feminist Law Professors I came across this article by Ian Ayers of Freaknomics fame.

In the article Ayers argues that perhaps we should educate teenagers that about 50% of them graduate virgins to combat the misguided notion (held by teenagers) that all of them are doing it.

The presumption behind this article is that remaining a virgin until post-high school graduation has some inherent value and that knowing this stat would decrease the number of teenagers who have sex pre-graduation. However, if Ayers is worried that teenagers are rushing to have (unsafe?) sex to join their peers, his own article refutes that concern (he states that the rate of teens who are actually having sex before graduating has remained the same for the past five years. As depictions of teen sex become more prevalent in our society, the number of teenagers having sex before graduation has remained the same).

Now onto the value of virginity. Perhaps the value in virginity consist in the fact that delaying sex until college means delaying exposure to the risk of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. However, a campaign that emphasizes "more of your peers are virgins than you think" sounds suspiciously like a spin off of "virginity is cool so sign this purity pledge" thing.

I think "virginity is a valid choice" has a place at the table in sex education, but in recent years marketing "virginity" to teenagers has proved to be ineffectual (and in cases where it has eclipsed comprehensive sex education, damaging), in part, I think, because it's built on the false premise that Ayers seems to buy into a bit. Ayers' reading of teenage sexuality assumes that the pressure to have sex comes from the outside, from believing that "everyone is doing it" and from seeing this reflected in pop culture. In reality, I think when thinking about sex education for teenagers we should begin from a place that acknowledges that some teenagers [1] want to have sex for the same reasons some adults do, as an expression of a biological drive, a desire for physical pleasure, and/or a need to express deep emotions towards someone. Telling these teenagers "you know, not everyone is doing this" isn't helpful. In fact, it's kind of condescending.

When you consider that teenage sexuality is often driven by the same impulses as adult sexuality (but perhaps hindered by teenager's less developed grasp of the consequences of and risks associated with their actions) it's easy to see why sex education messages that rely on conveying the "coolness" or even "normative-ness" of virginity fail. It doesn't matter if not as many people as you formerly thought were doing it are actually doing it, if your body, mind and heart are telling you that you do want to do it.

Our focus should be on providing comprehensive sex education and safe-sex, actively seeking consent, high-self esteem behavior models to teenagers (and the high-self esteem, seeing other people as human beings with agency behavior models should start well before teenage-hood).

[1] I say "some teenagers" and "some adults" here to acknowledge that not everyone identifies as having sexual drives.

Everyday is a things I like day

2009-04-15T13:11:00.005-04:00

"It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness...What James's characters gain is self-respect."
- Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

Painting is by Carole Marine and she has more for sale (follow the link).

2009-04-09T09:05:00.001-04:00

Georgia O'Keefe Summer Days 1936

Found this image in this blog.

This tornado loves you

2009-04-06T10:44:00.002-04:00

Things I learned about myself this weekend: I can run ten miles in 90 minutes. I still love dogs, but prefer not to be licked. I kill plants. Dishwashers are amazing. I need very little (and a lot at the same time) to be happy.

What I'm Saying

2009-02-24T15:22:00.002-05:00

What I'm saying isn't exactly news
and to say it bluntly is no big deal:
once you decide to live, you have to lose.

But what if you could simply refuse
by claiming that life itself isn't real?
What I'm saying isn't exactly news----

the Buddhist think this world, hooked on adieus,
is just red dust. If that's true, why feel
that having to live you also have to lose?

Well, because we're bodies, bodies whose
mortal bruise is time's kiss and time's seal.
What I'm saying isn't exactly news.

The luckiest among us live in twos.
Yet love has tied them to a burning wheel
once they decide to live. They have to lose

because time's only tempo is the blues.
It's what we're born to, what our prayers conceal.
What I'm saying isn't exactly news----
once you decide to live, you have to lose.

- Gregory Orr, What I'm Saying

This is the water

2009-02-02T18:50:00.004-05:00

I've been meaning to post a link to this every since throckmorton posted about it in the summer of 2007. This is a commence speech that David Foster Wallace gave in 2005.

I think about it a lot, but today, I'm thinking about this part:

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Common American Century

2008-12-22T08:28:00.006-05:00

I've recently run across the name Henry Luce in two different books. In his introductory essay ("What, then, is the American?") to The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture, Christopher Bigsby** writes, "When...Henry Luce declared the reality of the American Century he was merely registering the logic that had placed power, and, it has to be said, responsibility in American hands; the Project for the New American Century, by contrast, was a conscious effort to ensure that Americans remained the dominant culture." Check out the Project for the New American Century's Statement of Principles.

In Susan Faludi's Stiffed, on the other hand, Faludi argues that Luce's labeling, more than being descriptive, was an effort to steer American culture (and masculinity) towards one ethos and away from another.

"Towards the end of the war, two visions of postwar America vied for attention on the national stage in a battle over the nation's future that has long since been forgotten. One contender was [Henry] Wallace's Common Man century; the other was Henry Luce's American Century...Luce, the founder and editor of Time and Life magazines, saw America as a masculine nation whose manifest destiny was to loom like a giant on the global stage. He proposed the average man acquire a grander sense of himself by association with a nation that would dominate the world through unapologetic force. If Wallace's manly ideal was about parental care and nurturance, Luce's was all about taking control---and, even more important, displaying it."

"Luce's 'cure'---'to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit'---would prove to be a postwar prescription for aggression."

Of Wallace's Common Man, Faludi write,

"Wallace imagined an army of ordinary workingmen who, if given a shot a decent educations, jobs, and housing, could be a force on 'the new frontier' for expanded production, well-being, and democracy not only in the nation but throughout the world...Wallace saw America as 'a boy of eighteen' who could no longer 'avoid becoming a man by wearing short pants' and who could mature into a 'grown-up United States' by stoically 'shouldering our responsibility,' by contributing to the needs of the world rather than simply aspiring to dominate it. America's mission, he said, only half jokingly, should be to ensure 'that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day.' He was guided, as historian John Morton Blum has written, 'by his belief in the possibility of brotherhood and the inherent virtue of husbandmen.'"

Ultimately Stiffed is about how changes within larger structures in our country, namely, the government, corporations, and our economy, has affected American masculinity (ie, massive layoffs have done more damage to American masculinity than the feminist movement). Reading the introduction to Stiffed and in particular Faludi's discussion of Luce's and Wallace's competing views for America's future couched in the metaphor of the "ideal American man," I remembered Barrack Obama's Father's Day Speech this past summer. At the time, I remember some people felt that Obama was unfairly criticizing African American fathers, but reading it now, through the lens Faludi creates, I'm wondering if Obama's "ideal father" is really more of a Luce/Wallace metaphor.

Obama argues that the ideal father will pass on three qualities to his children: (1) the "ethic of excellence" ("achievement, self respect, and hard work"), (2) "the value of empathy" ("We need to show our kids that you’re not strong by putting other people down – you’re strong by lifting them up."), (3) "the spirit of hope" (the "spirit inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us if we’re willing to work for it and fight for it. If we are willing to believe.").

Obama makes an explicit connection between father's responsibility to their children and Washington's responsibility to parents. Obama says, "[I]t’s a responsibility that also extends to Washington. Because if fathers are doing their part; if they’re taking our responsibilities seriously to be there for their children, and set high expectations for them, and instill in them a sense of excellence and empathy, then our government should meet them halfway." He then goes on to list several examples of how Washington can help parents, including reforming child support laws, expanding pre- and postnatal care to pregnant women, protecting workers through protecting maternity and paternity leave.

I hear echos of the "Common Man." I wonder what an America of excellence, empathy, and hope would look like. I hope I get to see it.

(**Incidentally, just a few paragraphs earlier, Bigsby also mentions Rick Warren. "In 2002, 59 percent of Americans believed that the apocalyptic prophesies of the Book of Revelations would come true and 39 percent believed in the literal truth of the Bible. The end, it seemed, might be night, the moment when the chosen and the damned would be separated. Among the bestsellers of the new century were The Purpose Driven Lifestyle (total sales to date, 20 million), written by Rick Warren, head of one of America's five largest mega-churches and at the heart of a global religious network.")

2008-12-08T14:07:00.002-05:00

NPR has started a series called "American Moxie: How we get by" about how Americans are coping with the recession. It seems like there's only been one segment so far, about a farmer who is selling his cattle because as fuel prices rise and cattle prices remain stagnant, he's losing money on them.

I think it will be an interesting series, but I have some concerns about the title. I think the American Dream has often been misinterpreted to mean "if you work hard enough, you can do/be anything." I think that is a nice, but empty idea in our current system. It takes more than "moxie" to get ahead in America; often it takes inherited wealth, in the form of money from your parents or even in the connections they have made. I think the idea that the average Joe can pull himself up out of poverty has often been used by rich and powerful people to absolve themselves of either directly helping people or putting in place a system in the playing field is leveled. To me, the phrase "all men are created equal" requires us to protect and help our fellow man so that they can have the same opportunities that the rest of us do. It does not mean that we should be left on our own, out in the cold, to duke it out for ourselves.

Back to the Future: Backlash and Palin

2008-09-21T12:11:00.005-04:00

I have been slowly working my way through Susan Faludi's book "Backlash" about the backlash against women's rights in the 1980s. Fauldi argues that during the 1980s (and during other eras of backlash against the women's rights movement) pop culture, the media, and politicians claimed that feminism had gone too far, that women's liberation was damaging to them, and that the solution was to roll back the clock and return to an era where women have less equality (sometimes classing this return to less equality as "real empowerment").

At the same time I'm reading this book, I've also been thinking a lot about the U.S. presidential race and the prominent role gender has taken. Many people have pointed out the absolute ridiculousness of assuming that people will automatically transfer their vote from Hillary Clinton to Sarah Palin. There has also been plenty of discussion about how sexist criticism of Palin is unaaceptable.

When I came across the passage in "Backlash" regarding the curious anomaly of the anti-feminist woman (ie, the woman who says women's place is in the home from her office in Washington) and the role she plays in politics in the 1980s, what Fauldi had to say spoke to me about Palin and how the Republican party is using "feminism" to advance an anti-feminist agenda,

The New Right women were, in some respects, the reverse image of their more progressive "yuppie" sisters who got trapped in the backlash eddies. While mainstream professional women were more likley to voice feminist principles while struggling internally with the self-doubts and recriminations that the backlash generated, the New Right women were voicing anti-feminist views---while internalizing the message of the women's movement and quiety incorporating its tenants of self-determination, equality and freedom of choice in their private behavior.
If the right-wing activists at Concerned Women for America seemed less anxiety ridden about the "price" of their own liberation than the average liberal career women, maybe that's because these New Right women were, ironically, facing less resistence in their world. As long as these women raised their voices only to parrot the Moral Majority line, as long as they divided up the chores so that they could have more time to fight equal rights legislation, the New Right male leaders (and their New Right husbands) were happy to applaud and encourage the women's mock "independence." The women always played by their men's rules, and for that they enjoyed their esteem and blessings of their subculture. On the other hand, working and single women in the mainstream, who were more authentically independent, had no such cheering squad to buoy their spirits; they were undermined daily by popular culture that parodied their lifestyle, heaped pity and ridicule on their choices, and berated their feminist "mistakes."
The activists of Concerned Women for America, like New Right women activists elsewhere, could report to their offices in their suits, issue press releases demainding that women return to the home, and never see a contradiction. By divorcing their personal liberation from their public stands on sexual politics, they could privately take advantage of feminism while pubicly depoloring its influence. They could indeed "have it all"---by working to prevent all other women from having that same opportunity.

To me, this passage succiently sums my problems with Sarah Palin wrapping herself in feminism's flag. She claims that she's putting another crack in the glass ceiling (see Ann's post at feministing linked above for my other problems with this line) while aligning herself with a candidate that is opposed to legislation that would ensure equal pay for equal work. She claims that Bristol's choice to keep her baby is a private matter while joining a ticket that believes the state's interest in a fetus trumps the individual women's right to make the same decision privately. (In other words, as long as the choice is the right choice and made by her daughter, it's private. If it's one Palin and McCain disagree with, it's a public matter.)

Palin has benefited from feminism's advances; that doesn't make her one.

This is water

2008-09-16T14:22:00.003-04:00

Via Bitch PhD, I've heard that David Foster Wallace has died. I've never read Infinite Jest and haven't read very many of his essays. But about a year ago, throckmorton, linked to this amazing commencement speech Wallace gave and I've read it many times since.

Maybe will write more about this later.

Hands off my ballot

2008-09-11T11:20:00.009-04:00

Earlier this summer, Alternet reported that McCain would be scaling back voter suppression efforts that have been used in previous elections. Via Wonkette, I came across this piece in the Michigan Messenger.

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

This really pisses me off and I think it should piss you off as well.

Check this quote from The Right to Vote page on USInfo.State.Gov from the U.S. Department of State,

Without free and fair elections, there can be no democratic society, and without that constant accountability of government officials to the electorate, there can, in fact, be no assurance of any other rights. The right to vote, therefore, is not only an important individual liberty; it is also a foundation stone of free government.

Who shall have that right has been a persistent question in American history. A theme that runs throughout the American past is the gradual expansion of the franchise, from a ballot limited to white, male property-owners to a universal franchise for nearly everyone over the age of 18. A related theme is ensuring the full equivalency of each vote, insofar as that is possible within a federal system. But because Americans often take this right for granted, it has not always been exercised as fully as it should be. With nearly 200 million citizens eligible to vote, too many people think their individual ballot will not count. The closeness of the presidential election of 2000 has served as a reminder that every vote does count, however.
[emphasis mine]

News flash for the government: People don't think that their vote won't be counted because we have too many citizens and they've taken the right to vote for granted, they think their vote won't be counted because (1) the U.S. has a long history of limiting voting rights to classes that are already in power (white, landowning men, anyone?---read further on that Right to Vote page for more history), (2) because every year there seem to be more and more efforts to prevent people from voting successfully (please check out this page detailing some different state's requirements for voter ID laws and also the piece I previously wrote about Indiana's voter ID laws), (3) it is really difficult to trust electronic voting machines because of all the controversy around 'em, and (4) a significant portion of the population feel as though officials that they have elected ignore them once they get into office (ie, my vote might be literally counted, but does it count?).

Personally, I'm going to be stopping by my local Obama office this afternoon to ask them if they're providing literature to voters about their voting rights in Virginia. (FYI, according to The National Conference of State Legislatures [linked above, but please please check out this page], VA voters who do not have a VA voter registration card, social security card, VA driver's license, other ID issued by the VA/U.S. govt, or an employee ID card with photo, can still vote, they just have to sign a statement that says they are who they say they are. I don't want anyone telling a Virginian that they can't vote because they don't have ID.)

Supported by the GOP as necessary to protect against voter fraud, these laws have the effect of making it more difficult to vote. Under the Indiana law, for example, a voter without a photo ID either has to come back on Monday after the election with one or "execute an affidavit stating that the voter cannot obtain proof of identification, because the voter: (i) is indigent; or (ii) has a religious objection to being photographed." Even if a voter without a photo ID on November 4th is able to get one by November 10th or they fit the narrow exceptions, their vote will only be counted, if "the voter has not been challenged or required to vote a provisional ballot for any other reason."

From the Michigan Messenger piece, it's clear that the GOP is not going to stop at voter ID laws in its effort to restrict the right to vote of U.S. citizens in this year's presidential election. Imagine that you've lost your home this year. Imagine hearing that if you show up to vote, your vote might get challenged by the GOP based on the fact that you've lost your home (btw, as someone points out in the article, many people are still living in homes that have been foreclosed and therefore are still living where they registered and would be voting legally). I know what I would be thinking, "What if they challenge me publicly and tell everyone my home has been foreclosed on? That would be incredibly embarrassing [ED: I don't think there is anything shameful about not having the money to pay your mortgage, inflated or otherwise, but I can see feeling that way.]" That might prevent me from even trying to vote. And if I did go to vote, what happens to votes that get challenged? Do they only get counted if the district is really really close? (Does anyone know the answer to this?)

Possible Actions:

A sk John McCain to denounce this practice in Michigan.

Get in touch with Obama's Michigan campaign and make sure they know what's happening.

Help someone else in our state register to vote and fulfill our states voter ID requirements (and make sure local campaign offices are paying attention to voter ID requirements).

Keep writing in our own spaces about voter suppression tactics so people are aware of what's happening.

Fill out Progress Michigan's petition against this tactic.

I can try to toughen up

2008-09-08T08:41:00.001-04:00

She and Him

Think of the nieces!

2008-08-24T10:48:00.003-04:00

Last night I watched the 1971 movie "Get Carter," which Michael Cain playing the title role. It was a violent (though not visual disturbing because the special effects were so outdated; blood was very fake) movie with some extremely interesting moments. (As one reviewer on IMDB says, "as the film reaches its climax, the bodies begin to mount with alarming rapidity.") About two hours long, I found it to be a little long (the same reviewer describes it as a "slow-burner").

Check out the preview:

From here on out, this entire post is going to be one big spoiler and it is a movie that relies on suspense, so if you think you might see it; I'd just skip this post.

***SPOILER***

The plot is about Carter trying to uncover who murdered his brother. The movie includes several sexual detours; Carter has sex with ever women he has any dialogue with in the movie, excluding his niece/daughter and his dead brother's girlfriend (I'll get to that). He has sex with his boss's girlfriend (I'm counting phone sex as sex because it was a very erotic scene, and also, they've clearly had sex in the past), the woman who runs the bed and breakfast he's staying in, the girlfriend of at least two mob bosses in the movie. There are only two other women in the movie (that have any dialogue): Carter's niece (or possibly daughter, since it comes out in the movie that he's had an affair with her now deceased mother and that no one knew who fathered the baby. Even dead women have had sex with Carter.) and his brother's girlfriend.

The mystery of who killed the brother hinges on this porn movie that Carter discovers; it turns out that Carter's niece/daughter had been lured into the world of porn (Interesting thing about the porn: Carter is upset/disturbed when the porn begins; it's his niece and another woman, but the thing that puts him over the edge [he starts to cry and has to look away] is when a man enters the room and begins to have sex with the niece/daughter]). As for the brother's girlfriend, Margaret, Carter decides to set up the man who killed his brother, using Margaret. He kidnaps her, makes her strip down, and then injects something in her that kills her (you can see parts of this in the preview). He leaves her naked body on property of the man who killed his brother and then calls the police. Presumably everyone thinks she's the victim of a sexual assault.

At the end of the movie, Carter gets his, shot in the head by another professional killer. As a viewer, you want to see Carter successfully revenge his brother's death, but once he begins killing people (after he's seen the porn with his niece), he completely loses it and it becomes difficult to sympathize with him or to see him as anything other than a psychopath, who's revenge engulfs several, if not completely innocent, then close to innocent players, including two of the women.

What has supposedly driven Carter mad (and also got his brother murdered) was the niece's participation in this porn. When Carter is killing one of the men he screams at him, "How would you like it if that were your daughter?" Carter also watches, completely devoid of emotion, as one of the women (who he has locked in the trunk of his car after watching the porn [after they had sex]) who was in the porn with the niece, is drowned when the car is pushed into the ocean by people who have just tried to kill him. Carter himself murders Margaret, who's main crime it seems was not being that into Carter's brother and also "setting Carter up" (by calling the men who were chasing Carter). She may have also been in the porn, it was hard to tell.

In Carter's mind, and maybe in the world of the movie, there is one and only one innocent women, the niece/daughter. Carter never makes the connection, and the viewer isn't intended to either, in my opinion, that all of the women are potentially someone's daughter, sister, mother, wife, etc.

And maybe that's a good thing. To me, there's a fundamental problem with using a woman's relationship to others as grounds for treating women with respect (or at least with not murdering them callously). I mean, at no point in Get Carter did one character say to another "how would you feel if that were your son?!" while men were being thrown off buildings, shot, and knifed. There's something in that relationship-model that reeks of owner ship. (It was my niece, my daughter, my sister, my wife, my mother.) While using the "what if it were your daughter" line of reasoning may call upon someone's tender feelings for their relative, I think that at least in part it also relies on the indignity generated from imaging having one's possession damaged in some way.

I generally like movies where characters "do not learn their lesson" because I think those movies are much more true to life; usually situations are too complicated to take a simple lesson from them and often people cannot change who they are in that light-bulb moment, if ever. Carter never examined why he was so outraged when it was his niece who was used in a porn and why he could care a less (or feel violently angry towards) the other women who were used in the same porn. If the viewer examines why, I hope they don't walk away with the lesson "I wouldn't want to hurt a women, because all women belong to other people (ie are someone's mother, daughter, etc.)." That's a pretty sophomoric way of mastering gender equality.

Easing back into blogging

2008-08-21T20:50:00.002-04:00

Reading List:

you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to

right from the beginning—a relationship based on

good sense and thoughtfulness in little things
- From Robert Hershon's Superbly Situated

"The USA Foundation's motto was 'Promoting a free market of ideas on the nation's campuses,' and here we encounter yet another of the Washington right's signature lines. Like so many conservative ideas---anticommunism for example---it sounds fine at first. A 'free market of ideas' sounds like 'free inquiry' or a 'free exchange of ideas,' an environment in which hypotheses are tested and bad ones are wedded out while good ones go on to earn the respect of the community of scholars. But this is not what the phrase means at all. Markets do not determine the objective merit of things, only their price, which is to say, their merit in the eyes of large corporations and the very wealthy."

- Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How a gang of right-wing con men destroyed Washington and made a Killing, Harper's August 2008

*

Listen to:

And

Invisible Worlds

*

Radio junky

2008-08-20T09:14:00.003-04:00

Check out NPR's "Hearing Voices" podcast. Here's where you can listen to past episodes. At least a few episodes are hosted by Scott Carrier, one of my favorite contributors on This American Life.

So many books about food

2008-07-09T20:18:00.006-04:00

Something has been bothering me about Michael Pollen's book Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollen writes,

Before Fritz Haber's invention [of synthetic nitrogen] the sheer amount of life earth could support---the size of crops and therefore the number of human bodies---was limited by the amount of nitrogen that bacteria and lightening could fix. By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt. This same recognition by Chinese scientists a few decades later is probably what compelled China's opening to the West: After Nixon's 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have probably starved.

I've just finished Sharman Apt Russel's amazing book "Hunger: An Unnatural History," which among other things, discusses the physiological aspects of fasting, the various ways fasting has been used throughout history, and the Western world's response to hunger epidemics.

Here is a bit of what Russel writes about China,

The biggest famine in recorded history also took place in the middle of the twentith century...When [Chairman Mao] wanted China to become a great producer of grain, he collectivized the peasant's farms and insisted on unscientific methods of growing crops that inadvertantly reduce production. Under intense pressure, peasants and officials competed to grow the most food. Harvests were reported at twice, three times, a hundred times their actual yield. Delighted with these inflated numbers, Mao and the party took a percentage of the grain to be stored near urban centers. Sometimes that percentage was the entire real harvest, leaving nothing for the people in the countryside. At the same time China cut its imports of food and doubled its exports. As people began to starve, Mao ignored them.
...
By the end of 1960, even cities suffered from a lack of food since few farmers had had the strength to plant new crops...Meanwhile, in many areas, the grain stored by the state was left to rot.
...
Outside China, no one guessed at the extent of the disaster until the mid-1980s when China released census date that researchers could match with other accounts. Thirty to forty million people had starved to death.

Pollen clearly critiques the industrial food complex in Omnivore's Dilemma. I believe that Pollen's position can be summed up succiently from this one paragraph from the first essay in Wendell Berry's book "Another Turn of the Crank." Berry writes,

If communities of farmers and consumers wish to promote a sustainable, safe, reasonably inexpensive supply of good food, then they must see that the best, the safest, and most dependable source of food for a city is not the global economy, with its extreme vulnerabilities and extravagant transportation costs, but its own surrounding countryside. It is, in every way, in the best interest of urban consumers to be surrounded by productive land...

Pollen and Berry make it seem like such a clear cut choice, eat local [reject global] and you will be choosing the more environmental sound, healthier, and more animal-friendly route. To Pollen, our movement away from all these benefits has at least some its origins in the development of fertilizer from synthetic nitrogen, which shifted us away from solar based farming and onto fossil fuel based farming. But the phrase I keep returning to in that passage I quoted above from Omnivore's Dilemma is "grind to a very painful halt." Pollen goes onto to say that one of Haber's biographers "estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention." When you put that "painful halt" in the context of very real famines that have occurred, that are occurring, during our lifetimes, I feel less certain about what my food choice mean and if I can live with what they might mean.

Lettuce and strawberries from my local farmer's market.

We're howling forever

2008-06-29T13:47:00.004-04:00

Last week I stumbled across Amy Stein's Photography blog. I love her Domesticated series in particular this picture:
Maybe it's because I've been listening to TV on the Radio's "Wolf Like Me" quite a bit recently, but says so much to me about the collision of the natural world and the man made world (in other words, I've been feeling a lot like a wolf howling at a false moon lately).

Check out Stein's Women with Guns series as well.

Rachel Papo, a photographer on Stein's blogroll, has amazing pictures of women serving in the Israeli army.

She writes

Almost fifteen years after my mandatory military duty ended, I went back to several Israeli army bases, using the medium of photography as a vehicle to re-enter this world. Serial No. 3817131 represents my effort to come to terms with the experiences of being a soldier from the perspective of an adult. My service had been a period of utter loneliness, mixed with apathy and pensiveness, and at the time I was too young to understand it all. Through the camera’s lens, I tried to reconstruct facets of my military life, hopeful to reconcile matters that had been left unresolved.

Perhaps because they are placed right next to each other, two of Papo's images stood out to me. Here is the first and here is the second. The first, is almost a glamor shot; a starling beautiful woman, stretch out in a chair with a look of peace on her face. The second, in stark contrast, is an image of a women tightly balled up and perhaps crying or about to cry. Her photos are amazing, often depicting shots of female soliders looking directly and intensly into the camera. At first it is jarring seeing sometimes small women holding weapons as large as themselves, but for me the setting (the army, the guns) quickly fell into the background of her series.

As Papo writes

Each image embodies traces of things that I recognize, illuminating fragments of my history, striking emotional cords that resonate within me. In some way, each is a self-portrait, depicting a young woman caught in transient moments of introspection and uncertainty, trying to make sense of a challenging daily routine.

2008-06-18T19:43:00.004-04:00

Polyface Farm (you'll have to read Omnivore's Dilemma to know)

I've gotten really into Michael Pollen this past year. Future Farm House directed me to one of his talks which can be found at the Philadelphia Free Library Podcast, I heard him a couple times on NPR, his books kept coming up in conversation with friends, and I also really enjoyed the essay he wrote for the New York Time's Sunday Magazine several weeks ago.

Not sure what took me so long with all this exposure to Pollen, but I finally picked up Omnivore's Dilemma. I'm about one-fourth of the way through and enjoying it a lot so far. I don't know exactly what I expected (I mostly heard him speak about his follow-up book, In Defense of Food), but I'm loving the way Pollen weaves in history and science throughout his narrative.

While I was riding home from work the other day on the trolley, I read one particular passage that plucked something inside of me:

One might think that people would stop eating and drinking gargantuan portions as soon as they felt full, but it turns out hunger doesn't work that way. Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with larger portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprising elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter-gather ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine.

And also

The power of food science lies in its ability to break food down into their nutrient parts and then reassemble them in specific ways that, in effect, push our evolutionary buttons, fooling the omnivore's inherited food selection system. Add fat or sugar to anything and it's going to taste better on the tongue of an animal that natural selection has wired to seek out energy-dense foods. Animal studies proves the point: Rats presented with solutions of pure sucrose or tubs of lard---goodies they seldom encounter in nature---will gorge themselves sick. Whatever nutritional wisdom the rats are born with breaks down when faced with sugars and fats in unnatural concentrations...Food systems can cheat by exaggerating their energy density, tricking a sensory apparatus that evolved to deal with markedly less dense whole foods.

The feeling that welled up inside of me as I read this two paragraphs was: relief. It was not my fault that I want to eat all the time and I want to pick junk food (or even just bread and cheese) over lettuce. It is in my genes; it is how I am engineered.

In thinking about the powerful sense of relief I felt upon reading that human beings are hardwired to seek out energy-dense food, I realized that that relief is carried upon the back of a much larger feeling inside of me, namely, shame. When I eat certain foods or certain portions, I feel like I'm doing something "bad" or "wrong." The relief I felt depends upon the idea of shifting blame off of my conscious self and onto my genetics.

This blame-game is so deep inside of in my thinking that sometimes I can mistake it for relief, gratitude, or even a sense of accomplishment. All of these emotions can mask ideas that I have about what I do and don't deserve, ideas about my value as a person.

As a middle class American, what I eat does say something about me as a person and my political choices (I think Pollen would agree). As conscious decisions, based on my true value system about who I want to be, these choices are distinct from the voice inside of me that tells me "bread, bad; lettuce, good." My true value system tells me to make my eating choices balancing my realistic desires with what's best for the environment and also best for the animals involved. Valuing thinness over fatness, that's not my value system; it's ingrained in me, as my reaction to this Pollen passage demonstrated, but it's not mine.

Our powers combined

2008-06-07T13:57:00.008-04:00

I've stayed pretty quiet about the Democrat nominating process this year, both here and out "in real life." The general quiet was for several reasons; first, I knew that I would support whoever actually won the nomination in the end and I would have been happy with either Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton; and second, as a I wrote a couple of times, the tone of the conversation around the nominating process and the candidates disturbed and saddened me, and honestly, I was afraid to get involved. I was afraid I might write something and then see it twisted somewhere else, and much, much more shamefully, I was afraid of making a mistake or offending people.

[Sidenote: If I write something that offends you, in this or any other post, let me know. We may never see eye to eye, but I want to make an effort to hear where you are coming from.]

I probably would have overcome my fear if I thought I had something new to bring to the table, but there were tons of voices of reason out there, setting the record straight better than I ever could.

There is a whole other, and larger, reason though, that I haven't been being that loud about the primaries and probably will continue to stay relatively quiet during the general election. Here I am November, 2004:

Please note, if it wasn't obvious to you, the John Kerry button.

I've written and deleted the next paragraph a couple of times, because I'm not sure how to say what I want to say here.

I was so shocked and sadden when Kerry lost the 2004 general election (and Bush won the popular vote). I had been involved in Kerry's campaign as a very low-level volunteer in Pittsburgh and I have to admit, that though many people weren't moved or motivated by Kerry, I was. But it wasn't because "my" candidate had lost that I felt devastated that night; it was because of the story that came out of that election. For weeks after Kerry lost, the story that dominated the airwaves was that the people that had voted for Bush (or rather, against Kerry?) had been motivated by "family values." LGBT groups were told that they had cost the democrats the election because they had "pushed" the "gay-marriage issue." In addition to being code for homophobic, I felt (knew?) family values also stood for "pro-life," "believes strongly in enforcing gender differences," and "transphobic" among other things.

What the 2004 election brought home to me was that people hated me and hated people like me. This was a significantly different realization from knowing that people disagreed with the things I thought and the way that I saw the world. When I saw the presidential election as a war of ideas, as in we all get together and vote for the person with the best ideas, it was easy to keep myself out of the equation or at least keep some distance. Sometimes republicans would win, sometimes democrats would win; it was a serious game, but still a game. When, however, I came to see the presidential election as an opportunity for a public referendum on whether or not, I and the people I love, are truly equal in the eyes of their fellow citizens, whether or not we are hated, I realized that it was my body and my future that was at stake (along with the bodies and futures of people I care about), not (just?) my ideas. Not a game.

It's hard for me to write or talk casually about the election. Maybe because it is so personally important to me, I should be using that to write and talk forceful about it, but I am so scared of feeling the way I felt in November 2004 all over again, hated, rejected, and in some degree of danger, that it's difficult for me to allow myself to become emotionally invested again.

[Sidenote: I know it's a result of my privilege that my belief in the political system took it's first serious hit in this regard when I was in my 20s. There are plenty of people in our nation and others whose general population and government has always treated them like an enemy.]

We all have a lot at stake in this election (for example: I think the encroachment on our civil liberties is a pretty serious thing for all of us as well as many many other issues [Iraq war, anyone?]), and it would be a huge mistake for us to ignore the lesson of 2004. To me, the lesson of 2004 isn't to avoid putting issues on the national stage that will arouse people's anger and hatred, but rather, that we must acknowledge that emotions play an integral part in people's political decision-making process (and I would argue in all of their decisions). Harnessing people's deep feelings is not a bad thing because it clouds judgment (does it? I've been able to be angry/loving/sad and right at the same time before...) or just a smart campaign move, to acknowledge the emotional stake we all have in the political process is to acknowledge our humanity. I don't know what a purely rational being would look like, but I have a feeling it would be a lot less benevolent than Data.

When I think of Barrack Obama, I often think of what is arguably the best line from one of his speeches, "In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope." I think he has picked a pretty wonderful emotion to bring people out to the polls November 2009. Both because I have acknowledged that my emotions don't negate my ability to think rationally and because I believe that our emotional compasses can be used to guide us to the best in ourselves, I am not ashamed to say that I will be voting with my heart in November. (I just might not be blogging about it.)

Lauren (right) and Me, 2005

This post is the result of some discussions, I've had with my friend Lauren this past week and I've totally lifted some of her ideas. Thank you, Lauren.

Since I can't seem to write...

2008-06-02T15:24:00.003-04:00

...here are some other places you can go:

Please check out this NPR piece from The Bryant Park project where Rachel Martin interviews Ari Ne'eman, the president of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. It's really interesting.

I've also been getting into The Trouble with Spikol, after reading a New York Times article featuring Spikol and seeing a link to her Youtube videos on Feministing.

Daughter and Citizen

2008-05-16T09:43:00.003-04:00

This morning, NPR's Morning Edition had a segment on the Ladies in White, a group of women in Cuba who have organized to protest their spouse's arrest.

I was surprise that the segment did not mention the Mothers of the Plazo de Mayo in Argentina. The Madres official website is in Spanish, but I did find a related (or possibly the same?) organization, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. There is also a documentary about the Madres (which, is btw, listed on the excellent site, Women Make Movies.)

In these cases, the women have organized themselves around their status as mothers, grandmothers, and wives. They make their demands based on the authority granted to them as mothers and wives, rather than relying on the authority granted to them as citizens. In each case, I suspect, this is based in part on the idea that their government, in arresting/disappearing their husbands and children, has demonstrated that it no longer respects citizenship, so an effective protest must be rooted in some other identity category. It's an interesting method, I think.

They just keep coming back

2008-05-08T19:01:00.007-04:00

Warning: This post contains links that are potentially triggering to victims of sexual violence.

Via Iraq Today, I came across this article, which reports that Iraqi women have reported been sexually harassed and assault by KBR employees.

An Iraqi woman, who worked as a cleaning lady, told British diplomats that the head of KBR had asked her to stay the night and promised to double her wage in return.
Her refusal resulted in a pay cut and she was later dismissed.

Two Iraqi cooks, who confirmed the woman's claims to Foreign Office staff, also lost their jobs shortly afterwards, the Times reported.

They had worked in the canteen and said that KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly and paid or rewarded them for sex.

And where have we heard of KBR before? Oh yes, that's right: Jamie Leigh Jones. As I wrote back in December, Jones was an employee of KBR stationed in Iraq who states she was raped by her coworkers and then held in a storage unit by KBR (who also misplaced her rape kit and told she could either staying in Iraq or lose her job).

After reading the article about the Iraqi women who are accusing KRB employees of sexual harassment, I googled "Jamie Leigh Jones" looking for an update and I found this youtube video of Jones testifying before the House Judiciary Committee.

In her testimony Jones states that the man who made her a drink the night she was raped told her "Don't worry; I save all my ruffies for Dubai." Jones says she took that to be a joke and felt safe with her coworkers thinking "they were all on the same team."

Now there is a whole lot tangled up in that "joke" and Jones apparent feelings of being part of a team. Over at Racialicious, Latoya Peterson looks closely at the term "oppression Olympics" and uses Andrea Smith's excellent essay Heteropatricharchy and The Three Pillars of White Supremacy to unpack the concept. In the essay Smith writes, that the Three Pillars of White Supremacy "framework does not assume that racism and white supremacy is enacted in a singular fashion; rather white supremacy is constituted by separate and distinct, but still interrelated, logics. Envision three pillars, one labeled Slavery/Capitalism, another Genocide/Capitalism, and the last one as Orientalism/War, as well as arrows connecting each of the pillars together. "

The whole essay (and Peterson's post as well as the comments) is definitely worth a close read. For the purpose of examining Jones' attacker's (or attacker's accomplice's?) joke, however, I am particularly interested in this point that Smith makes in the essay.

What keeps us trapped in our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced with the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all non-Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous land. All non-Black peoples are promised if they comply, they will not be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. And Black, Native, Latino, and Asian peoples are promised they will economically and politically advance if they join U.S. wars to spread "democracy."

Though this part of Smith's essay is focusing on examining the barriers to making strategic alliances between people of color and Jones is not a person of color, I don't think it's too much of a stretch here to use the above quote to examine why Jones felt "safe and part of a team" after her coworkers made a "joke" that implied that date rape drugs were being saved for Arabic women. In my opinion, the joke made Jones feel like "one of the guys." Before her rape, she is not an other, but part of team; she has "the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars."

(Please note: I am in no way blaming Jones for being raped and then held hostage by KBR. I just wanted to examine a complicated aspect of her testimony. Being reassured by a racist joke does not equal deserves to be raped.)

Where else have I heard of KBR? Ah yes, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Klein, writing about the aftermath of Katrina, reports

Within weeks, the Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory for the same kind of government-run-by-contractors that had been pioneered in Iraq. The companies that snatched up the biggest contracts were the familiar Baghdad gang: Halliburton's KBR unit [Sidenote: KBR is not longer part of Halliburton] had $60 million dollar gig to reconstruct military bases along the coast.

Later Klein describes some of KBR's (or their subcontractor's) practices,

According to one study "a quarter of the workers rebuilding the city were immigrants lacking papers, almost all of them Hispanic, making far less money than legal workers." In Mississippi, a class-action lawsuit forced several companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages to immigrant workers. Some were not paid at all. On one Halliburton/KBR job site, undocumented immigrant workers reported being waken in the middle of the night by their employer (a subcontractor), who allegedly told them that immigration agents were on their way. Most workers fled to avoid arrest; after all they could end up in one of the new immigration prisons that Halliburton/KBR had been contracted to build for the federal government.

Hello, Slavery/Capitalism from Smith's analysis.

Maybe KBR should change it's slogan: All Three Pillars of White Supremacy for the Price of One!

Alan Ball Definitely Read this Book

2008-05-08T16:02:00.013-04:00

I'm reading Jessica Mitford's book The American Way of Death Revisited. I suspect I will have more to say about it after I've finished, but so far one passage has really stood out to me:

When, in the early eighties, the outbreak of AIDS became a matter of public anxiety, there was panic on the part of funeral directors and embalmers for their own safety. Most mortuaries refused to accept cases where it was believed that the deceased had been exposed to the HIV virus; those who did accept AIDS victims refused to wash, dress, or embalm the victim.
The New York State Funeral Directors Association (NYSFDA), on June 17, 1983, advised members to institute a moratorium on the embalming of AIDS victims. Reaction was quick.
Pete Slocum, a spokesman for the State Department of Health, said that funeral directors had previously been advised to handle the bodies of victims of AIDS as they handle victims of hepatitis B---that is, to wear latex gloves, a procedure that had already been prescribed to prevent spread of any contagious disease and required for health care workers under all circumstances when working with dead bodies. "We have not seen anything that suggests that there needs to be any precautions beyond that."

Threatened with a state bill that would force funeral directors to embalm AIDS victims or risk losing their license, the NYSFDA "lifted it's moratorium on embalming."

This, however, is by no means the ends of the story. It is now cash-in time. The mortuaries that did take AIDS cases began charging healthy "AIDS handling fees," usually $200 to $500. Others used subcontractors to do the embalming, covertly adding the cost by inflating the basic service fee. When the problem began to reach crisis proportions in New York City, the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), with the help of volunteers, surveyed the city's five-hundred-odd licensed funeral homes to identify their AIDS policies. With that information in hand, it put together a guide recommending only forty-two of the five hundred mortuaries to the thousands of friends and relatives of people with AIDS.

I was born in 1982 and I can remember the first time I became aware of the concept of "gayness" was as a young girl watching a television commercial for safe sex practices. (I didn't know what gay meant [I barely knew what sex meant] and I had to ask my mom for an explanation.) I grew up in an era where children were taught the ways that AIDS could and could not be transmitted. (I remember a particular presentation in high school where a women demonstrated how much of someone else's saliva one would have to drink to get AIDS by drinking 16 oz of water [which even accounting for messy teenage kissing was clearly way too much].)

It's passages like this that remind me how much previous generations had to endure and just how recent some of our progress is. I know that people with AIDS and HIV still face discrimination in both America and internationally. I know that gay men and women still face discrimination (in both America and internationally), but I think that if I fail to acknowledge the progress that has been made then I am failing to honor the people who came before me and fought for that progress.

My first thought upon reading this was, I really can't imagine much worse than losing a family member to a disease (a disease that marked them as a stigmatized person in life) and then being turned away from a funeral home. I suspect there's a lot that has happened (that is happening right at this moment) that I simply "cannot imagine." But I'm going to do my best to try to imagine it, to try to listen and learn; that really is the absolute least that one can do.

Edit: Weirdly enough, this week Dan Savage brought in some HIV-educators to answer someone's question about getting HIV from kissing.

I hope we don't have to rip out the foundation

2008-05-06T22:18:00.004-04:00

My friend Jake invited me to go to North Carolina today to campaign. I couldn't go because I couldn't take off work on such sort notice.

I also couldn't go because of everything Jay Smooth says here. This Ill Doctrine post, btw, is also a pretty good summation of why I don't really write about the democratic nomination process at the moment. Not gonna be more noise about this. (Don't take this as a criticism if you are writing about the nomination process. I love a lot of what I read; I just don't think I have anything new to bring to the table).

Bic me

2008-05-04T16:31:00.006-04:00

This entry (and 90% of my college papers) brought to you by Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and by Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning. Many thanks to Professor Susan Fraiman for introducing me to both.

This morning I was in the UVA bookstore and the April 2008 Esquire cover caught my eye.

As my sister, Caitlin, says this cover "seems less about hair and more about gender-play...the sexy woman in a man's button up shirt." (Sidenote: What is up with that? Why is it so sexy in a heterosexual paradigm for women to dress up in men's clothes?)

Esquire explains on their website that they are recreating another iconic Esquire cover image, "actress Virna Lisi caught mid-shave on the cover in March 1965."

As a woman who produces enough hair on my face that I feel the need to pluck those little black hairs off of my chin and jawline daily (and use Nair once a week), I saw this cover and felt mocked. Although it might at first glance seem like Esquire is revealing that women do, in fact, grow body/facial hair and go to great lengths to remove it, I think Caitlin's assessment of the cover is accurate. This cover doesn't reveal that women grow facial hair; it obscures that fact. In an excellent summation of my point here, the photographer for this cover says, "There is nothing masculine about Jessica. Even with a beard she couldn't be masculine." This cover is about emphasizing how not masculine Simpson is and the trope for masculinity is being able to grow a beard.

In my opinion, successful drag (and I do mean drag, here; the playful act of performing another gender---not cross-dressing or being transgendered, which is something completely different), plays with the tensions created by a gender binary system. Drag calls attention to gender as a performance, a shell game. Drag says, walk like this, talk like this, wear this; that is the essence of gender. Drag takes, "I am male therefore I shave my face" and makes it "I shave my face therefore I am male [at this moment]."

As a piece of drag, this cover fails (for me). This image of Jessica Simpson does not expose the act of shaving one's face a performance piece that creates masculinity; it reinforces the idea that men alone actually shave their face (and women can only pretend to).

Check out this link to some of Trish Morrissey's work Women with Facial Hair for an example of complex images that I think successfully explode the relationship between facial hair and masculinity. The article accompanying the images is also definitely worth the read.

2008-05-03T11:12:00.002-04:00

- Drawing on the rubber matting of a playground in Pittsburgh

Your tongue lives in your mouth and your tongue is you. He sent his tongue everywhere to see what was doing beyond the metal arch bars and the elastic bands. Across the raw vaulted dome of the palate, down to the tender cavernous sockets of the missing teeth, and then the plunge below the gum line. That was where they'd opened him up and wired him together. For the tongue it was like the journey up the river in 'Heart of Darkness.' The mysterious stillness, the miles of silence, the tongue creeping conradianly on towards Kurtz. I am the Marlow of my mouth."

- Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson

I've been grinding my teeth again.

2008-04-27T11:06:00.002-04:00

You may notice that one of the links on my blogroll is dead. Please check out this piece on feministing for a little background on brownfemipower's departure from the blogosphere (I believe she recently changed her handle to la chola, but she is more widely known as brownfemipower).

Feministe lead me to her "finals words." In this piece she explicitly rejects the label "feminist" and explains why. BFP writes,
“Feminists,” on the other hand, are not movement building, they are actively destroying women and blaming those women for the destruction. They are saying the point of feminism is “equality with men” without even thinking to acknowledge that “equality with women” is just as admirable of a goal and maybe even possibly the first step to achieving the goal of equality with men. They are saying, Just do it, just do it, JUST FUCKING DO IT.

The third-wave feminist critique of the second-wave rest largely on the idea the second-wavers privileged the experience of white upper class women over the experiences of lesbian women, women of color, and poorer women. BFP's piece requires white third-wavers to examine their glass house (and it's painful to see what that glass reflects back).

Please check out what she has written.

2008-04-25T13:18:00.003-04:00

Let me preface this by saying, I am in no way trying to talk about the experience of all women. Many women experience completely different and, some might argue, more hurtful/dangerous forms of street harassment then I do. Street harassment often involves a head-on collision of class, race, able-ness, gender expression, and sexual orientation, not only for the person being harassed, but also for the person harassing.

This morning as I was walking to work, some guy in a truck did a cat-call whistle. As I stood there waiting to cross the intersection, flicking the guy off while he turned the corner, I realized that to everyone in the cars all around me, who hadn't heard the whistle must think I was completely insane. And maybe some people who heard the whistle thought I was crazy too.

Street harassment really bothers me. I like to think the best of people, so I believe that the people (men?) who harass others (women?) on the street don't understand what they are doing.

When people harass me on the street, the first thing I feel is scared. I have no way of distinguishing between the random dude that is going to tell me I have nice legs and then walk away and the random dude who is going to tell me I have nice legs and then follow me for several blocks with follow-up comments (or the random dude who is going to tell me I have nice legs and then try to touch me).

The second thing I feel is angry. Being out in public should not be the equivalent of posting a picture of yourself on a hot or not website. Most times when I am out in public by myself, I am trying to get from point A to point B and it pisses me off that in between those points, people think I am inviting a referendum on my body, my clothes, my walk.

I hear many men say that they are just trying to compliment someone and how is someone supposed to know what's a compliment and what isn't. Here's the thing: if you're not in a situation where you can walk up to someone, introduce yourself, and then say whatever it is you want to say, then you're probably not about to deliver a compliment (and if you wouldn't say it if the person wasn't alone, you're also probably not about to deliver a compliment).

What is being deliver is a message of intimidation. Whenever someone shouts at me from a car or mutters something as I pass by, they are saying "get off the streets" to me. They are saying, "I am a person and you are something I like to look at." That attitude scares me and it makes it much more difficult for me to ride the trolley, take a walk, or really do anything by myself.

Oh and Guy, fuck you. You might enjoy looking at women, but it's articles like this that legitimize treating women like objects for men to enjoy rather than like real people. Via feministing.

Obsession is for objects

2008-04-20T21:11:00.002-04:00

“He suffers and he’s needy, and I relate to him personally,” Mr. Apatow said in a telephone interview. Particularly in dealing with the opposite sex, Mr. Apatow said, “we both have that same feeling that we’re obsessed with women and they don’t actually like us that much.”

This quote from the New York Time's article on Jason Segel, the writer-leading man of the new movie "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" has a lot packed into it. I really liked Knocked Up and was a big defender of it when many of the commenters on Feministing criticized it by agreeing with Katherine Heigls' remarks that it was sexist.

I defended Knocked Up by comparing it to "In Her Shoes" and "Just Like Heaven," movies that involved high-powered women finding the man of their dreams only after realizing that they need to give up their fast-paced, demanding jobs and take it easy. In Knocked Up, on the other hand, the male lead was the one who had to change "for love." More controversially (I guess) I also thought that Leslie Mann's character in Knocked Up was a sympathetic because, in the narrative of the movie, she is justifiably (I think) angry at her life. (Everyone else seemed to think she was meant to be a shrew.)

This quote makes me think I was wrong to defend it though. "Obsessed with women" is an attitude that sounds suspiciously similar to "thinks all women are the same." Or to put it another way, it doesn't matter if Apatow is shoving all women in the dirt or putting them all on a pedestal, either attitude treats women as something other than three-dimensional people with real flaws and actual character traits.

It got me thinking back to that Feministing discussion about Heigl's character in Knocked Up, specifically about how Heigl might have been the "together one," but she also never got to be funny and about the whole abortion thing and how glossed over it was. I still liked Knocked Up, but ya gotta admit that when a character decides to have a baby with a one night stand and you come away from that (non-)scene about that decision without knowing anything more about the character or her motivations, then that character really is little more than a plot device for someone else's journey.

Apatow did better than that with Freaks and Geeks and I'm pretty sure he can do better than that on the big screen too.

Here's looking at you

2008-04-13T12:39:00.009-04:00

Last week I finished reading Courtney Martin's book "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body." Martin uses the dichotomy of the "perfect girl" (the perfectionist) and the "starving daughter" (our most basic human desires) to examine women's relationship to their body. (As she said at a talk at the University of VA last week, once you start talking about women and their bodies, you end up talking about everything.)

A lot of things in the book really stuck with me, but one thing in particular was a concept about attractiveness and desire that Martin articulates: being noticed versus being seen.

Martin writes,

We walk around wondering what we look like through most of adolescence and, with less urgency, for the rest of our lives. Our inability to really see ourselves imbues the judgment of strangers with tremendous and undue value...A man I have never met can instantly put a little swing in my step...a bar full of half-drunk strangers has the power to make me hang my head.

We are dependent on the kindness of strangers because of the onslaught of skinny-and-fit female or tall-and-toned male images that we suffer daily. We become unsure of our own sight so early on, convinced that the only accurate view of ourselves is outside of ourselves. We search for signs that we resemble the mold---an invite to homecoming from a football player, a wink in the elevator from a cute coworker, admission into an exclusive downtown club. We feel, in these brief, usually fruitless encounters, like we are being seen when really we are just being noticed. The difference is significant.

Being noticed is ordinary, fleeting, and impersonal. Being seen is extraordinary, lasting and intimate. Being notice is common and only skin-deep. Being seen is rare and profound. It is what happens when you stay up all night talking in a stranger's car because the conversation is so good you forgot to reach for the door handle...Being seen is when your boyfriend knows that the horseshoe scar on your knee was from when you fell in the gravel of the playground in fourth grade playing flag football, and he adores it Being seen is a hand on the small of your back as you walk through a doorway, a glass of water when you are coughing in the middle of the night, his making a parting reference to something you said so long ago you barely remember it. Being seen is when your girlfriend asks, 'Why do you seems sad?" before you have realized that you are, indeed sad. Being seen is rarely about physical beauty. Being seen is never about being buff or thin.
- pp 149-150

This passage really spoke to me because I realize that a lot of my anxiety over my body come from a place inside of me that is desperate to be noticed and terrified about what it says about me when I am not noticed. I have never been the kind of woman that gets noticed. In some contexts this is a total blessing. On the rare occasions when someone harasses me on the street, I feel horrible about it and I'm not sure being hit on in a bar would be much different. On the other hand, I am acutely and occasionally painfully aware of the attention some of my girlfriends get. I think I have been wondering all my life to some extent what is wrong with me---why don't I get noticed?

That's not the real question though and in fact, it's not a question it all; it's a gratitude. I am so thankful that I have been seen by friends, family, and some of my romantic partners and that I have seen people. I think I've always thought of my failure to be noticed as some kind of indication of my chances of being seen, but the truth is, I can put that fear to rest. The results are in: I have been seen and loved and I have seen and loved. No amount of noticing is going to change that.

2008-04-09T21:47:00.004-04:00

It's not a paycheck from a fancy corporation. It's not a nice apartment, trendy clothes, a new car. It's not a nonprofit job that guarantees a spot in heaven. It's not even thinness.

None of these things make us feel perfect or even good enough. None of these things fills up the emptiness inside, the one that Anna Quindlen warned us about: "If you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be." When you turn twenty-five and you look up from the toilet bowl or the keyboard or the steering wheel and you realize that there is nothing where there should be at the center of your life, at the center of you body, at the center of your soul, what do you do? When you realize that the hunger you feel is for something much larger, much more substantial than a paycheck or a flat stomach or a cute boyfriend, where do you look for spiritual sustenance?

- Courtney E. Martin, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters

Stay Classy, Bob

2008-03-16T14:34:00.003-04:00

I just finished reading two articles in today's New York Times, Public Infidelity, Private Debate and I Agree, Dear, It Was Awful (which for some reason is not online).

In PIPD, the reporter examines women looking at the Elliot Spitzer scandal, feeling pity for Silda Wall Spitzer, considering what they would do in her situation, but never really believing their husbands could cheat. In IADIWA, the reporter says that men, on the other hand, focused more on why Spitzer got caught.

Reading these two articles, one is left with the distinct impression that men cheat and then women decide whether or not to forgive them.

Even before I read these two articles I was thinking way, way back to 1997 and how I remember that just before the Lewinsky scandal broke, Newsweek did a cover story on the rising levels of adultery and our changing attitudes towards. I couldn't find that particular story, but I did find "Those Cheatin' Hearts" from the 1997 (and about 6 months before Newsweek first wrote about Lewinsky). The reporter writes:

Public attitudes toward adultery are predictably ambivalent. According to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 78.5 percent of adults polled last year said extramarital sex was "always wrong"-up 10 percent from 1976. But tolerance for adulterers themselves has risen. A 1996 NORC study found that 22 percent of men and 15 percent of women admitted being unfaithful to their spouses at least once. Opposing adultery in principle is not the same as "believing the adulterer is a monster who ought to wear a red letter on his breast," says New York University sociologist Todd Gitlin. [emphasis mine]

Got that? In 1996, there was only a 7% difference between men and women who admitted to committing adultery. We are both a bunch of cheaters.

The rest of the stuff in that paragraph is pretty interesting too. It seems that hypocritical attitudes regarding sexually activity are not the sole domain of politicians using the very acts they rail against for their political capital...(Though, to be clear, I am not arguing against bringing this hypocrisy to light. I'm just saying let's not get too far up on the horse, because it's a long way down.)

And then there's the overlooked victim in this situation (from IADIWA):

Bob Beleson, 58, an independent beverage marketer who lives in Manhattan, said that the discussions he had with several buddies condemned the governor not for his sin, but for his excess. "These guys that pay $4,300 for a hooker are the same guys who pay $9 for an espresso," he said. "They're ruining it for everyone else."

Now, Bob, I realize that being in the beverage business, espresso are probably part of your whole thing, but comparing a human being/sex with that human being to a hot coffee drink, isn't that a bit much? Also, really? Really?! You are really going to complain in a nationally read newspaper that the thing about this whole Spitzer-thing is that it's really causing some price gouging in sex industry? I'm sorry "hookers" have been "ruined" for you. You must be devastated.

A Matter of Perspective

2008-03-09T16:45:00.004-04:00

Today's New York Times includes an article titled, "Senate Committee Seeks Audit of How Iraq is Spending it's Soaring Oil Windfall." Senators Carl Levin and John W. Warner, from the Armed Services Committee, have written a letter asking for an accounting of how Iraq is spending its oil money to further the reconstruction in Iraq. Apparently, the Iraqi government isn't spending much of it and are instead relying on U.S. money for reconstruction.

As upsetting as that is, I was thrown for a loop when I got to the last two paragraphs of the article.

"Finally, Senators Levin and Warner ask the question looming over the entire rebuilding effort: 'Why has the Iraqi government not spent more of its oil revenue on reconstruction, economic development and providing essential services for the Iraqi people?'
Also on Friday, Iraqi security forces discovered a mass grave containing the remains of about 100 people in Diyala Province, said Maj. Winfiel Danielson, a spokesman for the Mutlinational Forces-Iraq."

Ok, hold the phone. 100 dead people? Mass grave? At the end of an article about oil money? I guess the connection is that both of these things happened in Iraq, but isn't this a little bit like the New York Times ending its "the price of grain is really rising" (also in today's paper) with something like this, "Oh yeah, btw, mass grave found in Northern Indiana." Doesn't a mass grave warrant it's own teeny little column?

So I went to Iraq Today to check it out, which led me to a BBC article and a Washington Post article about the mass grave. The BBC article explains that the bodies have probably been there since pre-invasion and the Washington Post article says that hundreds of mass graves have been found since the March 2003 invasion.

The thing is though, scrolling down through the info on Iraq Today (and reading that Washington Post article), I can kind of see why the mass grave part got buried in the NY Times article. Mass graves and incredible amounts of violence (please note that all those links are from this past week and I got them from Iraq Today) are the norm in Iraq. That's not what the scoop is anymore. I'm glad that Levin and Warner want to get to the bottom of where that oil money is going in Iraq. But I'm sad that instead of our politicians demanding answers being the almost un-reportable norm, we are expected to be so blaze about the discovery of 100 (more) people dead in Iraq.

Science! It means whatever you want it to!

2008-03-03T12:34:00.005-05:00

As my friend Lauren put it, there are grocery lists that are written better than this piece in the Washington Post.

There is so much I could say about this article (and much of it has already been said). I'd like though, to address (the author) Charlotte Allen's point about women drivers.

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

Run for your lives! It's a woman driving!

Let's re-write this paragraph shall we:

"Depressing as it is, several of the supposed myths about male inferiority have been proven true. Men really are worse drivers than women, for example. A study published in 1998 by Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Public Health revealed that men were three times more likely to be involved in a fatal car crash as women. Although women get in slightly more accidents then men (5.7 women car accidents/million miles to 5.1 men car accidents/million miles), men take many more stupid risks. [I'll get to the whole spatial/navigation thing]"

I haven't read the study. However, I don't think either of the above paragraphs accurately represent the study, mainly because they take the findings (as I understand them--that men's car accidents are more fatal and women get in more car accidents) and draw the conclusion that one sex is a better driver than the other sex, a conclusion that I don't really think is supported by the findings. I mean, take a look at this abstract of a study from Spain, which says that Spanish men are more likely to be in a car crash than Spanish women. (BTW, this study was published in May 2001, in the American Journal of Epidemiology, which is the same journal [I think] that published the Johns Hopkins' study that Allen references.) What does that mean for Allen's little theory? Being Spanish effects a man's ability to perform task involving navigation and spatial awareness?

The thing is, even though I haven't read the study, I'm pretty damn certain Allen hasn't either. After all, she says that she has no use for math ["I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?)"], so I'm sure she can't really bother with a silly little thing like fact checking.

I don't know why men are involved in more fatal crashes than women and I don't know why (American?) women are in more car crashes than men. But neither does Allen. Maybe she was going for a whole meta-"this article is so illogical that it proves women are stupid because I am a stupid women" thing. Whatever it is, the Washington Post never should have published it.

Belly up

2008-02-23T21:28:00.004-05:00

After returning to Bikram yoga last week, I picked up Yoga Journal at the grocery store. It's a cool magazine packed with a lot of information about life in general as well as yoga (there was financial advice and information on SAD to name just a few things I wasn't expecting in a yoga magazine).

I always like to read the letters to the editor in magazines (actually, I have a tendency to get in trouble with friends when they send me links to things, because they want to talk about the actual article and I want to talk about the [often ridiculous] comments about the article). In the Feb 2008 issue of Yoga Journal, Alice Stevens of Atlanta, Georgia writes in about an article on prenatal yoga. She writes,

...I would have preferred to have seen your suggested poses photographed in better taste. Yoga honors and respects the body. I don't think that showing a bare pregnant belly is respectful or appropriate in a magazine---not even in a prenatal yoga class.

Within the letter section there's a shrunken image of the magazine spread that accompanied the prenatal yoga article. It's a smiling woman sitting in a tailor seat, in a sports bra and yoga pants. Her hands are on her ankles so her arms are framing her belly. It looks something like this:

[This image comes from Birth Roots Doula Collective, Inc.]

Am I missing something? Is there something inherently disrespectful to the body about showing a pregnant woman's belly?

Remember when Demi Moore posed naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair? I remember there was controversy at the time, but I can't remember it's exact nature. Now, looking at this image, I see Moore gazing out at the viewer proudly and aggressively. We often see nudity connected to sex in magazines images and, often in more sober content, sex connected to pregnancy. This image of Moore directly connects nudity to pregnancy and, in doing so, brings sex to the forefront. While Moore explodes the idea that a pregnant women is not a sexual being, her defiant gaze out from the glossy cover, also says that she is looking at us. The roles are not reversed, but the playing field is leveled; the "object" of our gaze, is looking back.

In Yoga Journal, however, the pregnant model (student?) sits smiling happily for the camera and in the image above, the model has her eyes cast downwards. And they both are at ease in yoga poses. Rather than forcing the reader to confront the sexualization of women, while simultaneously challenging imagery of pregnancy as scrubbed clean of sex, these images really are squeaky clean. It made me wonder what Stevens' point was. If just showing a naked pregnant belly is offensive, then perhaps having one is a shameful thing, in Stevens' mind. I hope not though.

To my fellow viragoes

2008-02-18T17:33:00.002-05:00

Everyday I get a "Word of the Day" from Dictionary.com. The February 16th word was "virago"

1. a loud-voiced, ill-tempered scolding women; a shrew.
2. Archaic. a woman of strength and spirit
Synonyms - scold, nag, termagant, harpy, Xanthippe.

Note that there are no synonyms listed for the second definition (and see the linked word for more synonyms). I suspect that this is probably because the second definition, identified as archaic, is no longer used (by the way, the 2002 Oxford American college dictionary, also identifies the second definition as archaic, but is slightly different: "a woman of masculine strength or spirit; a female warrior" [emphasis mine]), but I have to say other than maybe "amazon" I can't really think of a synonym for the "woman of strength or spirit" definition.

So I looked up amazon to see if dictionary.com would lead me to any interesting synonyms. Amazon pops up in the synonym lists for "women" and for "mean lady." The synonym list for women is particularly interesting; it includes (among other words), "babe, cupcake, hussy, lady, madam, mama, she-stuff, shrew, temptress, and weaker sex [emphasis mine]."

First of all, "she-stuff"? WTF? She-stuff is like what Buffalo Bill would have called his victims in Silence of the Lambs.

Second, isn't it sad that we lost a word like virago when there are so few words that are defined as "a woman of strength and spirit"? When I see those two definitions of virago side by side, all I can think of is how often I get the message that strong women are bitches, smart women are unattractive, and opinionated women are just loud.

I'd take the world where virago is an honor rather than an insult, any day.

2008-02-13T16:57:00.005-05:00

Dear Fourth Years at UVA,
I am you. I have come from the future to warn you. Two years from now you are most likely going to be (1) dropping out of grad school, (2) starting grad school, (3) sitting in an office at 5:01 pm willing the next 29 minutes to pass quickly.
Please get drunk immediately.

To B

2008-02-10T20:55:00.001-05:00

Why does it affect
and comfort me
the little scar
where, years ago, you cut your lip
shaving when half drunk
and in a hurry
to play drums in public.

We step now to rhythms we don't own or understand,
and, with blind, dog-like diligence,
we hunt for scars
in tender places.

-Moya Cannon, Scar

And this and this.

The gift of Ear Candy to remind you that you're fabulous

2008-02-07T13:51:00.000-05:00

I may have linked to these two bands/singers before, but I really like them so I thought I would share.

Peggy Sue and the Pirates (my favorite of theirs is "the new song") are two women from Brighton, who twist up their voices around a guitar. Adele is from South London and reminds me a little of Regina Spektor.

On a completely different note, as some of you know, I am going to be a Bridesmaid this summer. Just for fun I typed "Bridesmaid" into google to see what the top hits would be. Second down on the list was a bridesmaids.com which featured a blog (or something that poses as a blog while helpfully linking to a bunch of stores. Also it's addressed to the bride, which I found weird).

Here's a particularly choice entry:

This week is National Singles Week, which means there’s no better time to take a moment out of your aint’-love-grand stupor to celebrate with the eligible single ladies in your life: your bridesmaids. Whether that means writing them a special note, assuring them once again that their bridesmaid dresses do not make them look fat, or blessing them with special bridesmaids’ gifts to remind them of their worth, there’s no better time than Singles Week to remind your bridesmaids that they are single and fabulous.

I'm not even going to touch that whole "make sure to tell them they're not fat" tip.

I assume that I would react with appreciation if someone gave me a gift at any time, but I find something just a teensy bit patronizing in a bride giving her presumably single bridesmaids a gift for National Singles Week. Am I the only one who would read receiving a present from a soon-to-be married friend during National Singles Week as having a tinge of pity attached to it (which would defeat the purpose of celebrating National Singles week [ahem, it's actually called National Single and Unmarried Americans Week])? I don't think single people are waiting around for affirmation from married people that they are "fabulous."

February's Give plus two things I like

2008-02-06T13:20:00.001-05:00

This month I've decided to give my monthly donation to the Women Under Forty Political Action Committee. On their website they state that their mission is to:

To help elect more young women to elected office so that young women have an equal voice in shaping public policy.
To build the seniority of women in Congress by electing women at a young age.

They also have a sister organization called "Running Start." Check out the info under the "Young Women" tab on their website, which includes a map of where young women are running for office, what they bring to the table, and links to other resources about young women and politics.

Also, if you're sick of all the election coverage and need something to do, please checkout the Philadelphia Free Library Podcast, which broadcasts (podcasts? streams?) the author lectures that have taken place recently at the library. I have particularly enjoyed Micheal Pollen and Robert Kamenetz's lectures. Also, via Feministing, I came across the Library of Congress's photostream on Flickr, which is absolutely amazing.

Dollars and Sense

2008-02-05T12:33:00.000-05:00

I meant to write about this when I read it, but I've been having computer trouble at home and I've been too busy at work. (When I'm having busy days at work I want to spend my lunch hour away from the computer.)

I've noticed this all over, but last Sundays this paragraph from a New York Times article about Obama's South Carolina victory caught my eye:

"A heightened anxiety about the nation’s economy was at the center of the primary fight here. More than half the voters said it was the most important issue facing the country, overtaking health care or the war in Iraq." (Emphasis mine.)

From this quote, I assume pollsters/reporters were asking voting South Carolinians, "What issue do you care the most about, the economy, health care, or the war in Iraq?" This question (or the quote that results from it) fails on two counts: (1) It perpetuates the idea that the economy, health, care, and the war in Iraq are separate issues and (2) it is practically empty of meaning as I don't know what aspect of each issue they respondents are concerned about, leaving me to fill in whatever I am concerned about with that issue.

There will always be buzzwords summing things up into neat little categories that allow everyone to think that we're talking about the same thing when we're not. What concerns me most is the first failure. The economy, health care, and the war in Iraq are connected to each other, not separate issues.

Dwight Eisenhower said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

If you're looking for the actual numbers the American Friends Service Committee (via Iraq Today) spells it out for us here.

2008-01-22T20:24:00.000-05:00

Those dreams in which a phantom
Of the beloved appears: those
Are a true haunting. A trick
Of the mind to make you think
She's lost, that he will never
Come again.
You wake
In the dark, weeping. You hear
The river outside your window,
Flowing to the sea. You think:
Who could read poems
In this darkness? And all the time
Your sorrow is the poem of hope
And the beloved is there beside you.
- Gregory Orr, from Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

Housing is a Human Right

2008-01-13T20:01:00.000-05:00

In her book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein includes a chapter about New Orleans. After examining the mismanagement of disaster relief work, that the government outsourced to private contractors (using tax payers' money, if that's not clear), Klein writes

"The attacks on the disadvantaged, carried out in the name of reconstruction and relief, did not stop there. In order to offset the tens of billions going to to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40 billion from the federal budget. Among the programs that were slashed were student loans, Medicaid and food stamps. In other words, the poorest cities in the country subsidized the contractor bonanza twice---first when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services, and second when the few programs that directly assisted the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills."

She goes on to write about the lack of progress in New Orleans, two years after Katrina hit. She writes,

"The vast majority of publicly owned housing projects stood boarded up and empty, with five thousand units slotted for the demolition by the federal housing authority...New Orleans' powerful tourism lobby had been eyeing the house projects, several of them on prime land close to the French Quarter.
Endesha Juakali helped set up a protest camp outside on of the boarded-up projects, St. Bernard Public Housing, explaining, 'they've had an agenda for St. Bernard for a long time, but as long as people lived here, they couldn't do it. So they used the disaster as a way of cleansing the neighborhood when the neighborhood is weakest...This is a great location for bigger houses and condos. The only problem is you got all these poor black people sitting on it!'"

As I read Klein's chapter on New Orleans, I was reminded of something that I had read on La Chola's blog before I went on vacation for the holidays. She has several posts on the Public Housing advocates protesting the New Orleans City Council meeting convened to approve the "untimely demolition of the 4 largest housing developments during an unprecedented housing crisis in this city." (Quote on her blog came from here.) I urge you to watch the video in her post Public Housing Advocates Attacked part 4 (which is linked above) as well as check out the link to the video of the protesting outside of the court house.

Think New Orleans provides a round-up of some links to blogs covering the controversy here.

The Coalition to Stop Demolition (I may have the name wrong, it may be called Defend New Orleans Public Housing) provides a Fact v. Myths page and a Demolition Fact Sheet. The home page provides regular updates of the Coalition's work.

In its latest update, the coalition writes,

"The City Council approved demolition plans for the four major housing developments in late December. Hundreds of people were locked out of the meeting. About a dozen people were arrested for loudly demanding that the council let people in to the empty seats. Police used pepper spray and tasered several protestors. The Council urged HUD to develop one for one replacement of affordable housing and asked for quarterly reports.

The Mayor of New Orleans has promised that there will be no demolition at Lafitte or St. Bernard until HUD shows a full-funded plan for one for one replacement of affordable housing. He announced he would allow demolition to begin at B.W. Cooper and C.J. Peete as soon as he was provided with a Memorandum of Understanding between the HUD and the residents.
Demolition on St. Bernard and Lafitte has not started. Demolition has started on C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper"

Please check out their calls to action here. Their call for action includes urging U.S. Senate Committee on Banking Housing and Urban Affairs to finishing deliberating on Senate Bill 1668: Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act of 2007. The bill has to get through the committee before it can be voted on in Congress (and many bills never make it out of the various committees, so it's important to let them know which ones are a priority!). This form will allow you to contact the committee with a statement in support of SB 1668.

Since I'm going to be drunk for the rest of the election cycle

2008-01-11T13:25:00.000-05:00

I like beer, probably-over-priced beer, to be a little more specific. So, for my fellow beer lovers out there, here are two brief news items: A New York Times Dining article about American brewing styles and a Bryant Park Project blog post on the rising cost of hops. (Bonus: For those of us actually considering drinking everyday from now until the first week in November or playing the Feministing drinking game, it might be wise to check out this segment from today's Bryant Park Project.)

I have to say, the NY times article makes me feel silly about liking fancypants beer so much because apparently the American style of brewing involves making our beers, like, TOTALLY XTREME. Although perhaps I can take comfort in the fact, that my love of beer does not extend to actually knowing much about it. I drink what my local expert puts in front of me and then either I like it or I don't.

Still, I think it says something about me that I am more interested in knowing more about the rising cost of hops than I am in knowing about the subprime mortgage crisis.

Must have Photo ID to Rock the Vote

2008-01-10T13:11:00.000-05:00

Please check out this article from the New York Times on the case before the Supreme Court challenging the Indiana voter ID law. The law says that either you have to produce a photo ID when you vote or, if you don't have photo ID, vote provisionally and then go to the county courthouse within 10 days of voting to validate your vote. Proponents of the law claim that it is necessary to prevent in-person voter fraud. Challengers of the law claim that the law will, in effect, disenfranchise minorities, poor people, and elderly people, all of whom are less likely to have photo IDs. Voting is a fundamental right and this law infringes on that right, so the court should use "strict scrutiny" as their standard of review. (Sorry to use Wikipedia as a link, but I think this particular article does a good job summarizing strict scrutiny from what I can remember from my law school days.) Strict scrutiny means that the law must protect a compelling government interest and be narrowly tailored and use the less restrictive means to achieve that interest.

The Times article does a pretty good job of summing up how things are going (not well; divided along party lines). It really pisses me off and makes me sad that Kennedy said the law causes a "minor inconvenience" for people. I feel like he's not thinking about how truly difficult it is for some people to get to government office buildings during their hours of operation, because of the hours the person works, or not having child care, or being physically disabled. It has not been proven that there is any problem in the U.S. with in-person voter fraud, but I think it's entirely apparent that we do have a problem getting people out to vote at all. I think it's horrible that states are writing laws that make it more difficult for people to vote.

If this law gets upheld, then I really hope that registration drives start to include helping people obtain photo ID. I wonder if there is some kind of fund that could be put together to help people with the fees that accompany getting a photo ID in some states.

*

In international news, the Times reported yesterday that abortion clinics are shutting down in Spain, while the workers go on strike to protest the lack of government protection from violent and threatening pro-life protesters. I do think the Spainish government should do all it can to ensure the safety of the clinic workers and the women who use the clinics, but I can't help but think that by shutting down the clinics to protest, the clinic workers are hurting their own clients (an estimated 2,000 women will be affected) more than making a statement to the government or to the pro-life movement.

(Why does the NY Times author call the pro-life people "anti-abortion?" I would call them anti-choice. Out of politeness, I have chosen to call them pro-life here, but calling them "anti-abortion" implies the other side is pro-abortion. As I have said before, I believe both sides of this debate are committed to reducing the number of abortion; pro-life people generally believe that the way to do this is to make all abortion illegal and teach abstinence-only sex education and pro-choice people generally believe that the way to reduce the number of abortions is to keep it legal [read: safe] and promote pro-contraceptive sex education. It's disingenuous to present one side as anti-abortion and, in doing so, imply that the other side is pro-abortion. Although maybe the pro-life movement in Spain is commonly referred to as anti-abortion and that is why the NY Times has chosen this nomenclature.)

It's time to have a talk (aka LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU)

2008-01-09T14:30:00.001-05:00

Ever since I saw this piece by Gloria Steinem about Hillary Clinton and the role of sexism in her campaign, I have been passing it around to friends. Well, after reading this piece by Angry Black Bitch and scrolling through the comments accompanying the post, I have to say I'm completely ashamed I didn't give more thought to Steinem's piece.

I know where Steinem's piece came from. As I glance around on the internet this morning, I see a lot of backlash against Clinton taking the form of sexist attacks. And that makes me angry, sad, and afraid.

However, even with Steinem's disclaimer that she knows all about the intersections of racism and sexism, the article still reads like this: "Obama, as a black man, has an easier time getting the democratic nomination than Clinton, as a white woman." This is a dangerous game because even as Steinem's disclaimer sits there shouting about how tangled up identities are, the rest of her article claims to separate out identities so neatly that supporting Clinton is supporting the (mythical single) cause of all women/feminism. This game is going to lead to a lot of shouting, a lot of deeply hurt feelings, and absolutely no resolution.

I am all for having discussions about the intersections of race and gender and I'm not about to tell people when they can and cannot have these discussions. I am just not looking forward to having this "discussion" played out on the national stage through presidential primaries and the subsequent presidential race. I'm apprehensive about this, mainly because I don't think it will be a discussion at all. Discussion requires an attempt to understand another person's opinion. I don't know if you've been on the internet lately, read a newspaper, turned on your television or radio, or stepped outside, but there's not a lot of that going on.

I see a lot of conversations about who the candidates are in these terms: Clinton is a woman, Obama is black, Huckabee is a preacher, Romney is rich, Kucinch/Paul are the outsiders. These handles tell us something about the candidates, but not much. The also tell us something about the candidates' supporters, but, again, not much. And I think, perhaps, they disguise a lot more than they tell. We are told again and again that voters care more about superficial aspects than they do about the "issues." Even when we care about the issues, our interest can supposedly be summed up in one easy phrase, "Change." How are voters supposed to care deeply about the issues when we are force-feed this cliff-note version of things? What does change mean? What do we mean when we say people support/don't support Clinton because she's a woman? What do we think being "a woman" means? What do we think being black means? What do we think being an white means? What do we think being rich means? What do we think being an outsider means? What do we think "we" or "the nation" means? WHAT ARE ALL THESE WORDS CODE FOR?

2008-01-03T11:03:00.000-05:00

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Somber clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor,
leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

- Bereft, Robert Frost

Give to the Charlottesville Free Clinic

2008-01-02T12:02:00.000-05:00

In order to honor my New Year's resolution to "Give More" each month this year, I plan on selecting a different organization and giving them a $30 donation. This month, I will donate to the Charlottesville Free Clinic which provides health care to the "working uninsured." You can read their most recent (at least from what's online) newsletter here.

When I was a teenager, my family moved to the U.K. While we were house hunting, I fell down a flight of stair, bouncing the whole way down on my tail-bone. It was really embarrassing to take that fall in front of my family, the home owner, and two relators, but even more embarrassing when I passed out trying to get out the front door so I could cry from the pain in privacy. After I passed out a second time, trying to get up from my prone position, an ambulance was called and I was carted off to the emergency room. By the time I saw a doctor I had completely recovered. One of the main things I remember from the whole thing (besides the embarrassment and being offered a plastic donut to cushion my bruised butt), was that my parents were really surprised when it turned out that we didn't owe the hospital anything because the UK has the NHS.

I believe in the Charlottesville Free Clinic mission to provide “high-quality health care to the working uninsured,” because I believe that every human being deserves access to adequate healthcare. I also believe that it is our government's job to ensure that every citizen, but especially every child, has access to adequate healthcare. However, until the government steps up into this role, there's a desperate need for free clinics in our country. I hope you will join me in giving what you can this month to the Charlottesville Free Clinic or your own local free clinic.

Check out this interesting article by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, author of The Healthcare Fix, Universal Insurance for All Americans, on a voucher system for health insurance.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T11:37:00.000-05:00

Last night, I celebrated the end of 2007 with good food and drink. For dinner I used a recipe from the Better Homes and Garden Vegetarian Cookbook to make "Miniature Mexican Frittatas."

Ingredients:
1 10 oz package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and well drained
1 C cottage cheese, drained
1/2 C grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 C shredded cheddar cheese (2 oz)
4 eggs
1/4 C milk
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp pepper
2 TBS snipped cilantro or parsley
Salsa, warmed
Sour cream (optional)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
In a medium bowl stir together the spinach, cottage cheese, parmesan cheese, and cheddar cheese. In another bowl stir together the eggs, milk, cumin, pepper, and cilantro. Combine the two bowls. Spoon the mixture into 12 lightly greased 2.5-in muffin cups. Bake for 20-25 min or until eggs are set. Cool for five minutes. Top with salsa and sour cream.

Here's what the finished product looked like:

While I was on my lunch break yesterday, I stopped at the Market Street Wine Shop to pick up some fancy-smancy beer. I love that store so much. I am a bread-fiend and their bread always looks so amazing. I've heard that on Mondays you can get bread-ends there for free, but I have yet to try it. Here (minus the champagne, which my parents gave me) is some of what I picked up:

For dessert, I broke out the muffin tins again to make cupcakes (from the box). Those suckers were really tricky to frost. I have too many of them on my hands now:

I did make a resolution for the New Year, which I am planning on writing more about later today or tomorrow. I generally make specific, goal-oriented resolutions like "go the the gym everyday" or "start writing fiction again," but this year I've decided to do something different. My resolution for the new year is embodied in the word "Give." I want to give more. I'm not sure how yet and I don't plan on settling on one specific way to give more. I'd rather just focus the idea of giving and see where it takes me. I already have one idea of something I would like to do with this, but that's for another post.

Three things I like Thursday

2007-12-27T09:34:00.000-05:00

My jaw has been hurting lately, bringing the first stanza of this poem to mind:

But now that I am used to pain,
Its knuckles in my mouth the same
Today as yesterday, the cause
As clear-obscure as who's to blame,

A fascination with the flaws
Sets in - the plundered heart, the pause
Between those earnest, oversold
Liberties that took like laws.

What should have been I never told,
Afraid of outbursts, you withhold.
Why are desires something to share?
I'm shivering though it isn't cold.

Beneath your window, I stand and stare.
The planets turn. The trees are bare.
I'll toss a pebble at the pane,
But softly, knowing you are not there.
- J.D. McClatchy, Pibroch

I also really like this song and the stories on this website.

Part 1

2007-12-23T08:32:00.000-05:00

Spoiler alert: If you are still waiting to see 1962's Manchurian Candidate, this might not be the post for you.

I'm about 1/4th of the way through Naomi Klein's new book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" (thanks, Lauren, for the xmas gift!). Klein explores the links between disasters (whether state-created or natural) that befall a country and the privitization of public institution (twin shocks, to borrow her language). In the first chapter, Klein describes how the CIA came to use Ewan Cameron's psychological research in the 1950s. She writes of a meeting between different intelligent agencies and academic in 1951.

Klein writes,

"The subject of the meeting was growing concern in the Western intelligence community that the Communists has somehow discovered how to 'brainwash' prisoners of war. The evidence was the fact that American GIs taken captive in Korea were going before cameras, seemingly willingly, and denouncing capitalism and imperialism. According to the declassified minutes from the Ritz meeting, those in attendance...were convinced that Western powers urgently needed to discover how the Communists were extracting these remarkable confessions. With that in mind, the first step was to conduct 'a clinical study of actual cases' to see how brainwashing might work. The stated goal of this research was not for Western powers to start using mind control on prisoners, it was to prepare Western soldiers for whatever coercive techniques they might encounter if they were taken hostage."

Last night, I finished watching the original Manchurian Candidate, made in 1962. It's central plot point rests on the fear that Klein describes in the above passage, that the Communists were capable of brainwashing prisoners of war, and then takes it a step further. In the movie the captured platoon doesn't go on television and denounce Western imperialism, but rather, a member of the platoon (Laurence Harvey playing Raymond Shaw) is a sleeper agent, activated as an assassin each time someone suggests to him that he play some solitaire and he sees a queen of diamond.

There are few clues in the movie about how this is accomplished, the main one being that they were brainwashed at a fictional place called the Pavlovian Institute, which suggests that the creators of Manchurian Candidate envisioned brainwashing as being related to behaviorist techniques. Behaviorism involves offering reinforcement to reward or punish specific behavior. As Klein describes the research of Cameron (in 1957 the CIA gave him his first grant), his goal was not to erase specific behaviors, but rather to erase the person entirely and begin again with a blank slate. To achieve this goal, he used new inventions to give extremely intense shock therapy sessions, sensory deprivation, and extended sleep. Cameron was conducting this research on his patients, who were left much much worse off after being in his care.

Klein is very clear in pointing out that the experiments Cameron engaged in with CIA funding "are consistently described as 'mind control' and 'brainwashing.' The word 'torture' is almost never used."

This semantics game is meant to remind the reader of today, our own on-going semantics game with "enemy combatant" and "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the discussion that seems to have centered itself around the practice of waterboarding. The Manchurian Candidate represents the (not outdated) idea that torture/brainwashing might be used to make a person an effective tool for the interrogators. In the Manchurian Candidate, they created an assassin, today, it's claimed we are trying to create "sources of information." Klein's narrative and Cameron's research state, however, that we are not trying to create a tool, but rather obliterate a person. Rather than the person, it is his/her absolute obliteration that is the tool, the weapon, and the objective is terror.

For more information from a unique perspective about waterboarding please check out this post.

2007-12-12T16:24:00.000-05:00

I think I may have to divorce the internet. I'm not sure what that's going to mean for my blog though. I'd like to keep writing here and reading other blogs, but I have to say, everyday I encounter things that really upset me on the internet. And I don't mean upset me in the sense that there are tons of depressing news items out there that convey information about an increasingly stressful and depressing world. I mean upset me like, I cannot believe you, my beloved blog, would say such a thing! (Which maybe just means I'm overly sensitive.)

I wanted to leave a comment about this at Jezebel today (I need to stop reading Jezebel if only because I think I've written three out of the last four posts about stuff I've encountered there), but I can't because I have this new policy that it's stupid to leave comments that criticize people for offending your personal sensibilities. It's like coming into someone's house and saying you don't like the wallpaper.

But you know me, silence isn't an option either.

Anyway, long preamble for this: Today Jezebel is following up on the news coverage that has recently gone on about facebook groups dedicated to women posting pictures of themselves drunk. A lot of blogs have written about this and mentioned how it's just a bunch of pearl clutching about how THOSE GIRLS SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES, sometimes wrapped in the extremely thin (see-through) gauze of concern about binge drinking. Jezebel has written about this website in the past and invited readers to send in pics of drunk guys from facebook. It posted some of those today.

About two years ago, a friend of mine from high school got really drunk at a party. At some point in the night, his friends discovered him lying down outside at the foot of some stairs. Thinking he was passed out, they brought him inside and put him on the floor to sleep it off. Reportedly, his friends heard him snoring during the night. He had hit his head falling down and sometime during the night, he died.

That's why this picture really upset me.

I know that over at Jezebel their intention is to point out to the media that gee, it's not just girls who are getting drunk, taking pictures of themselves, and putting it up on the internet. And yeah, ok, it is kind of hilarious to have a friend smear whipped cream all over their faces while their passed out drunk and your tickling them with a feather (or whatever. I'm not that fond of writing "balls" on people's heads; it's played out).

Funny pictures on the internet (and those HOLY SHIT OUR DAUGHTERS GONE WILD new stories) aside, it's just hard for me to look at these pictures and not think, "But what if he really is dead?"

Not just a few bad apples

2007-12-11T10:39:00.000-05:00

Warning: This post is potentially triggering as it deals with rape.

Via Jezebel: Yesterday ABC posted a news story about a woman named Jamie Leigh Jones. While she was in Iraq working for either Halliburton or its then-subsidiary KBR (the new story isn't clear) Jones alleges was gang-raped by her coworkers. She is suing Halliburton and in her lawsuit she alleges that after being given medical treatment by army doctors who performed a rape kit, she was held under guard in a Halliburton storage container with a bed in it and told that if she left she would lose her job both in Iraq and back in the United States. The rape kit, which contained evidence that she had been both vaginally and anally raped, has disappeared.

After reading about this case, I remembered reading about women who, while serving in the army in Iraq, have been raped or sexually harassed. A quick google search lead me to SuzanneSwift.org, a site that publicizes the story of two women on its home page, Suzanne Swift and LaVena Johnson. The LaVena Johnson story has its own website here. I urge you to read the stories of both women. In particular check out this link from suzanneswift.org: What can I do if I'm being sexually mistreated in the military?

Do what I say, not what I do

2007-12-05T18:19:00.000-05:00

If you listened to the Bryant Park Project on NPR yesterday (or looked at any major news source I suspect) then you've probably heard about the U.S. intelligence report that concluded that Iran stopped pursuing creating nuclear weapons in 2003. This morning, however, the BPP (and the NY Times) delivered the (rather predictable) news that Bush says that his tough policy towards Iran is justified because Iran has pursued nuclear weapons in the past and will do so in the future if the chance arises.

I don't know if the new U.S. intelligence report is correct. I don't know if Iran intends to get nukes in the future (although, honestly, I suspect that they might). What I do know is that Bush scolding Iran for attempting to create nuclear weapons is the U.S. talking out of both sides of his/her mouth.

November's issue of Scientific American poses the question "Do We Need New Nukes?" as the cover story. In the article, the author, David Biello, explores the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Department of Defense's (DOD) proposal to replace "the W76, which makes up a third of the available warheads" (and according to Biello we have "a stockpile of roughly 10,000 nuclear weapons"). Apparently, W76s have a 30 year life span which is about to expire. The bulk of the article is about explaining and critiquing point by point, DOE and the DOD's argument both for the particular design they'd like to use to replace the W76s (a design filed under the moniker the Reliable Replacement Warhead [RRW]) and for the replacement project in general.

Near the end of the article Biello discusses what I think is the main argument against replacing these outdated warheads. Biello quotes Sidney Drell from the Standford Linear Accelerator Center as saying

If the United States, the strongest nation in the world, concludes that it cannot protect its vital interests without relying on new nuclear weapons for new military missions, it would be a clear signal to other nations that nuclear weapons are valuable, if not necessary, for their security purposes, too.

Or in other words the United States could restart (continue?) the nuclear arms race by pursuing the RRW program.

I'm with Henry Kissinger on this one, who, along with George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn have issued a statement saying, "We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal."

We are sending mixed messages to Iran. While we are demanding (through Condoleezza Rice in the above linked NY Times article) that “Iran...stop enrichment and reprocessing activities," we are simultaneously sending them the message (through actions such as proposing the RRW program) that maintaining a fully function nuclear warhead supply should be the top priority of world powers.

Onslaught

2007-12-04T17:48:00.000-05:00

This week over at Jezebel Dodai wrote a post about Nigella Lawson, author of "How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking." She a celebrity chef in Britain and apparently people have been saying that she's getting fat. Lawson takes her critics to task, saying that it's gotten to the point where beauty is almost entirely equated with thinness.

Also on the topic of the media's love affair with calling people fat, Zuzu at Feministe writes about Jennifer Love Hewitt's recent response to people saying she has a fat butt. Hewitt writes that she's not concerned for herself, but rather all the women out there who are struggling with body issues.

I was really interested to see the number of comments over at Jezebel that basically said, "but she's not fat!" re: Lawson. Hewitt's post contains this as well. She says "size two is not fat." Both the comments at Jezebel and this comment from Hewitt point out a legitimate problem in our society. Women in general, but celebrity women in particular, are held up to ridiculous and unrealistic standards.

On the other hand, I think these comments conceal something that further adds to our collective psychosis over body image. Here's what I want to ask: What if Lawson and Hewitt were fat?

It's important that we point out that calling either Lawson or Hewitt fat is ridiculous. But it may be more important to for us to say that being fat does not make someone ugly, lazy, or valueless.

Hewitt is right, this fat-policing of celebrities stuff isn't really about communicating directly with the celebrities. What it's really about is making it damn clear to everyone what are acceptable body types and what are not.

Our ideals for our celebrities are like a cracked mirror that tells us all about our own insecurities and desires. The mirror tells us that we cannot let ourselves get old without intervention (but that if we have plastic surgery, it's taboo to go out until it's fully healed), it tells us that cellulite "ruins" our legs, it tells us to be hairless, white, and sexually available, but not slutty.

It's not enough for us to protest, "but I don't have those flaws" when we fail to live up to the image. That doesn't break the mirror; it just passes it on to someone else.

PS: I really liked Lawson's late husband's book.

2007-11-30T13:37:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow, December 1, 2007, is World AIDS Day. If you go here, you can listen to Thembi, a South African woman who is living with AIDS.

Apathy Mask

2007-11-28T22:25:00.001-05:00

I recently finished reading "A People's History of U.S.," a book I've mentioned again and again here. As I neared the end of the book (and moved closer to present day) author Howard Zinn argues that the government has become disconnected from the people.

Zinn writes

After the disastrous war in Vietnam came the scandals of Watergate. There was deepening economic insecurity for much of the population, along with environmental deterioration, and a growing culture of violence and family disarray. Clearly, such fundamental problems could not be solved without bold changes in the social and economic structure. But no major party candidates proposed such changes. The "American political tradition" held fast.
In recognition of this, perhaps only vaguely conscious of this, voters stayed away from the polls in large numbers, or voted without enthusiasm. More and more they declared, if only by nonparticipation, their alienation from the political system.

Passages like this really stuck with me. My brother turned 18 a few years after Kurt Cobain killed himself. Interviewers were asking Cobain constantly if "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was about teenage apathy because the story of the time was that my brother's generation, the one right before mine, was apathetic. They didn't vote because they didn't care or so said the media.

That story continues today. Sean Combs "Vote or Die" Campaign seems based on the idea that if teenagers and people in their twenties just really understood how incredibly important it is to vote, if they were just whipped into a frenzy, they would be voting.

But perhaps apathy masks something deeper and more frightening, despair.

Again, Zinn writes, "In a two party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn."

The apathy story is a good one for the government and the media because it turns nonparticipation into individual moral failing (laziness, being uneducated, selfishness). The "despair" story is a much more difficult one because it requires us to admit the system is failing the people rather blame people for failing to participate in it.

I know where I won't be shopping

2007-11-23T13:45:00.000-05:00

In this week's issue of the Hook, the weekly newspaper ran a column called Holiday howlers, which consisted of interviews with local shop owners about their stories of last minute holiday shoppers. Cynthia Schroeder of Spring Street's interview particularly caught my eye. The author of the article, Claiborn Thompson, writes,

In her second year running the women's clothing shop Spring Street, owner Cynthia Schroeder found the holiday season to be especially hectic. But things turned from hectic to strange when a man came into the store-- located at that time in Meadowbrook Shopping Center-- apparently looking for a gift for his wife or girlfriend. But no. Schroeder says he wanted to try the clothes on... himself! Realizing she had no rules against it, she allowed him to take his pick.
Then, while he was busily trying on clothes, a lady out in the parking lot backed into Schroeder's car and tried to drive away.

"Since then," she says, "we've decided that men should not try on women's clothes-- during store hours or otherwise!"

I don't even get how this was a story. Let's break it down: A man wanted to try on women's clothing. The store owner let him. An unrelated woman then backed into the store owner's car. Since then the store owner has decided men should not cross-dress.

All I have to say is, WTF?

This past Tuesday (November 20th, 2007) was Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day "set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice." The website for the day defines transgender as "a transsexual, crossdresser, or otherwise gender-variant" individual.

It's depressing that the Hook ran this story the same week as the Transgender Day of Remembrance. If this woman wants to exclude a group of people from her private business, fine, but it's ridiculous for the Hook to publish this as a humorous story that condones her bigotry.

The Hook dehumanizes cross-dressers and other transgender individuals with this story by making them a punch line in a joke and celebrating their exclusion from a business. It is exactly this kind of attitude that protects members of our society who commit violent acts against transgender people merely because they do not conform to our notions of what it means to be a man or a woman.

Shame on The Hook.

Questions

2007-11-20T17:14:00.000-05:00

What do you think the removal of body hair is about? If both men and women naturally grow body hair, does it make sense that our culture breeds people of both genders to find body hair to be disgusting? Does it spring from U.S. history which looked down upon and oppressed people with darker hair, from Eastern Europeans to African Americans? (In other words, is it because it makes people look "ethnic"?) Is it a matter of personal preference? (Something that I think is difficult to argue since distaste for body hair in American culture is nearly universal. Maybe you do genuinely "prefer" to be hairless or sexually "prefer" others to be hairless. How convenient though that your preference is supported and pushed by traditional beauty standards.) Is it an attempt to further an artificial distinction between men and women? Is it about creating a market for hair removal products? Is it about making people focus on individual flaws and in doing so, taking their eyes off the big picture? Is it punishment, self-flagellation? Just what, exactly, as a culture, are we willingly doing to ourselves?

(Post stems from this discussion)

Insert slogan here

2007-11-15T11:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday NPR's Morning Edition began with this segment about a poll that had been conducted regarding perceptions of the black community in the United States. The article expands on a lot of information in the poll, but the radio segment focuses on the conclusion that the poll draws that black people in America no longer see themselves "as one race." Steve Inskeep (the host) and Juan Williams clarify that in the poll "not seeing themselves as one race" is akin to seeing themselves as not having the same economics or same values, rather than not having the same skin color.

It was really strange for me to hear this on NPR. Is it really news that all black people are not the same in their values and economics? The article does a better job of framing the poll, saying that television and popular culture portrays black people as having only one set of values, but black people do not see themselves this way. I was really upset, however, when Inskeep asked (something like) "So do middle and upper class blacks seem to get closer to whites in their values?"

Just as black people are not a homogeneous group of people, white people are also divided in their values and along class lines. Inskeep's question implies that all whites are middle and upper-class, which erases a large portion of white people in America who are poor.

According to the article,

72 percent of whites, 54 percent of blacks, and 60 percent of Hispanics agree that in the last 10 years, "values held by black people and the values held by white people (have) become more similar."

I think that this perception is wrong, not because there are not shared values between people of different races, but because, like Inskeep's question, this perception rests on that there is such a thing as "white people values" (or "black people values").

Many historians have written about the Jim Crow laws in the south as not only a reflection of racist attitudes of the time, but an attempt to maintain and fuel racist attitudes particularly in poor white people. These historians argue that poor white people and emancipated slaves had much in common, namely the conditions of poverty, and that people in power were afraid of unity between the two groups erupting into a class war.

It's a good step to recognize that there are class divisions within the African American community (as obvious as I think this is, I'm still glad it's being said). An even better step would be to recognize that those same class divides exist throughout the country, regardless of race.

*
In more local news from yesterday, first-year Alex Cortes had a piece in the UVA newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, in support of shouting "not gay" during The Good Old Song at football games. For those of you who aren't from Charlottesville, when UVA scores a touchdown, the fans sing The Good Old Song in celebration. There is a verse about everything being bright and gay at Virginia, after which some people (fewer and fewer, I hear) shout "not gay."

My sister Caitlin sent me Cortes' opinion piece this morning explaining how hilarious and sad it was all at once, and it really has to be read to be believed.

Anyway, here is my little response (which I may or may not send to him; you can vote! But I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter because he seems the type to google his name on a regular basis [see last paragraph of his article]).

Dear Alex,
You want to shout "Not Gay" at football games during the good old song? Fine, whatever, I don't really care. But you're going to have to accept that in shouting "not gay" you are aligning yourself with idiots and assholes. And do you want to know the reason that is the case? Because as much as you might want it to be, shouting a catch phrase is not an intellectual argument. I don't care if "not gay" is supposed to stand for "I am against the homosexual "lifestyle" for religious reason and I also am against sex between a man and woman before marriage." This is akin to saying that screaming "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you" to your parents at the age of 14 is an intellectual argument that is meant to convey "The differences between our ages makes it almost impossible for us to relate to one another. I am becoming an adult and I need more space and freedom."

However, I whole-heartedly invite you flesh out your "not gay" chant. At the next football game, try hysterically shrieking, "I am not gay because it says it's wrong in the bible and I also believe that men and women should only use the act of intercourse for procreation" if that is what you are really trying to say. I am sure all those people who have been staring at you and saying negative things at past football games will be completely won over by this "intellectual" argument.

Lifestylely yours,
Rachel

2007-11-12T19:29:00.000-05:00

Love has to take us unawares
for none of us would pay love's price if we knew it.
For who will pay to be destroyed?
The destruction is so certain,
so evident.

Much harder to chart,
less evident,
is love's second life,
a tern's egg,
revealed and hidden in a nest of stones
on a stony shore.

What seems a stone
is no stone.
This vulnerable pulse
which could be held in the palm of a hand
may survive
to voyage the world's warm and frozen oceans,
its tapered wings,
the beat of its small heart,
a span between arctic poles.

- Moya Cannon, Arctic Tern (From: The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry 1967-2000)

Green, my ass

2007-11-09T22:36:00.000-05:00

First of all, Columbus Day, redux.

Secondly, a confession: I do not like "reality" TV (that is not the confession part---and yes, I really am going to use scare quotes around reality), but sometimes I watch "The Biggest Loser." This week I caught part of the "Green Week" episode. The challenge this week was that the contestants had to race up ramps to recycle several tons of soda cans. The team that recycled the most cans in weight won a 2008 Ford Escape hybrid SUV. A hybrid SUV.

Now if you'll please check out the second graphic with this article, the one that lists the Revised EPA Miles Per Gallon Estimates for several different types of vehicles. According to the graphic, 7 different kinds of cars get better gas mileage than the 2007 Ford Escape Hybrid SUV. In fact, the 2007 Toyota Prius gets 16 more mile/gallon city and highway combined than the 2007 Ford Escape Hybrid.

I think this is an excellent example of how the "green"/"environmental friendly" sticker is being slapped onto products and companies right now as just another marketing tool. Why did NBC pick the Ford Escape Hybrid (the less environmentally friendly car) over the Prius as a prize during their all-good-for-the-environment episode of the Biggest Loser? My guess is that Ford offered more money (that other "green") for the product placement of its cars.

So thanks, NBC, I guess this means two more (hybrid) SUVs out there on the road.

Can't stop, won't stop

2007-11-08T19:57:00.001-05:00

Yesterday the House passed the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA). (Bad news for the New York Post maybe.) I am very happy that we are one step closer to protection LGB people from discrimination in the workplace, but you'll notice the T is absent Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered acronym. Some Democrats decided that ditching protection against workplace discrimination for transgendered people was the best way the ensure the bills passage. Understandably some people feel betrayed and pissed. And some people are arguing that transgendered people and their allies just need to be patient and their time will come.

I do believe that eventually transgendered people will be protected from workplace discrimination and I'm willing to hear the counsel "be patient," but not if being patient is supposed to mean, "shut up, sit still, and wait."

As Martin Luther King, Jr., said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail,

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We cannot stop agitating for the things we believe in. If you want to do some agitating in letter-writing form, here's how to find your US House Rep and Senator.

The Radical Act

2007-11-07T15:57:00.000-05:00

Warning: If you do not want to read about body issues, please skip this post.

Through dooce, I came across this blog post by Mihow where she describes the way that her weight has fluctuated through-out her life using the real numbers (read: her weight in pounds and her height in feet and inches). Many of her commenters (and dooce) commend her for being brave enough to put her real numbers out there and setting a goal for herself.

I do think it's brave to publicly admit to how much you weigh. It's sad that in our society this is a brave act, but there is so much baggage accompanying the numbers on the scale. So I don't want to sound like I'm coming down on Mihow here. However, when I read her post, it just made me feel bad.

You see, I am two inches shorter than Mihow and weigh about the same amount. And so the comparison game begins. She considers herself overweight, should I? Do other people? Reading Mihow's numbers added fuel to the fire of voice in my head that tells me because of what I weigh I am a failure and others see me as a failure (or, if you want, that I am unloveable and others see me as unloveable). (Let me take a moment here to say that I don't want comments that say that I am not a failure and I am loveable; although I appreciate the sentiment, I feel that that is equivalent to saying "Don't feel the way you feel.")

Recently, I reread my diaries from middle school hoping to find something I could use "Mortified-style" for my friend's variety show. I didn't really find anything funny in there. What I did find though was hundreds of entries that contained the phrase, "I failed today. I ate between meals." I remember wishing that I was thinner in middle school, but I had forgotten how it made me feel like I was a failure because I wasn't thinner.

I don't know why I was so surprised though, because those feelings are still around.

I need to lose some weight for health reasons (because a laminated paper chart taped to a doctors wall was consulted and ordain it). So take the amount of weight I'd like to lose for health reasons. Triple it. That is how much I actually want to lose.

This little math exercise is significant for me because I do believe that weight loss has a healthy, positive place in my life. If I were treating my body as I should be, exercising and eating correctly, the by-product of that would be weight loss (I am told). However (and here's what my little math equation is meant to demonstrate), the kind of weight loss I am really interested in, in my heart of hearts, is divorced from treating my body like I love it. It is deeply linked to hating my body and hating myself for failing to have the kind of body that I think I might love.

Since the end goal is the same, a leaner and therefore healthier body, perhaps it doesn't matter if my motivation is to be healthy or to look "good," but I think it does. Every time I exercise (or chose to stay on the couch) and every time I deny myself food I want (or go ahead and eat it), there's part of me that's doing it out of self-love and there is part of me that is doing it out of self-hatred. And I have a feeling that if I listen to the self-hatred enough, it's not really going to matter if I wildly exceed my expectations in regards to weight loss.

I am coming to terms with the idea that this self-hatred/self-love dichotomy is not like two paths in the woods, where I just have to get off the self-hatred one and step onto the self-love one. I am always going to struggle with feelings of inadequacy in regards to my appearance/weight (as are so many other women and increasingly men). But you know how when you see someone bullying someone else on the street, there's this moment where you have to decide whether or not your going to intervene and stand-up for the person being bullied? I like to believe I'm the kind of person who would intervene for a stranger and now I want to be the kind of person who will consistently intervene for herself.

During college (this is the wrap up, I swear), in one of my Feminist literature classes, we watched Margaret Cho's stand-up at the end of the year. Some of the things she said always stuck with me. She talked about how she use to take time out of her day to look at herself as she passed buildings with glass windows to think "I am fat," and how she could spend her time so much more productively. And she also said this (watch it please, it's good).

She says it so much better than I can.

Two things I like Tuesday

2007-11-06T20:24:00.000-05:00

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

that's why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river
forcing it's way between deformed cliffs
an acute angle of understanding
moving itself like a locus of the sun
into this condemned scenery.

What we've had to give up to get here---
whole LP collections, films we starred in
playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows
full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,
the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,
afternoons on the riverbank
pretending to be children

Coming out to this desert
we meant to change the face of
driving among dull green succulents
walking at noon in the ghost town
surrounded by a silence

that sounds like the silence of the place
except that it came with us
and is familiar
and everything we were saying until now
was an effort to blot it out---
coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you
You mention the danger
and list the equipment
we talk of people caring for each other
in emergencies---laceration, thirst---
but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power
your eyes are stars of a different magnitude
they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT
when you get up and pace the floor

talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves
as if we were testing anything else.

- Adrienne Rich, Trying to Talk with a Man

And this song, by Loudon Wainwright.

But what does it all MEAN?

2007-11-05T18:23:00.000-05:00

After reading this post on Finally a Feminist 101 Blog, about the relationship between lesbianism and feminism, I began to think about a certain scenario that I have seen/experienced.

Picture this: Guy approaches girl (or group of girls) in a social setting. Guy makes his move. Girl or (group of girls) rejects guy. Guy says, "What are you, a (bunch of) lesbian(s)?!"

Having been on the receiving end of this insult (which is how I'm going to refer to it, since that is what the speaker intends, even though I don't feel that being identified as lesbian is insulting), I've done a little bit of thinking about what the speaker intends to convey. I've come up with a few different things.

(1) It is a warning. It says, either find me attractive or risk being categorizes as sexual unavailable/attractive (which is how the speaker sees lesbians). This would only an be effective threat in a setting/society that values women based on their sexual availability/attractiveness to men. It's also a little strange considering that the guy has already let on that he finds the woman/women he is hitting on to be desirable.

(2) In the same vein, it is some sort of bizarre reverse psychology. The guy is hoping that upon hearing the above threat, the girl will go out of her way to prove that she is straight, namely, by responding positively to his come ons.

(3) It is the only explanation that the guy can grasp for why he would be rejected. As in, if you reject me, then you must be rejecting all of men everywhere...and if this is the case, man, how fragile can an ego be?

(4) It is a very strange rejection in return (kind of like number 1). The equivalent of a kid's "fine, I don't like you either." (Although this could also be achieved through any kind of name calling so I don't think it really explains why the guy chooses "lesbian".)

(5) The guy decides that if he can't actually have the woman/women he has hit on, he is going to appropriate her through the common male fantasy of girl on girl action (this one works better when it's a group of girls rejecting the guy).

What do you think it is? Why do you think "lesbian" or "dyke" are still used as insults? Do you think it's different when they are used in a sexualized context?

Banana Bread and Easy Egg Florentine

2007-11-04T14:46:00.000-05:00

I make darn good Banana Bread.

And here's how I do it:

(Recipe from Jeannine Meyers and posted on allrecipes.com)

1 1/2 C white sugar
1/2 C butter softened
3 Bananas mashed (ed: I like to use bananas that are so brown/black they are almost fermenting)
2 eggs
2 C all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/3 C sour milk (ed: I just use regular milk)
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). (ed: If your oven has a setting where both the top and bottom coils can be turned on, set it to this.) Lightly grease a loaf pan.
Combine all the ingredients into a large mixing bowl; beat well. Pour into greased loaf pan.
Bake for 60 minutes or until toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean (ed: I bake with the top and bottom coil turned on for the first 30 min and then just the bottom coil turned on for the last 30 minutes, to make sure the bread does not over-bake on the top.).

For dinner last night I made "Easy Eggs Florentine" from The Everything College Cookbook. As the name suggests, they are extremely easy to make. It's also a filling and tasty meal.

2 C fresh-packed spinach leaves
2 eggs
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp olive oil
2 slices crusty rye bread (ed: I just use whole wheat or whole grain bread)
2 TBS ricotta cheese
1/4 tsp (or to taste) cayenne pepper

Toast two pieces of bread and spread the ricotta cheese on them.
Break each egg into a separate bowl. Bowl about 3 in of water in a medium sauce pan, turn down to a simmer. Slid one egg into the simmering water and cook for 3 to 5 min. (ed: I do the full 5 min to get a "firmer" egg.) Remove from the water with a slotted spoon to drain off excess water. Repeat with the second egg.
When the egg has about 2 minutes to go, heat oil in a frying pan and then toss the spinach leaves on (ed: I use a lot of spinach leaves, probably more than the 2 C; I just eye-ball it). The spinach leaves take about a minute to cook.
Add the spinach on top of the bread with the ricotta cheese. Add the egg on top of that. Sprinkle cayenne pepper on top.
This recipe takes about 5 to 10 minutes.

mindfulness

2007-10-31T21:01:00.000-04:00

I have been feeling wishy-washy about my relationship to technology and that all came to a head tonight when I broke my cell phone by dropping it by accident.

The thing is, I've broken three cell phone in the past and each time I've been really upset at the thought of losing my cell phone, but besides feeling momentarily inconvenienced, I wasn't upset this time. Partly it's because circumstances are different now; I have a landline and I can get a pay-as-you-go cell phone for emergencies. Partly it's because I just don't want a cell phone anymore, for the same reason I've been having trouble with the internet lately.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with cell phones or the internet. In fact I think the internet in particular has brought a lot of amazing things into my life and does a lot of good. Lately, however, I've been really frustrated with aspects of the internet or maybe just how I use it.

I think I may use this kind of technology to spend less time alone with myself and my thoughts. When I am always reading about other people's opinions, I never really have time to form my own. It's the same with the cell phone. Instead of walking by myself and thinking or waiting and thinking, I can just call some one up and chat. There are good aspects to both of these things, of course, I stay informed (or get misinformed) with the internet and I reach out to my friends with my phone. But it seems like (and I don't think I'm alone in this) I am unable to use the internet or my cell phone in moderation or for the "right" reasons.

Besides stunting my ability to form my own opinion, I think the internet has had other negative effects on me. When I read blog comments or visit youtube and look at the comments, I inevitably end up angry or depressed. Some days, being on the internet can be like watching the failure of communication over and over again. I do not understand why strangers feel compelled to try to convince one another that the other person is wrong. I do not understand why I feel compelled to do this. I would not feel compelled to do this if someone on the bus started telling me about their conservative view points, so why do I feel the need to shove my viewpoint down someone else's throat on the internet?

I am not very good at wrapping things up, so I thought I would just end with a thought from Radiant Mind: Essential Buddhist Teachings and Texts. Jon Kabat-Zinn writes,

Where to start? Why not with your own mind? After all, it is the instrument through which all our thoughts and feelings, impulses and perceptions are translated into actions in teh world. When you stop outward activity for some time and practice being still, right there, in that moment, with that decision to sit, you are already breaking the flow of old karma and creating an entirely new and healthier karma. Herein lies the root of change, the turning point of a life lived.

2007-10-31T12:34:00.000-04:00

I've been worried recently that we are about to declare war with Iran. Everyone tells me that it won't happen because politicians recognize that it would be political suicide and that the army is stretched thin as it is. If we went to Iran, maybe we would have to re-institute the draft. I'm afraid of that too, but I've also been told that that isn't really a possibility because of the notion of "political suicide." Maybe I am totally paranoid and just plan freaking out about current events, but the argument that the draft will not reappear in our life time because politicians don't have enough traction to get it passed the inevitably outraged population has made me wonder about the country's feelings about the draft in the past.

Howard Zinn writes,

On August 1, 1917, the New York herald reported that in New York City ninety of the first hundred draftees claimed exemption. In Minnesota, headlines in the Minneapolis Journal of August 6 and 7 read: "DRAFT OPPOSITION FAST SPREADING IN STATE" and "CONSCRIPTS GIVE FALSE ADDRESSES."...Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia said "there was undoubtedly general and widespread opposition on the part of many thousands...to the enactment of the draft law. Numerous and largely attended mass meetings held in every part of the State proptested against it..." Ultimately, over 330,000 men were classified as draft evaders."

According to this website, the US had a population of 106,021,537 in 1920. This website tells me that there were about 24 million draft cards on record, about 23% of the population in 1918. So let's say about 25% of the population was eligible for the draft in 1920. That would mean about 37,170,738 men could have been drafted. So, around 80% of the population that could be drafted were classified as draft evaders during WWI.

Today, the US population is around 303,256,320 people. Since only men have to register for the draft (and pretending still there's a fifty-fifty split), that means about 151,628,160 people are able to be drafted currently (ignoring age restrictions as I did above). So if the draft were put in place and the US classified the same percentage (6.23%) of the population as draft evaders as it did during WWI, that means that 9,446,434.4 men would be classified as draft evaders. Or, to put it differently, the entire population of New York City (men and women) and then some would be classified as draft evaders.

So imagine a scenario in regards to draft evasion happening today like it did during WWI. War is declared, the draft is invoked, there are enough draft evaders to equal (and go over) the population of New York City. Yet we still go to war.

As for the Vietnam War, Zinn writes,

By mid-1965, 380 prosecutions were begun against men refusing to be inducted; by mid-1968 that figure was up to 3,305. At the end of 1969, there were 33,960 delinquents nationwide.

Zinn goes onto write that anti-war feelings continued to grow in the nation, which eventually (along with other factors) led to US withdraw of troops. But not before the draft was used and not before so many people were killed.

My point is, throughout history there has been resistance to the draft. Politicians know that it is going to be unpopular. But that has not stopped them from using the draft in the past and I think we are being naive if we think that negative public opinion will stop them from using the draft today.

Reproductive Justice

2007-10-25T23:37:00.000-04:00

Over at The Curvature, Cara is discussing the different possibilities for "re-branding" within the pro-choice movement in order to encompass the ideas of reproductive justice.

It reminded me of Loretta Ross, the National Coordinator of SisterSong, who I saw speak in Charlottesville last year during the Festival of the Book. SisterSong is a women of color reproductive justice organization. Here's how they described themselves:

The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective is a network of local, regional and nation grassroots agencies representing five primary ethnic populations/indigenous nations in the United States:
African American
Arab American/Middle Eastern
Asian/Pacific Islander
Latina
Native American/Indigenous

When Ross came to speak in Charlottesville last year one of the topic she touched on was SisterSong's involvement in the 2004 March for Women's Lives. Until they had become involved the march was called "March for Choice," but one of the conditions of SisterSong's involvement, Ross explained, was the name change. I remember feeling disappointed when I heard about the name change, because I thought it was about diluting what was to me, the primary issue, abortion rights.

My feelings at that time epitomize why the name change was necessary. To me, and to many Americans, pro-choice had become synonymous with being pro-choice about abortion (focusing on the right to choose to have or not to have an abortion). By changing the name to "March for Women's Lives" and by using the phrase "reproductive justice" SisterSong hopes to reconnect and recognize the links between abortion rights to other social justice issues and to other reproductive issues.

Reproductive Justice, as defined by Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (an original founding member oranization of SisterSong) is the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, economic, and social well-being of women and girls, and will be achieved when women and girls have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves, our families and our communities in all areas of our lives.

In their extremely interesting Funders Briefing Report from 2005 (seriously, read it; it's not that long and it's great), SisterSong explains that the Reproductive Justice framework "spells out affirmative obligations that the government has to ensure the necessary social support for our decisions." (p. 2)

SisterSong writes,

From the perspective of SisterSong, one of the key problems we collectively face is the isolation of abortion from other social justice issues that concern all communities. Abortion isolated from other social justice/human rights issues neglects issues of economic justice, the environment, criminal justice, immigrants’ rights, militarism, discrimination based on race and sexual orientation, and a host of other concerns directly affecting an individual woman’s decision making process. Moreover, support for abortion rights is even frequently isolated from other reproductive health issues. We believe that the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is directly linked to the conditions in her community and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access. (pg. 3)

Slander, Libel, Oh My!

2007-10-23T19:33:00.000-04:00

Today Gawker did a piece on a blogger who has create her blog in order to publicize the picture of the man she believes gave her herpes. On her blog she also documents that she flyered the neighborhood they live in with a picture of him that says, "I have herpes" across it.

I'm not going to link to the blog for two reasons. First (which will be the substance of this post), I don't want to participate in spreading a rumor and secondly, I'm pretty sure she's mostly doing this because she's blinded by anger and wants attention. (Note to everyone out there [including me], nothing lastingly good ever comes from actions motivated by feelings of anger or wanting revenge.)

Please check out the American Social Health website for information about herpes. The blogger found information that theusual incubation period is about 2 to 20 days, which is how she calculated who (she claims) knowingly infected her. Here are two things that cast doubt on her claim that come from the same website linked above: (1) Although the first reaction usually appears within 2 to 12 days, the symptoms can be so mild that the carrier does not realize that they have herpes until a subsequent outbreak, which can be years later as herpes remains in your system for life. Based on what she's posted on her blog, she cannot be sure that this is her first outbreak and she may have actually contracted herpes years ago. (2) It's estimated that 90% of people who have herpes don't know that they have it. It's likely, therefore, that this guy was not aware that he had herpes.

From a legal standpoint, setting up a blog like this is a ridiculously stupid thing to do. As Gregory A. Abbott, Esq. explains

Defamation consists of the following:

(1) a defamatory statement;
(2) published to third parties; and
(3) which the speaker or publisher knew or should have known was false.

In order for a statement to be defamatory the plaintiff must prove that the statement is damaging to his reputation, but accusing someone of having an STD is defamation per se, meaning the plaintiff is not required to proved damages.

The blogger in this case is not left without legal recourse, however. People have successfully sued others for knowingly transmitting an STD (though it is rare).

I also wonder what is really being criticized in this blogger's posts; the failure to disclose STD status or just having an STD at all. The former is certainly reprehensible. But I often find that just hearing that someone has an STD is enough to get people and their criticisms going. And if you're a sexually active adult, how hypocritical is that? First, chances are high that you have an STD and just don't know. Secondly, if you don't have an STD and you are sexual active, that is a combination of practicing safe sex and luck, but luck is a factor.

The Good Earth and the Happy Body (and the Pleased Checkbook)

2007-10-16T18:38:00.000-04:00

So I'm a day late with this, but I just heard about it this morning on The Bryant Park Project. Yesterday was Blog Action Day, during which bloggers were meant to discuss the environment.

In my favorite posts bloggers wrote about their tips on how to reduce one's impact on the environment, so I thought I would add one of my own, one for the ladies (sorry, fellas).

Instead of using tampons or sanitary napkins (which has got to be the most awful generic name for a product ever), try the Keeper.

The Keeper is designed to catch your menstrual flow rather than absorb it. Its bell shape allows ...[it]...to fit snuggly and comfortably up against your vaginal walls, below but not touching your cervix.

The Keeper is much better for the environment then pads or tampons, which come in cardboard boxes and plastic wraps and are thrown out after use. Besides the positive environmental effects, using the Keeper is cheaper than restocking on pads and tampons each time you have your period. (It cost about $35. Pads and tampons costs about $4, right now, so if you use a pack a month for 30 years you will have spent $1,440 on menstruation products. Even if your using half a pack a month, it's still a lot cheaper to buy a Keeper.) Finally, I like the Keeper because I know what's coming in contact with my body. When I use a pad or a tampon, I'm not sure what chemicals have been used to bleach the product white or to make it super-absorbant.

If I've sold you on it, you might be wondering how it works. First, here is what it looks like:

When I begin my period, I wash the Keeper off with soap and hot water and then I boil it for ten minutes (I've read that three minutes in boiling water is safe, but I like to be careful).

To insert it, I fold it in half once and then again (see below).

Then I get into the same position I would to insert a tampon (if seeing a diagram of a vagina is NSFW don't click on that link) and slide it with my thumb and index finger guiding it in. When I remove my fingers, the Keeper pops open and into place.

I have to empty the Keeper twice in a 24-hour-period, which I generally do in the morning and before I go to bed, dumping the contents into the toilet or down the drain while I shower. I wash the Keeper thoroughly before re-inserting. Sometimes I use a pad at night with the Keeper just in case.

The Keeper has a little knob on the end that sticks out of your vagina while it's in (some people cut off this knob). You can grip this knob while you remove the Keeper. To remove it, I simply insert my finger into my vagina and squeeze the Keeper, breaking it's seal, which allows me to pull it out (it's painless).

When my period is over I wash it and boil it again. I store it in a small cloth bag (which by the way, I wash with the laundry the week I have my period).

Here are some things to consider before buying a Keeper:

If you do not like to put your fingers in your vagina or are worried about getting a tiny (and it really is tiny, I've never spilled it or anything) amount of blood on your fingers, this probably isn't for you.

It is larger than a tampon, so it might be uncomfortable to use if you haven't had vaginal sexual intercourse yet. (Although I do have to say, that I do not feel it at all when I have the Keeper in and I am able to feel tampons.)

If you have to change the Keeper more frequently because your flow is heavier, you should be prepared to change it in a public restroom setting just in case. This might mean bringing some extra water and a little bottle of soap with you, so you can rinse and wash the Keeper in your stall.

I have read that Keepers might increase the chance of getting a UTI, but if you are prone to UTIs you can prevent this by just being extra careful (drinking lots of water, practicing good hygiene, drinking unsweetened cranberry juice, urinating after sexual contact, and never holding your urine in for a long period of time).

I really love my Keeper and I'm happy to answer any questions anyone has about it to the best of my ability.

Edit: If you don't want to try to use the Keeper consider making your own pads. All you need is an old t-shirt, pillowcase, or sheets and a couple safety pins. You can cut them to be any length you want and fold them over to make them any thickness you want. Just rinse them out, wash, and reuse! Even if you just do this at night you'll be cutting back on the amount of trash produced by traditional menstrual products.

Just scan and bag, please!

2007-10-15T14:07:00.000-04:00

Awhile ago I had to buy a pregnancy test from CVS. When I got to the counter and paid the clerk somberly told me that he hoped it turned out whatever way I wanted it to. I know that the guy meant well, but I can't help but wonder if he says the same thing to some guy purchasing cream for his penis. (Not that they sell "cream for penis" at CVS. Do they? I have no idea. But you know what I'm saying anyway.)

I cannot even begin to tell you how intensely invasive the clerk's well-intentioned remark felt to me. Suddenly there was this new individual who had actively alerted me to his knowledge of and his opinion of what was, to me, a deeply private act (after it involved my urine and my hormone levels; I was going to take the test in a bathroom with the door shut, not at a party or in the street). I didn't want his well-wishes; I want him to keep the silent compact between clerk and customer, that the customer's purchases are her private business.

I don't think it's any shocker for me to say that when it comes to reproduction women's private space is being slowly eroded and has been for awhile. In some states pharmacists whose are personally against Emergency Contraceptives (EC) are legally permitted to turn away women seeking the drug. In these cases, the state is saying to the woman, "here is another non-medical and not personally related to you opinion that trumps your decisions regarding your body, contraceptives, and reproduction." The ethics policy of the American Pharmacists Association requires pharmacists who will not provide women with EC to direct them to a pharmacist or pharmacy that will, but EC must be taken within 72 hours to be effective, so time is of the essence. Also, many woman cannot take time off work to drive all across town to different pharmacies that provide EC. In addition, it must be incredibly demoralizing and humiliating to have to face the pharmacist's implicit disapproval.

Maybe that's at least in part what this law is about. Let's call a spade a spade; this law is not about respecting a pharmacist's opinion; it's about preventing women from effectively using EC. If I think I might need EC, but know that I might have to be humiliated in a store (potentially in front of other customers) and then forced to drive across town to another store to get it (where I might be humiliating again...what's to prevent a pharmacist from "mistakenly" sending a woman to another store that "doesn't stock" EC) all within my ever shrinking lunch hour, maybe I will just give up, bury my head in the sand, and "hope for the best."

For an easier way to get EC, please check out Planned Parenthood here.

Well worth the read

2007-10-11T13:27:00.000-04:00

I don't have much to say today.

Please check out Russell Shorto's amazing May, 2006 piece in the New York Times, "Contra-Contraceptives." It's long, but that's because it's packed with really interesting information, so I suggest you read the whole thing. Shorto examines anti-choice groups' stance on contraceptives and makes the case that they are really struggling to make all sex marital and for procreation purposes.

National Coming Out Day

2007-10-10T13:14:00.000-04:00

I didn't get around to posting on Monday, Columbus Day, and I have something I'd like to post about that, but before I do there's something going on tomorrow that I'd like to alert people about.

Tomorrow (Oct 11, 2007) is National Coming Out Day and the twenty year anniversary of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, accompanied by the AIDs Quilt's first display. The AIDs Quilt is a giant memorial to individuals who have AIDs/HIV or have died from it. In addition to being a memorial, the Quilt is also used to raise money for AIDs service organizations.

This year for National Coming Out Day, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is inviting LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) people to make videos about coming out and straight people to make videos about being inspired by others coming out. You can check out their website to watch their introductory video and to get information about how to make a video. Also, please check out their Getting Involved/Take Action tab for some information about the HRC's current advocacy campaigns.

***
On to (or back to) Columbus Day:

Howard Zinn tell us that when Columbus landed in the Bahamas, he was

met by the Arawark Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawark lived in village communes, had developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.
This was to have enormous consequence: it led to Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold."

These were just the first of Columbus' prisoners. According to Zinn, when Columbus realized that there was not as much gold in America as he had originally presumed and that he would have to send some merchandise back home he and his men

went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spanairds and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route."

Zinn goes on to say

My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress...that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."

For some interesting history about the Monacan tribe of Native Americans, who Thomas Jefferson once saw passing through Monticello to visit a burial ground of their ancestors, please check this out.

Buddhist in loooooooooooove

2007-10-09T17:25:00.000-04:00

Today I listened to the 1998 Valentine's Day episode from This American Life. The shows overall theme was about marriages and relationships after that first bloom has fallen. The third act featured poet Donald Hall who read poems from his book "Without" about the death of his wife from leukemia. Listening to his poems and his descriptions of his wife, I ended up tearing up in my office.

His poetry, and the entire episode really, has made me think about the nature of love. I know that the romantic love we think of today is a product of time and place; rising hand and hand with our (relatively) new notions of individualism. At the same time, we still clearly care about what society has to say about love; gay-marriage activists want society to recognize and sanctify their love and homophobes (sorry, I feel strongly about this) want society to deem homosexual love as unacceptable.

In college, I had this amazing revelation after I broke up with my high school boyfriend. Everything I thought I knew about love was wrong. The catalyst for this revelation was my Intro to Buddhism class where we read a Thich Nhat Hahn essay (page 85) that delved into his ideas on love-sickness. According to Thich Nhat Hahn, love-sickness is a kind of love that is all consuming; we are obsessed with the object of our affection to the point where we can no longer function normally. Love is like a drug and we long to possess our lover. (See also, Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.) I recognized this kind of love. I think it is the same kind of love that is idealized and celebrated by romantic comedies, love songs, and almost every show on television.

It took a long time for me to discard this model of love. I felt like I had thrown away the most wonderful thing in my life and I wanted to get it back. But it wasn't the guy; it was just the feeling. I wanted to feel that way again (minus the devastation that followed when it ended) and it didn't matter with who. The worst part was once I had this feeling again the only thing I was concerned about was keeping it which manifested itself in obsession over the idea that the person I was with was going to leave me. I spent so much time with that kind of obsession that I didn't spend anytime getting to know the actual people I supposedly loved.

[You can put this next paragraph in big "In My Opinion" brackets]

Today I have different ideas about love. When I am in love with someone I try to recognize that I have all the responsibilities to them that I do to a friend and also, that they have those same responsibilities towards me; respect, compassion, and interest in who they are. Love, to me, also means a commitment to set aside certain sexual play or expression for one person (whether that be monogamy, which is what I practice, or specific sex acts). This wouldn't be a commitment or a sacrifice if it didn't feel at times like I didn't want to do it. [Edit: For me, it should resemble a "joyful sacrifice." As I said it is hard at times, but it would be equally empty of meaning if this was something I did completely unwillingly.] Finally, love means to me allowing the person to be at their worst (while still expecting them to be kind when they can) and knowing that I can be at my worst with them (while still always trying to be kind when I can). In short love is basically showing up everyday and trying to be my best because I want to make the other person happy, but knowing it's ok if I can't be my best that day (and vice versus). Everything else is just icing on the sweet sweet (but PDA is still not ok--kidding! or am I?) cake.

And now I'm hungry.

Memphis, TN

2007-10-04T11:57:00.000-04:00

There are two albums that my Dad introduced me to in my childhood that I still listen to today, Billy Joel's An Innocent Man and Paul Simon's Graceland. I really got a kick out of sliding around on the kitchen floor in my socks and belting out "I aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmmmmmm an innocent man" when I was a kid.

Although I still love Innocent Man (I just listened to it this morning), it's Graceland I identify more and more with as an adult. As a kid, I loved the "silly" song "You can call me Al," for what I saw as it's elements of pretend ("I can call you Betty and Betty, when you call me you can call me Al"), it's upbeat tempo, and it's confusing, but engaging imagery ("Mister Beer-belly [beer-belly] /Get these mutts away from me/I don't find this stuff amusing anymore). Now, as an adult, I hear that song as being about identity crisis. I like that I can still enjoy all the elements of Graceland that I did as a child and as an adult (with a larger vocabulary) I can find meaning in Simon's songs. (You can listen to You Can Call me Al here.)

What I also didn't know as a child, is that Graceland was caught up in some controversy involving UN resolutions against South African apartheid. It seems that at the time the album was made there was a cultural boycott of South Africa going on. Simon used South African artists on Graceland, but as none of the money from the album went to support the apartheid government and the album featured the work of black South Africans, Simon was cleared of any wrong-doing.

For some interesting reading on the history of apartheid please check this out. (This article is specifically about how computer technology was used during apartheid, but this page gives a brief general history of South African apartheid.)

Fit to print

2007-10-02T12:31:00.000-04:00

I am having one of those days where I am feeling a little helpless. I have a lot of compassion and energy, but I don't really know what to do with it all the time. I do several of the obvious things to help out (donate, volunteer, try to spread the word), but there are some days when I just feel like a hamster on the wheel.

There are several issues going on right now that I have been following. I don't write about some things because I do not feel qualified (yet) to speak about them, but here are some of the things I have been reading about lately:

1. On Feministe, Jill reminds us that the genocide in Dafur is still happening.
2. At Bitch, Ph.D., the doctor fills us in on the protest in Burma.
3. At Majikthise, Lindsey highlights the disturbing report recently released about Blackwater's activities in Iraq.
4. NPR continues its coverage of people in poverty in Iraq.

On a lighter note, I want to post about a couple of comments I have received, because I know not everyone clicks on the comments to see what people have said. Sean Tubbs commented on my post "Moo" to let me know about the Charlottesville Podcasting Network and one of their pieces on local food. I've really been enjoying their "Voice of Poverty" podcasts.

Also John let me know that Better than Television is alive and well in Charlottesville. They are bringing us Head-Roc War Machine this Friday at the Bridge as part of the Columbus Day Symposium.

Built for Gender-Neutral Play doesn't have the same ring

2007-10-01T22:16:00.000-04:00

I was pedaling along on my exercise bike tonight, watching TV when a commercial came on for Tonka Toy Truck. Has anyone else seen this commercial? The one with the motto "Built for Boyhood"?

The commercial begins with what has got to be the earliest example of well-intentioned-man-is-clueless-about-the-house style of advertising, when a toddler tracks dirt all over the floor in order to bring his mom flowers that he's pulled up from the roots.* The commercial then informs us that boys are "just different" and that's why they need the Tonka Toy Truck, which allows boys to do things that are natural to them like selecting shapes...and walking...I suppose the part that the toy makers consider truly gendered (let's hope they don't consider picking out the square to be a naturally male talent), is the last function of the toy, that a toddler can ride around on it and it's shaped like a truck. Didn't you know? Girls only like to ride around on ponies. The commercial then ends with the cheery (yet ominous to me) note, "Let's face it, boys are just different" (so stop trying to efface harmful gender roles and stereotypes, you dirty feminist bitches?).

I guess what really gets to me about this commercial is the last line, the just face it one, and the motto, Built for Boyhood. Both suggest that there are rock solid rules and behaviors to being a boy (and implicitly to being a girl). I feel like the motto has it spot on, but not in the way that the manufactures want. Yes, this is how we build boyhood (or girlhood for that matter), by giving children repeated messages about what is and isn't appropriate for them based on their gender.

I'm not saying that there aren't girls out there who just like to ride ponies or that there aren't boys out there who just really love trucks. Hell, the majority of boys and girls might fit into these stereotypes. I just think that it's much more complicated than that. For example, when I was a kid I loved playing house, but I also loved pretending to be an explorer in Anartica. One year, I desperately wanted to go as a ballerina for Halloween, but then when the actual night was too cold for my costume, my mom made me go as Zorro...and guess what, I loved being Zorro way more than I liked being a ballerina. I had a plastic kitchen, but I also had a creek that I loved to muck around in with my brother. And I know I'm not the only one out there whose childhood cannot be neatly categorized. If it can't be categorized so neatly, then maybe Tonka should "just face it," people are born male and female (and sometimes intersexed), but they are made into little boys and girls.

The moment that you accept that at least some aspects of gender are socialized, the next question becomes, but why do we socialize gender this way? What purpose does it serve? Whom does it benefit? I think there are many different answers to these question and which answers that we chose to see might be as personal and complex as childhood play.

*For other examples of these kinds of commercials please see any commercial where "Dad" does laundry, dishes, or any kind of childcare. I just love how we are still asking if a woman is capable of being president while at the same time we portray men as not being capable of doing a load of whites. Here's an idea, maybe commercial men can't do housework because that helps reinforce the stereotype that woman are naturally better at it. And maybe real life men want that stereotype reinforced because doing housework is a boring thankless job and as long they are considered bumbling fools within the household they can have plenty of time to do all the things that are "natural" to men, like holding political office, making laws, and deciding who gets what money.)

For all you Lovers out there

2007-09-29T23:22:00.000-04:00

Today I went to the Charlottesville Vegetarian Festival. While there I stopped by the Food Not Bombs' table and picked up some of their materials and signed up to be called to help out. The Charlottesville Food Not Bombs' group serves vegetarian/vegan meals to people in need of food at Tonlser Park at 1pm on Sundays. I have wanted to get involved with Food Not Bombs (this one will take you to their home page) for awhile. (I remember trying to during the summertimes in Pittsburgh to find a Pittsburgh chapter, but I must not have tried very hard [or they must have recently got things up and running] because a quick search took me to this page.) Anyway, check out the Food Not Bombs links above; the group has had some interesting history.

(Thinking about Food Not Bombs today lead me to search for mention of "Better than Television," in Charlottesville. I don't think they exist anymore. Does anyone know? Anyway, that lead me to Slingshot "a quarterly, independent, radical, newspaper published in the East Bay since 1988 by the Slingshot Collective." [And I take issue with the first person's statement that cervical cancer is easily cured if detected early--what about people who do not have access to annual cervical exams?])

Finally, on two totally unrelated notes, I am in the midst of a cold and had my first nose bleed ever today and I'm reading "Remembrance of Things Past" and thought I would share this passage,

At this time of life one has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before our passive and astonished hearts. We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we remember and recreate the rest. Since we know its song, which is engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains---filled with the admiration which beauty inspires---for us to remember what follows.

I can't think, the TV is on

2007-09-27T09:03:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been feeling way too wired into television and the internet. For me, it's akin to feeling full or even like a glutton after a huge (unhealthy) meal. I have several websites that I check multiple times a day throughout the day everyday. And now, with the fall television season starting up again, I've been spending a lot of time letting my eyes glaze over as I practically slump over on the couch in front of the t.v. I am one of those people who cannot watch tv and carrying on a conversation at the same time; I get completely engrossed in whatever is on. I guess it's all those bright and shiny colors flying by me at a fast rate.

I watched Heroes last season and I'm going to continue to watch it again.

Spoiler alert **if you haven't watched the first season of Heroes and want to stop reading now, even though I'm only going to talk about it in a general way**

Last season focused good battling the evil of "progress at any cost." The Company was willing to sacrifice the lives of most of the people in New York City in order to unite the country under Nathan, ushering in a new era of progress and prosperity. Because the cost of the Company's idea of progress was millions (thousands?) of deaths through a nuclear explosion (in New York City), I initially thought that the show was trying to say something about terrorism. But I think that there is something else there, namely I think the Company represented the ideas of Social Darwinism*, (the concept that the rule "survival of the fittest" applies in economic and social situations).

On an individual level it's easy to see that, Social Darwinism is ridiculous; it requires us to consider a man who had the happy accident to be born into a wealthy family morally superior or more deserving of his wealth than a man who was born into poverty (it also requires us to think that the man born into poverty deserves to be poor). But I think that Social Darwinism lives on in some of our business practices. More and more companies are turning to global outsourcing as a means of cutting expenses. It is cheaper to make products in foreign countries that have less strict (or no) environmental or labor regulations. Those cheap costs of production are then (somewhat) reflected in lower costs to the United States consumer.

How can it be fair to pay someone with the same skill sets as an American worker less money just because they are born in a foreign country? I know there are complicated reasons why less money is seen as acceptable in these cases, but is one of those reasons based on a Social Darwinian idea? That those who work hard enough, no matter where they start, can and will achieve wealth and therefore, people who are poor are poor because they did not work hard enough (and do not deserve equal treatment)?

If progress in this case is cheaper goods for American consumers then the cost might be companies must engage in unethical business practices. Are we asking ourselves if progress is worth the cost? I know they are in academia, but is this question being asked by business leaders? Is it being asked by consumers? How can consumers even ask if progress is worth the cost if they don't even know what the ethical costs are? Is it the consumers job to stay informed about global business practices of the companies they use? Or is it the government's job to prevent unethical global business practices to begin with?

I honestly do not know if global outsourcing has a net positive or negative effect on foreign countries. I have heard arguments from Americans on both sides. I would like to hear from the foreign workers as well, because I don't want to be Whitey McPriviledged spouting my opinion about what's best for other countries. I do think, however, there are clearly some costs to global outsourcing.

I'm leaving this entry the scattered mess it is. I don't really know enough about this stuff to be writing about it, and clearly I have more questions then answer. If anyone has any good books/links in regards to globalization that they'd like to share, please do.

*A note about Social Darwinism: the theory of evolution defines success by a species ability to adapt to a given situation; the ability to adapt is measured first by the number of offspring a species successfully raises to reproduce and secondly, the number of new species that spring from the original species. Social Darwinism, on the other hand, measures success in terms of wealth acquired and the idea of "progress and civilization." One of the reasons that Darwin's theory of evolution was so threatening at the time he wrote his books is because there is no "progress" in Darwin's evolution; there is no end goal, there is only randomness. In college I took a class called Origins of Contemporary Thought where Allan Megill argued that this was Darwin's real challenge to religion; a world that works without an end goal, without progressing, implies that there is no God.

Moo

2007-09-25T12:15:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning I heard this segment on NPR's Morning Edition about the rising cost of dairy products. As the segment explains, although milk is generally a local product, the price of skim-milk powder, which is used in many products, has risen. Dairy producers may focus on making skim-milk powder, increasing the shortage in milk production (which is already increasing for many reasons as the NPR segment explains). As supplies go down, prices go up.

After hearing this piece, I realized I had no idea where Harris Teeter, one of the local grocery stores, gets its milk. A quick google search didn't get me any closer to finding out, but I did run into Majesty Farm's Cow and Goat Share Program. As the link explains, the cow and goat share program allows people to buy "stock" in a goat or cow; the price of the stock includes the farm boarding and feeding your animal, regular vet visits, daily milking, and 1 gallon of milk a week per "cow share" or 3 quarts for a "goat share." The program allows people to get around laws prohibiting buying and selling raw milk (it's not illegal to own/drink milk from animal you own). It's too expensive for me, but I thought it was an interesting idea worth sharing.

Also, if you're like me, you may have run out of This American Life episodes to listen to. If so, I highly recommend Radio Lab.

On their backs

2007-09-24T19:06:00.001-04:00

I worked nine hours today, which is about average for me. For some reason today felt particularly long, but then, while I was waiting for the trolley this evening I was reading "A People's History of the United States" and I came across this,

1835, twenty mills went on strike to reduce the workday from thirteen and a half hours to eleven hours, to get cash wages instead of company scrip, and to end fines for lateness. Fifteen hundred children and parents went out on strike, and it lasted six weeks. Strikebreakers were brought in, and some workers went back to work, but the strikers did win a twelve-hour day and nine hours on Saturday.

And then later,

A three-month strike of 100,00 workers in New York won the eight-hour day, and at a victory celebration in June 1872, 150,000 workers paraded through the city.

So that nine-hour day that wore me down today? That was bought on the backs of strikers, who sometimes gave their lives when militia were brought in to break up strikes in the 1870s. All of the things I enjoy in my working life; a lunch break, a paycheck instead of coupons at the company store, health insurance, workman's comp should I be injured on the job, sanitary and physically comfortable working conditions, were fought for at the ballet box and on the streets.

Zinn also writes,

...[After the Civil War] political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expensive of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression

I think much the same is going on today, a wealthy few is exploiting many, with separate levels of oppression being used "to stabilize the pyramid of wealth," but I also think it's important to recognize the backs we are standing on, as we continue to push against the classist, racist, sexist, and xenophobic forces that are expressed in our country's working life.