Whitewashed

Behavior

Erased: The unmarked graves of Sapelo Island’s slaves

For two centuries Sapelo Island, Georgia has been home to a vibrant community of farmers with their own dialect, mythology and traditions.

Should you choose to visit this island, or the several websites inviting tourists to do so, you will learn almost nothing about any of them.

Sapelo’s most fascinating resident was Bilali Muhammad (aka Bu Allah/Bilali Bell).  Nearly 200 years ago, Bilali was kidnapped from Futa Jallon in West Africa and brought to the West Indies where he was purchased by a Georgia plantation owner named Thomas Spalding.  Accounts differ as to how many children he had and how many arrived with him, but the story I grew up with is that he convinced Spalding to purchase his 7 daughters as well.

The ability to negotiate from the auction block is just the tip of the iceberg of Bilali’s legend.  It was said that such was his charisma that white men traveled to the island to hear him speak.  A devout Muslim, Bilali attempted to recreate a textbook on Muslim law, drafting a manuscript in Arabic which is now housed in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia.

When slavery ended, while Jim Crow pressed former slaves and their descendants throughout the south into arrangements barely distinguishable from slavery, Bilali’s descendants pooled their meager resources and purchased the land they’d worked as slaves.  Every generation would begin life with a small parcel cut from the family plot to work as their own.

This rich history is reduced to a handful of lines about tenant farmers known only for the beautiful sweetgrass baskets they weaved.  Even this small acknowledgment is overshadowed by materials that gush over the efforts of a handful of white men who had the ingenuity to build their fortunes through the degradation and manipulation of others.  From Spalding the slave owner, to Howard Coffin and RJ Reynolds, both of whom attempted to cheat an island full of semi-educated second-class citizens out of the property their forebears worked so hard for.

When I used to visit the island as a little girl, it seemed as though as I was entering another world, surrounded by older cousins and aunts and uncles whose Gullah dialect I could barely decipher, overwhelmed by breathtaking views that could be enjoyed for hours without encountering another soul.

It’s jarring to go now and see the island full of strangers.  But what’s worse is seeing the people who created a unique and beautiful way of life written out of its history.

The Right to Be Curious

Natural

Step Right Up…

If ever you’ve found yourself overcome by the urge to touch a black woman’s head, Antonia Opiah, founder of black haircare aggregation site un’ruly.com, is giving you your chance.

On June 8th from 2pm to 4pm, black women with various hair textures will stand in Union Square and invite curious on-lookers to cop a feel (above the neck only).

As with everything else, there is a wide diversity of opinion among black women about people who ask to feel our hair.  Some receive it as a compliment and are flattered, others see it as yet another way of coopting black women’s bodies treating them as though they are public property.  Pretty much all agree that just walking up to a stranger and sticking your hand in her head is just bad manners.

My reaction varies with the asker—some people approach with an innocent fascination that just comes from lack of exposure.  Others seem to be adding to their mental list of Things that Make You People Gross, and are dealt with accordingly.

But in a country as large, diverse, and segregated as ours, we are all bound to have some questions when we finally do encounter those whose features and customs are different.  The line between a natural, respectful curiosity and treating fellow human beings like attractions at a freak show is not always easy to walk, something worth remembering for those of us on the receiving end of sometimes unwelcome attention.

For those on the giving end, Opiah offers advice on the “right way to be curious”  which applies well beyond the texture-philes fascinated by black hair:

Ask the question. But ask it only when you’ve earned the right to do so. Ask it when you’ve taken the time to Google some of the basic questions about black hair. Ask this five-word request when you understand that it carries the weight of hundreds of years of being told our hair is unacceptable and now being told that it’s a curiosity. Ask it when you understand that enlightening you about our hair is a responsibility no one individual wants to bare. Ask it when you’ve actually developed a relationship with a person to the point where you don’t have to doubt their response to the request. Because if you’re actually friends with a person, ‘Can I touch your hair?’ is a question you don’t have to ask because you know that you can either just do it or know to steer clear. And if you don’t know any black people that well enough, maybe you should be asking yourself a different question.

 

The Next Doctor

If only they could afford her...

If only they could afford her…

There have been several impassioned pleas, both in posts and comments, for the 12th Doctor to be female.  That combined with the fact that the inevitable backlash has been far less vitriolic than I expected has led me to foolishly nurse the hope that this might actually happen.

There’s certainly nothing in the logic of the show that prevents a female Doctor.  Over the last 50 years, the writers have reinvented, rebooted, reimagined and retooled various aspects of this universe enough times that a little thing like gender reassignment is easy enough to explain.  In fact there’s really no explanation necessary.  There have been plenty of hints that in the distant future, in galaxies very far away, gender is something fluid and of limited relevance.  The only question is what the writers can take on and what the fans will accept.

Those arguing against a female Doctor have tried to make the case that a change in gender would disrupt the show in a way that changes in age, race,  and disposition do not.  In every comment thread, against every suggestion of a brilliant actress who could pull it off, or a new theme that writers might explore as a result of the change, detractors insist that this is just too different.  There is something about femaleness and Doctorness that is incompatible.  But they can’t seem to articulate why that would be so.

I don’t think (most) of those arguing against a female Doctor are doing so out of a disdain for strong female leads or that they wouldn’t happily watch a spin-off starring a badass Time Lady so long as the Doctor were left untouched.

But I also don’t buy the idea that a female Doctor would necessarily be so unrecognizable as to destroy (or even fundamentally alter) the show. Every regeneration requires a balancing act between the development of a distinctive Doctor and continuity with all that came before.  Doctor Who has always forced fans to say goodbye to old, beloved characters and reacquaint themselves with someone new and different.  This capacity for reinvention is one of the things that’s allowed the show to not only survive but build an ever-growing fan base, including those who might never have been interested in the 1st Doctor or the 6th or the 11th.  A female Doctor is a continuation of this tradition of expansion and evolution, not a deviation from it.

And, his recent romantic dalliances notwithstanding, gender is easily the least interesting thing about the Doctor.  He can and has changed in ways much more jolting:  a female Doctor in the mold of River Song feels much closer to the Tenant/Smith incarnations than what I imagine Idris Elba’s Doctor would be (or, for that matter, what Eccleston’s Doctor was).

I think, rather than a defense of some fundamental intangible of the show or an aversion to a strong female character, the resistance to a female Doctor stems from an inability to imagine feeling for a woman what these fans have come to feel for the Doctor.  Whether they see him as an idealized version of themselves; a crush; a father figure; an older brother; a brilliant professor; or something else, there is some gendered space the Doctor has taken up in their lives that cannot be occupied by a woman.   At least, they can’t imagine a woman occupying that space.

And that is precisely what makes a female Doctor such an interesting prospect to me.  Because the writers can (and should) write her in precisely the same way they would write a male Doctor–the brilliant, mad adventurer with a terrifying temper and sentimental hearts, savior and scolder of humanity–while exploring the differences in how that character is received in different times and places, all because of a few minor cosmetic tweaks.

This is not, as some have argued, a pander to political correctness, or the sacrifice of the show’s integrity on the altar of feminism.  It is a rich and promising avenue for a character whose mission has always been to expand our sense of what’s possible.  If we’ve learned nothing else from witnessing the Doctor’s adventures all these years, it should be that the universe is far too expansive a place to be hemmed in by the petty hangups of 21st Century humanity.

The Crash

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My favorite scene from Sunday’s Mad Men is Don’s exchange with Gleason’s daughter.   Given the surreal quality of the show, when she tells him that the question he’s thinking is “Does anyone love me?”, you’re almost ready to believe that she really is reading his mind.  Same for when she listens for his heart and tells him, “it’s broken.”  Of course, it turns out she’s just a spacey hippie, spewing facile psycho-babble (“that’s everyone’s question”) and disappointed that the stethoscope she found doesn’t work.

I love this scene because it both hints at the thing that drives Draper’s mania throughout the episode, and demonstrates what a shallow, silly thing this is to strive for.  The fortune teller that, surprise!, really can tell you what you need to know is just the sort of  film cliché Draper seems to have been chasing all his life.

His plan to win back Sylvia includes everything but him running through the rain—she won’t want to listen at first, but he’ll come up with the one line that will stop her from closing the door.  As the music swells, she falls into his arms…

In his search for the inspiration to turn his most recent sexual relationship into an idealized trope, he reaches for the memory of his first sexual experience:  The prostitute turned surrogate mother turned sexual predator.  He’s nearly managed to erase that ugly scene with an ad for oatmeal, the predatory prostitute replaced with a chaste doppelganger who “knows what he needs.”

Draper’s first, last, and every relationship in between has been one thing in reality and something different in his mind.  He endures until the dissonance between the two becomes so great that he checks out—he doesn’t leave, he just checks out.

And by the end, as it becomes more and more apparent that Draper’s charm and talent are fading, that they will not be able to shield him from the consequences of his actions for much longer, he announces that he’s checking out of the firm as well. Chevy, not to mention the merger,   is yet another relationship that started out as something warm and inviting and transformed into something painful and beyond his control. 

*Side note:  Anyone else notice that the last time we saw Roger Sterling, the guy who had the heart attack a few years ago, he was walking into an office to be shot up with amphetamines?

The Fall of the Eleventh

The-Name-of-the-Doctor

Steven Moffat’s reign as show-runner for Doctor Who has been a controversial one, creating hardened factions of supporters and detractors.  I’ve mostly been in the former group, defending the dramatic changes in both the mythology surrounding the Doctor and that character’s relationship to the universe in general and humanity in particular.

The greatest stories about The Future and/or time and space focus on the consequences of these larger than life ideas for the finite, short-sighted and morally ambivalent mortals forced to grapple with them.  Where, in the Davies era, the Doctor generally served as a demi-god saving us from our worst instincts, Moffat’s Doctor seems to spend more time fighting his own, forcing us to see him as a flawed, powerful man rather than a repository for our aspirations and ideals.  While this changes our relationship with the Doctor, it doesn’t necessarily make him any less interesting or compelling.

At least, that’s what I thought until this past season and I vainly hoped to be redeemed in last night’s finale.

The multiple-season story of how the Silence pursue the Doctor in order to save the universe from him had some great possibilities.  The view of the Doctor as a hero whose excesses have jeopardized the universe was an interesting one.  The idea that the Doctor had to be killed in order to prevent the undoing of a timeline in which he repeatedly saved the universe is even better.  Moffat flirted with both and chose neither, instead allowing the questions of the last three years to receive a set of stunted, uninteresting answers.

It is either a testament to Moffat’s cleverness or to my own love of puzzles that I’m still curious about how all this shakes out. The thing is, my curiosity can easily be satisfied by a post-season perusal of Wikipedia. There has to be something to keep me interested on the way to the answers.

That something should be the characters themselves, but the Doctor’s companions have come to feel more like cultists than adventurers, blindly following the Doctor and more interested in exploring and preserving his mysteries than those of the universe.  Compare Clara’s decision to jump into the Doctor’s timeline with Amy’s goodbye as the Doctor straps himself into the Pandorica at the end of season 5. In the latter, the stakes are high both for the universe and for the Doctor’s companions and you manage to feel the weight of both while never doubting which takes precedence.

This balance is echoed in Vastra’s recognition of what the Doctor’s undoing means to the universe. Only later does she realize that it is not only star systems and civilizations that are being wiped out, but also the Doctor’s greatest contributions to her own life, her wife Jenny and comrade Strax.

But while Vastra mourns the loss of love, friendship and entire worlds, Clara sacrifices herself not to save the universe, but to save the Doctor (and obey the imperatives of time travel:  “you’ve already seen me do this”).

This is especially problematic because the show has spent more time convincing us to figure Clara out than to care about what happens to her.  Clara Oswald is the platonic ideal of Moffat’s woman problem: a clever, impetuous wit machine with two dimensions and no center. Amy started off this way but developed into something more by the end of her first season. With Clara, the writers seem to have decided that being the Impossible Girl was a sufficient replacement for a personality.

Consequently, instead of feeling like the sacrifice of a noble, beloved character for something greater than herself, Clara jumping into the “time winds” feels more like a sad but uninteresting story about self-absorbed strangers.

It has been suggested that the moment The Silence were trying to prevent hasn’t happened yet, and maybe not (I actually think probably not—there are hints that future Doctors turn into something twisted and evil and that something may have been revealed in the final scene of last night’s finale). But the twists and turns of the last year indicate that, whatever may happen in the 50th anniversary special; whatever brilliant complications await in the Christmas special and series 8, Moffat is more interested in clever puzzles than either big ideas or characters that amount to something more than a Rubik’s cube.

 

Black Mythology

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A black family portrait

If anything good has come from Jason Richwine’s musings on race and IQ, it is the series of smart posts on the folly both of treating intelligence as a measurable “thing in the head” and of treating race as something more than a social construct.  The quote from John Stuart Mill cited in Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man applies well to both:

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own, and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something particularly abstruse and mysterious.

The idea of race as a cultural fiction rather than an obvious truth is a difficult one for many of us to absorb, and difficult for reasons that are not necessarily amenable to smart arguments rooted in historical facts about the construction of race.

The list of reasons I’ve been given for not being “really black” has been a long and odd one, ranging from my crush on Steve Tyler to having a passport by the age of 13.  What is even odder is having someone ignore virtually everything they know about me in order to reach the conclusion that I grew up somewhere dangerous and poor or doing an impression of me that is just this side of Shanehneh.

In both cases, when faced with a conflict between “black” as an abstract concept and the fact of an actual black person the response is to favor the concept, either by carving out an arbitrary exception or denying the existence of the person in front of you.

After a lifetime of experiences like this, it becomes clear that for a lot of people “black” has nothing to do with genetics or ancestry or anything we might have a reasonable argument about.  It is a superstitious belief in a cursed people.  This doesn’t just apply to racists looking to exclude, but to liberals basking in self-righteousness and blacks who have internalized the idea that one cursed drop can destroy a gene pool.

Even those who have embraced “black is beautiful” as a rallying cry are playing the same warped game, reducing a diverse and complex set of histories to a set of limited archetypes.

If black means anything at all, it is a rough descriptor of a large and diverse population with roots in Africa, Europe and the Americas.  It’s a term that is barely large enough to contain the set of histories assigned to it and far too small to constrain the futures of the peoples it’s meant to describe.

Draper Unmasked

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It looks like I’m the only one who suddenly finds Don Draper more interesting this season.  Perhaps because Mad Men was a show I watched all at once after years of hearing people rave about it (I caught up just in time to watch last season in real time), I became bored with Draper’s too-cool-for-school-philanderer thing by around season 3.  Apart from wincing a little at the thought that Megan might redeem him, I all but ignored his scenes and focused on hating Pete, loving Peggy and feeling protective of Joan.

But, for all the complaints that Draper is the character that cannot change, something clicked between that final scene in last season’s finale and this season’s opener in which Draper seems to go days without uttering a single word to his wife.

In the first few seasons, the transformation of Dick Whitman into Don Draper was not nearly as interesting or disturbing as the transformation that took place on the commuter rail each evening.  Taking over Don Draper’s identity required an odd mixture of fearlessness and cowardice, but lying daily about his devotion to his wife, his children, and anything like a set of moral values required something more frightening.  Strangely to Pete Campbell’s credit, he is unable to move between his roles as city philanderer and suburban family man the way Draper could.  Emily Nussbaum tweeted that Draper’s background feels like that of a serial killer, and his ability to shut emotions on and off at will, the ability that Campbell lacks, indicates she may not be that far off the mark.

What has changed  in the current season is his desire to believe otherwise.  The Draper of earlier seasons seemed to be trying to convince himself that he was perhaps flawed but basically a good guy.  That Draper was capable of the occasional tender gesture at his wife–consoling her as she lost both parents, spending a romantic weekend in the city–while this one receives the news of his wife’s miscarriage like the confession of an impulsive shopping spree.

No longer needing to justify himself to himself, he does little to justify himself to others.  Faced with his latest mistress’ discomfort with the idea of sitting across the table from the innocent spouses they are both betraying, the old Draper would have held forth with some pseudo-philosophy about how we all lie, to ourselves and each other, and what does it really matter when all is said and done?    This Draper dismisses her concerns with a cruelly indifferent, “They are both good company.”

Draper’s sudden refusal to bullshit is also beginning to affect his work as he perhaps reveals too much in an ad depicting a business man stepping off a plane and disappearing into the ocean.  When clients protest, he is as likely to bark at their lack of vision as he is to attempt to manipulate them into submission.

This is Draper at his most honest and, consequently, his most dangerous, resulting in a kind of slow burn suspense that had been lacking from this character for ages.

 

Southern Pride

Street Musicians in Maynardville, TN

Street Musicians in Maynardville, TN 1935 (Ben Shahn)

 

First of all, if you’re not reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on a regular basis, you should be.  Only Coates could get me to pay attention to a country music song featuring an aged MC who was middling in his prime.  Coates’ post on the Accidental Racist silliness nicely sums up what’s wrong with the project, however well-intended the participants may have been.

But I want to focus on a larger point, which Coates makes beautifully:

Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King’s birthday, to celebrate a Southerner’s contribution to the world of democracy. He could rock a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner’s Light In August, and celebrate the South’s immense contribution to American literature. He could preach about the contributions of unknown Southern soldiers like Andrew Jackson Smith. He could tell the world about the original Cassius Clay. He could insist that Tennessee raise a statue to Ida B. Wells.

Those who attempt to recast the Confederate flag as a symbol of pride often speak as though without it there would be nothing for southerners to be proud of.  As Coates points out, for all the horrors of its history, there are also rich cultural traditions in art, music and literature, not to mention the brave southerners, black and white, who stood against injustice.

To celebrate the Confederate flag is to devalue those traditions in order to lionize people who chose to commit treason in devotion to the systematic torture and oppression of other southerners.  This isn’t a choice made by people desperately seeking something, anything, to make themselves proud.  It is a pathological yearning for white supremacy and the people willing to kill to defend it.

Regaining Control

AP Photo/The Plain Dealer, Lisa DeJong

One of the many disturbing responses to the rape case in Steubenville, Ohio has been the many young (and not so young) women who have dismissed the victim in the coarsest misogynist terms. Disturbing, but not surprising as we have been telling generation after generation, not just in football towns and certainly not just in the United States, that wearing too little or drinking too much transforms a woman into something sub-human, rendering consent irrelevant.

But young people are not passive vessels simply taking in and regurgitating the messages of the surrounding society. The messages that stick do so for a reason. It’s easy to see why the idea that rape is the result of the inappropriate behavior of loose women might appeal to boys and young men (though it is predicated on the idea that most men are violent sociopaths driven to attack at the sight of cleavage). But it’s also important to recognize why young women might cling to this narrative.

Years ago I volunteered for a rape crisis line, answering calls from survivors of rape and incest. One day while I was on-call waiting for clients to be forwarded to my home phone, a few friends stopped by for a visit. As we sat and chatted, I explained what I was doing and that at any moment I might have to leave the room to take a call.  This speech often led to a discussion of the purpose and function of the hotline; resources available or not available to survivors; and the ways in which a person’s life can be forever changed by an assault.

The response I was not prepared for was the one I received on this particular day:  “So, most of the women who call you, it happened because they were doing something they weren’t supposed to do, right?”

Now, part of being on-call is of course keeping your head clear so that you are present and available for any clients. The last thing I wanted was to find myself in a heated argument about rape culture just as my phone started to ring.  So I offered only brief but strong one-line answers:  “The only person ever responsible for a rape is the rapist.”  And tried to move on.

But my visitor was persistent.  She continued making similar statements and demanding agreement until finally she said something that made her motivation clear:  “I know that when it happened to me…”  With this I perked up and in the strongest possible terms I told her that there was nothing that she did or could have done that would give anyone the right to hurt her.

And it was immediately clear that this was not the response she wanted from me.  What she wanted was confirmation that she had not been raped, that nothing that terrible had ever happened to her.  She wanted to replace that story with the story of an impetuous young girl who had a crazy night out once a long time ago.

I have been thinking of her while reading some of the more incendiary responses from young women to the case in Steubenville.  It’s easy to become enraged seeing the girls and young women dismissing Jane Doe with misogynist epithets.  But then I remember this conversation from years ago, and I can see that they are terrified young women trying to change the story.  They recognize themselves and their friends in the kids in Steubenville.  The story they are trying to avoid is one in which any one of them could be a victim attacked by people she thought she could trust and then ostracized by those who should be most eager to offer her comfort.  Like that young woman years ago, they are trying to wrest control back from attackers, actual and potential, by imagining that being attacked is a choice made by an irresponsible victim, one that can be easily avoided.

 

Our Kids

Children_BBall_Court

Consuelo, Dominican Republic

 

For the last couple of months I have been consumed with raising funds for a literacy program in the Dominican Republic.  The Consuelo Literacy Project is an effort to expand and modernize Community Connection International’s program while introducing a computer literacy component.  (Click here to learn more and, of course, donate!)

The hardest part of fundraising, at least for me, is getting used to hearing people tell you no.  Asking for contributions is no different from sales—it’s a numbers game that requires you to drown in no before you get to that first yes.  When the product or the cause is one you believe in, every no feels like a repudiation of some part of you as a person.

So be it.  The yeses are more than worth the noes and the end result is more than worth the effort.

Still, there is one response that I have heard from several people, a response that many others were probably just too polite to say out loud, that has been especially difficult to hear:   “What about our kids?”

The specific meaning of “our kids” varies with the speaker.  Sometimes it refers to location—kids in this neighborhood, this city, this state, this country.  Other times it refers to ethnicity or race or descent.

But its larger meaning is always the same.  It is a crude tribalism that insists that there are some children that matter and others that do not, that an 8-year-old in the Bronx has greater value than an 8-year-old in Bangladesh.

Of course, no one has infinite resources.  We all have to make our own choices about whether and where to offer what we have to whom we wish.  My policy is to give money abroad and time at home. The difference in the effect of a dollar in the world’s most impoverished countries and a dollar in the United States is enormous. And an hour spent mentoring or providing needed services here in the States is vastly more valuable than any check I could afford to write.

I don’t fault anyone for making that choice differently than I do, but I do fault them for making the choice on such shaky grounds.

And, if you are not repulsed by the idea of valuing some children above others, there are practical reasons for abandoning this tribalism. Neither humanity’s problems nor its triumphs have ever remained within man-made borders for long. Our challenges are much too big and our world much too small for us to have the luxury of throwing anyone away.

That’s my long answer to the question, “What about our kids?”  Here’s a shorter one:  “Our kids” are going to need all the help they can get.

The Legend of Django

Django-Unchained-2

[Chock full of spoilers]

There’s an odd inaccuracy in several reviews of Django Unchained.  In summarizing the plot, reviewers write that the deal German dentist turned bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) offers Django (Jaimie Foxx) is that the doctor will help Django find and free his wife, in exchange for help identifying the Brittle brothers, three fugitives on the run.  But this isn’t actually the deal the two strike.  In fact, Schultz barely offers Django a deal at all.  Shortly after purchasing him, Schultz tells Django that, despite his hatred of slavery, he is willing to use it to his advantage in this case, though he would prefer that Django cooperate with him voluntarily.  He tells Django that he will give him $75 ($25 for each Brittle brother), a horse, and his freedom.  Django has no reason to refuse this offer, but Schultz has made it clear that refusal is not really an option anyway.  It isn’t until later, when Schultz asks Django what he will do with his freedom, that Schultz even discovers that Django has a wife.  Schultz responds with disbelief, “Slaves believe in marriage?”

Still, Schultz hasn’t committed to anything beyond supplying Django with the means—freedom, money, and a bit of target practice—to free his wife.  Only when Schultz tells Django the story of his wife’s namesake, Broomhilda (played by the stunning but virtually silent Kerry Washington), does the relationship between the two men change.

Schultz begins telling the story in the tone of someone who lost interest in the characters and their trials and triumphs long ago.  But as he continues, he sees Django react as someone hearing it for the first time—the woman trapped on the mountain by a tyrannical, powerful villain, the hero who loves her enough to face the impossible to save her—and the characters receive new life as they are transformed from German clichés into flesh and blood people living in times of real life monsters.  The solitary and jaded Schultz, whose hatred of slavery previously extended right up until the point at which he found it useful, is inspired by the plight of a slave whom he has just now come to see as a man.

Of course, Django is himself an archetype, the wronged man come to wreak vengeance on his enemies with a quick draw and a witty line.  Like Schultz, we are invited to find the humanity of actual human beings through the telling of a story of archetypes.  The portrayal of a slave as a John Wayne-style gunslinger removes him from history, rooted in a particular context (not just that of slavery but of the entire history of race relations in the United States up to the present day) and remakes him into a quintessentially American representation of heroism.

And yet, despite self-conscious wallowing in the archetypes of both the spaghetti western and the blaxploitation flick, the black characters of Django feel more varied and more nuanced than any portrayal of slaves I’ve ever seen in a large budget film.  The system of slavery treated black people as a mass of undifferentiated beasts of burden, and film depictions rarely do much better, offering up a collection of noble victims and desperate uncle toms.  By contrast, the slaves in Django make choices, each developing a unique response to the horrors of the system they are trapped in, a combination of protected spheres of individuality and surrender.  That range is best showcased in the brutal mandingo fight scene.  As plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo Dicaprio) cheers his fighter on with a disturbingly matter of fact ruthlessness, everyone in the room reacts—the bartender watches the fight with a mixture of compassion and disgust; Candie’s black mistress, Sheba, seems gratified by the distinction preserved between her and the bloody beasts writhing on the floor; the victorious fighter grips at what’s left of his humanity even as his own sense of self-preservation requires him to tear another human being to shreds.

Even Samuel L. Jackson’s villainous old house slave Steven is more than meets the eye.  He has carved out an identity for himself as the indispensable right hand man of his master, Candie.  Like Sheba, he has sought to remove himself from the lowest indignities suffered by slaves, recasting himself as a confidant and co-conspirator and reimagining himself as something distinct and unrelated to the unfortunate beasts left bloodied and broken in the muck of slavery.  He is not a pathetic uncle tom, but the clear-eyed, intelligent villain who drives most of the action.

The film also deals surprisingly well with the ways in which slavery and class privilege interact.  When one of his slaves asks whether she should treat this free black man the way she would treat a white man, plantation owner Big Daddy quickly demurs and explains she should treat him like Jerry, the “peckawood boy from town” (that is, a low class white man) who occasionally comes by to fix the windows.  The destitution of Candie’s white servants would seem tragic if we saw it simply placed alongside the grandeur of Candie Land.  But instead, we see it alongside the atrocities suffered by Candie’s slaves.  It is of course no accident that the lot of Candie’s whites is elevated by a comparison to the lot of Candie’s blacks.  Even Candie’s lawyer, clean and groomed and seated at the table in the Big House, simpers in Candie’s direction with a dedication that rivals Steven’s.

In the end, the film ends the way a western is supposed to—villains dead, victims avenged and heroes victorious.  And, also in keeping with the formula of westerns, the main female character has little to say and even less to do, beyond operate as an object to motivate the hero.  There are reasons why I don’t love westerns, and they are all more or less summed up in those two sentences.  But Django Unchained is remarkable precisely because it manages to combine a near-flawless execution of the genre with a smart and unflinching portrayal of slaves and slavery as something both more brutal and less pat than many “serious” films that have come before it.

Calls to Action

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Photo Credit: USAID Africa Bureau

Full disclosure: when reading Kathryn Mathers’ scathing critique of New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, “Mr. Kristof, I Presume” (pdf), it was only natural that I’d be a little resistant to it.  I am one of the dread New York Times’ readers who began with Kristof’s columns, then picked up his book, Half the Sky, and continue to follow his Facebook and Twitter pages.  It was in his book, co-authored with his wife, Sheryl Wu Dunn, that I first read about Zainab Salbi and her organization, Women for Women International, to which I’ve been contributing ever since.  It was likely the seed that led to a trip volunteering in the Dominican Republic with an organization with which I am still involved.  I am precisely the well-intentioned but misguided westerner targeted by Kristof and lamented by Mathers, a visiting professor at Duke University who teaches courses on global development.

Mathers takes Kristof to task for work that reduces the ostensible beneficiaries of aid work to caricatures, the noble but wretched of the earth passively waiting to be rescued.  Kristof, Mathers complains, encourages young idealists to view humanitarian work as a sort of self-improvement project, with too little regard for the root causes of the problem or the preferences of affected communities.  Mathers writes:

 Despite these critiques, Kristof’s writing about Africa (and he is not alone) is attractive and compelling to many Americans.  Students and other fans come to listen to him talk about the ways that impoverished women around the world are being helped by people just like them.  These are the same students that attend my classes on Africa or global development, who just want to know how they can ‘do development better.’  My courses ask them to take a critical look at the structural, political, and economic causes of poverty and the ways that development and humanitarian interventions often contribute to these causes.  But Kristof offers a much simpler and ultimately compelling answer to their question.

I think Mathers’ comparison between her presentation and that of Kristof misses the point.  His stated goal is to draw people into a world they would otherwise ignore.  By the time her students come to her, they are people who, by definition, are dedicated to developing a better understanding of the developing world.  Kristof is writing for the average New York Times reader, someone he hopes will be motivated to act on what she’s read.  The best case scenario is one in which young people go from following Kristof to learning from Mathers.  For the middle aged accountant and mother of 3 skimming Kristof’s column after reading the odd trend piece, the hope is that she will donate something of her time or money because of what she’s read.

For his part, Kristof acknowledges the shortcomings of his representations and offers this defense:

 But I do take your point. That very often I do go to developing countries where local people are doing extraordinary work, and instead I tend to focus on some foreigner, often some American, who’s doing something there.  And let me tell you why I do that. The problem that I face — my challenge as a writer — in trying to get readers to care about something like Eastern Congo is that frankly, the moment a reader sees that I’m writing about Central Africa, for an awful lot of them, that’s the moment to turn the page. It’s very hard to get people to care about distant crises like that.  One way of getting people to read at least a few grafs in is to have some kind of a foreign protagonist, some American who they can identify with as a bridge character.

Rather than countering this defense, Mathers very nearly ignores it, dismissing it as an “astonishing dismissal of his audiences’ power to think” before moving on.  I don’t think it is particularly earth shattering or controversial to say that most people do not and will not spend Sunday afternoons reading long nuanced pieces about global poverty or economic development.  Of those who will, not many will do much about it, beyond shaking their heads at the shame of it all.

I certainly would not want to put myself in the position of defending everything Kristof writes.  This column, for example, seems pretty indefensible.  My issue with this critique is that it not only ignores practical realities, but that it is itself an oversimplification.  The implication of Mathers’ critique is that it’s possible for Kristoff to write a series of columns that would present an unvarnished truth of the story of poverty in Africa or elsewhere, and an obvious proscription for the structural changes necessary to eradicate poverty.  A nuanced understanding of the historical, cultural and economic basis for the current state of affairs in any part of the world requires more than reading a few newspaper columns or a few books or even a semester with Professor Mathers.  It requires more than a visit of a few weeks, or even a few years.  Scholars who have studied these issues for decades reach different conclusions both about the most important causes and the most promising solutions.  The New York Times could devote entire issues to that topic for the next several years and the most diligent readers would not necessarily walk away with a course of action to take.

I also think it’s a bit lazy to dismiss out of hand travelers who return from a short trip abroad believing they have developed new insight into the struggles of people in other parts of the world while learning something more about themselves.  To be sure, there is a danger for westerners of falling into imbecilic narratives about noble savages and Gardens of Eden and it is tempting to believe that a small insight into a facet of a problem in a corner of the world makes you an expert on that issue for all time.  But there is also a world of difference between reading about global poverty and interacting with it up close.  There are daily details of living without that cannot be understood unless they are experienced.  A traveler who works to reign in the usual pitfalls of the clichés of the developing world shouldn’t be ashamed to say that she learned something, and was changed by the experience.

And that change can be the beginning of a commitment to do more.  It would be nice to live in a world where people sought to prevent the suffering of others without requiring any personal connection or reward, but there are few if any of us who operate that way.

I would contrast this critique with the outcry that followed the infamous 1,000,000 T shirts campaign.  Many people who were familiar with humanitarian aid work reached out to founder, Jason Sadler, not simply to ridicule his lazy and self-interested foray into the field, but to offer ideas about how he might tweak his idea to turn it into something useful.

This is what’s missing from Mathers’ essay and many similar critiques.  She doesn’t argue that Kristof encourages readers to support organizations that are useless or counterproductive, nor does she offer us a list of organizations we might support or actions we might take instead.

Ironically, given the amount of snark devoted to Kristof’s whiteness by many critics, what seems to be elevated here is the importance of upper middle class white people developing a truer understanding of the pain of black and brown people around the world.  (I’ll take this moment to note that, while I am one of the dread followers of Kristof as described above, I am also a black woman raised in a middle class home by a struggling single mother.  That so many of Kristof’s critics use “westerner” or “American” as synonymous with “upper middle class white” is a topic for a post of its own).

Perhaps the most important takeaway from Mathers’ piece is this:  “It is not that Kristof’s story is always wrong, but that it is the only one he tells.”

Kristof is one man—one man with a hell of a platform, it’s true, but still just one man with a stated goal:  to create a narrative that will motivate people to act.  It is unrealistic to expect him to tell every story that needs to be told.  The effort being expended drafting self-righteous screeds calling out Kristof and his ilk would be better used to push alternatives.

Today’s Shameless Plug: $50 Contributors Receive a $25 Amazon Gift Card

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The next 6 contributors who give $50 to help fund the expansion of Community Connection International’s  literacy program in Consuelo, Dominican Republic will get a $25 Amazon gift card as a thank you.  Click here to contribute, and please share the page/like us on Facebook.

Consuelo

With Players from Liga Manny Acta

With Players from the Manny Acta League

It has been a lifetime since I’ve posted here, but I do have a halfway decent excuse–for two full months I was on the road, living out of a suitcase, and I’ve spent the time since I returned struggling to recall what it’s like to live at home again.  I spent the bulk of my time away knocking doors in Philly, doing my part as a loyal member of the rank and file supporting my candidate for president.  But after election day my time was my own and for two amazing weeks I woke up each morning in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived.

It took a day or two for me to feel that way about Consuelo, Dominican Republic.  The music pumping from the colmadas, or small open air bars; the revving of the engines of the motorbikes that were constantly whizzing past as I meandered through a maze of (mostly) unmarked and unfamiliar streets; and the barking of the dogs ambling by or resting in shade along the side of the road pushed all thoughts out of my head, leaving me both blank and overwhelmed at the same time.

I was there working with an organization called Community Connection International, a nonprofit offering aid to members of the community in exchange for services (for more about CCI and their Service for Aid model, see their website linked above or read founder Angie Bennett’s blog).  As a volunteer I spent my afternoons teaching literacy and basic computer courses to local school children.

Working with students in the literacy class

Working with students in the literacy class

In the classroom, I felt at home, supported by the organization and confident in my ability to do the work.  During my down time, that first day or so, I felt a bit like Marcus Brody, wandering Turkey in search of someone who speaks ancient Greek.

But the thing about Consuelo is that people there go out of their way to make you a priority.  If CCI was determined to make sure I had everything I needed at work, every person I met in Consuelo was determined to make sure I had what I needed everywhere else.  And that desire to help, to make the people in your presence feel welcomed and comfortable, wasn’t limited to visitors like me.  Several of the people I met in Consuelo had ideas, some already being executed, some in the planning stages, about how to make their city better.  Plans to help neighbors improve their homes, or provide poor children with better nutrition, or to improve access to education were constantly coming up in casual conversation.  The generosity of the people I met towards me and towards each other moved me to tears more than once.

With Donato and his family

With Donato and his family

Each morning I was shown around town by my Spanish teacher, Donato, who seems to have taught every man, woman and child in Consuelo at some point.  He was not only my teacher but my tour guide, building each lesson around the barrio we were to visit that day, offering short histories of the politics and people and introducing me to several former students who always greeted him with a mixture of warmth and gratitude.  Some of my best photos from the trip were the result of Donato’s leading me into parts of town I never could have discovered on my own.

Between my time with Donato and my time at CCI, I would often sit on the front porch, listening to the rhythms of the neighborhood as children played, fought, made up and played some more; vendors shouted out their best pitches; and neighbors laughed each other through daily chores.

And then I was off to class where I taught children that were lively, often mischievous, and nearly always smiling, except when they were laughing out loud.

A couple of days of that and it was impossible not to fall in love.  By the end of my first week I was waking up with a smile on my face.  By the middle of my second week I was wishing I’d planned a longer trip.

SancochoThose last few days were bittersweet.  My friend Yenifer asked me what I’d like to do or see before I left and, thanks to Anthony Bourdain, I knew to  ask for sancocho for one of my last dinners.  It was coincidental but incredibly fitting that we ended up scheduling this dinner for Thanksgiving.

My last day in Consuelo was spent sitting and talking with friends.  I was a very long way from that sense of bewilderment I’d felt in my first days, and had come to almost marvel at the thought that I’d ever lived anywhere else.  I’ve left many cities in my life, some I loved, some I hated, but none of them have stayed with me the way Consuelo has.

I hope to continue supporting Consuelo and CCI in every way I can, beginning with this fundraising page I’ve created at Indiegogo.  Please click through, share what you can and, please, please, please, share the page as well!

For more photos, see the coffeeandfingernails tumblr which will also provide you with a handy link to the, ahem, fundraising page.

Fighting Back

A computer class near Baroda, Gujarat, India. January 2007

For some men, there is nothing in the world so terrifying as a woman making decisions for herself.  Through legal, cultural, financial and physical means, men around the world seek to block women from achieving the most basic levels of autonomy, from choosing what to wear, to when and whether to have children.  When all else fails, when women stubbornly insist on behaving like autonomous adults, the last resort for such men is to attack any and every woman in sight, in a desperate attempt to put all of us back where we belong.

Enter the entitled sociopaths of Reddit.  Dissatisfied with the millions of websites full of video and photographs of women who have consented to have their images distributed, these men prefer clandestinely-taken photographs of women (and, in some cases, children) who have dared to leave their homes.

When criticized they respond, like a child shouting “I’m not touching you” while holding her finger an inch from your face, that none of this is technically illegal and there is no expectation of privacy in public.  (Protip:  if your only defense is “my actions are not quite so reprehensible as to invite jail time”, you should probably rethink things).

Offended Reddit users have responded with some perfectly legal activity of their own, exposing the identities of participants and alerting interested parties that their coworker/teacher/classmate may be a sexual predator.

This response has the benefit of reclaiming some of the power these men sought to take away from their victims.  I imagine it is cold comfort to any of the women who actually appeared in these posts, but to the extent the goal was to punish women generally, the actions of “Samantha” a 25 year old woman imposing some accountability on Reddit’s worst users, are far more satisfying than any legislation could be.

That said, as a general rule, I prefer to funnel the anger inspired by these kinds of acts into efforts to grant girls and young women more of the autonomy that so rankles the man-boys of the world. Even better than the poetic justice being served up by Samantha and others like her is a focus on protecting, empowering and encouraging the girls whom men like Michael Brutsch and his ilk seek to victimize.

Please visit the sites below for opportunities to offer money and/or time to young women in the U.S. and around the world:

Boys and Girls Clubs of America

Developments in Literacy (a program building schools in Pakistan)

Charities Participating in the Half the Sky Movement

Girls Quest (a program for girls from low-income families in New York)

Girl Talk (a national peer to peer mentoring program for high school/middle school-aged girls)

Afghan Institute of Learning (a woman-run NGO promoting access to education and healthcare in Afghanistan)

International volunteer opportunities from Half the Sky

Local volunteer/fundraising opportunities around the country can be found at VolunteerMatch.Org

Makin Em Laugh (cont’d)

Earlier tonight, Louis CK sent out an email promoting a recording of a set done by his friend, comedian Tig Notaro (side note:  did I get excited about seeing Louis CK’s name in my inbox, like he’s my friend writing me and me alone?  yes, yes I did).

Louis’ description of her set is a moving example of the central role humor plays in all our lives, those of us with uteruses included:

I stood in the wings behind a leg of curtain, about 8 feet from her, and watched her tell a stunned audience “hi.  I have cancer.  Just found out today.  I’m going to die soon”.   What followed was one of the greatest standup performances I ever saw.   I can’t really describe it but I was crying and laughing and listening like never in my life.  Here was this small woman standing alone against death and simply reporting where her mind had been and what had happened and employing her gorgeously acute standup voice to her own death.  The show was an amazing example of what comedy can be.  A way to visit your worst fears and laugh at them.   Tig took us to a scary place and made us laugh there.  Not by distracting us from the terror but by looking right at it and just turning to us and saying “wow. Right?”.   She proved that everything is funny.  And has to be.  And she could only do this by giving us her own death as an example.  So generous.

To order Tig’s set, go to Louis CK’s website at https://buy.louisck.net/

Makin Em Laugh

Lucille Ball

Of all the things I loved about I Love Lucy growing up, I loved the sound of Desi Arnaz’ laughter the most.  Whenever Lucy was doing what she did best, those iconic scenes of broad physical comedy, you could hear him off camera, cackling over the studio audience as he (presumably) doubled over with uncontrollable laughter.  It is still the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.

It is likely this early exposure to a man enraptured by the brilliant comedic instincts of the woman he loves that made the following passage the most offensive to me in Christopher Hitchens’ infamous essay, Why Women Aren’t Funny:

An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.  Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift.

(emphasis mine)

I’ve never considered myself a funny woman, but damn if I don’t incorporate my best Lucy impression into every effort at courtship.  And I learned long ago that any man I couldn’t make laugh was not worth expending any further effort.

It is not news that there are men who find funny women threatening.  To laugh is to be vulnerable, to expose something fundamental about who you are and what has meaning for you to anyone and everyone within earshot.  The ability to make people laugh is an ability to force them out of their composure and into a state of nakedness.

It’s no wonder then that there should be every incentive to deny this ability to the people we find threatening.  Hitchens was not the first and will not be the last man to wax bullshitastic about women’s weakness in this area.

Enter Nikki Finke’s Emmy awards liveblog, in which she attempts to set the record straight on this silly notion that ladies with good bone structure might make someone laugh:

Listen-up, Hollywood: Beautiful actresses are not funny. They don’t know how to do comedy. (As Bowen demonstrated with her acceptance speech that repeated the phrase ‘nipple covers’ 3 dozen times. To zero laughter.) Only women who grew up ugly and stayed ugly, or through plastic surgery became beautiful, can pull off sitcoms or standups. Bowen isn’t a comedienne just like Brooke Shields wasn’t and a zillion more. Because it’s all about emotional pain and humiliation and rising above both by making people laugh with you instead of at you. So stop casting beautiful actresses when you should be giving ugly women a chance.

Being a woman allows Finke, unlike Hitchens, to hide behind the insidious idea that people with any form of privilege have no stories to tell and no insight to offer.  She insists on the type of fantasy world in which  pretty people are dumb and useless and rich people are all miserable drunks—only those of us here in the Real World really know what life’s about.  Ironically, this kind of lack of imagination would be death to any comedienne.

But for me, the worst thing about these kinds of comments is not that they insult the work of a lot of brilliant, talented female writers, stand-ups, and performers, relegating them to the dismissive status of exceptions to the rule.  Adam Corolla is not signing Tina Fey’s checks, making her one line response to all pronouncements of female humorlessness sufficient:  We don’t fucking care if you like it.

The worst thing is what it takes from the rest of us.  The intelligence, courage and longing to be liked that are wrapped up in the telling of a joke are not limited to one gender, or to people who have suffered, or people who have suffered in a particular way.  To suggest otherwise, is to insist that half the people on the planet are dull scolds, existing only to be admired, impregnated and then forgotten and lacking one of the most important defense mechanisms available.

No surprise then that positions like Hitchens’ and Finke’s always invite a lot of (justified) irritation and angry responses from those of us thankful for a good laugh regardless of the source (see:  this post).  But the good thing about these little dust-ups is that the most common rebuttal is a list of people who have made us laugh.  References to funny women of the 1930s not only made me smile, but added some movies to my Netflix queue.  And talk of Lucille Ball brought back distant memories of a time when enjoying good comedy didn’t require any deep analysis, just a willingness to surrender until the tears rolled down your cheeks.

Persuasion

A couple of days ago Conor Friedersdorf wrote a post explaining his reasons for not voting for Obama.  His case against the Obama administration’s execution of the war on terror is a compelling one, and, judging from the response, hit a nerve among many frustrated that this issue has received so little attention.  Friedersdorf writes that he will either vote for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson or not at all, and encourages others to do the same:

If enough people start refusing to support any candidate who needlessly terrorizes innocents, perpetrates radical assaults on civil liberties, goes to war without Congress, or persecutes whistleblowers, among other misdeeds, post-9/11 excesses will be reined in.

That statement is undoubtedly true, but for all of the retweets Friedersdorf’s post has received (well over 2,000 so far), his planned course of action is not likely to have any impact on the policies he opposes.  Friedersdorf acknowledges that there is a bipartisan consensus behind most of these policies.  As a general rule, if politician after politician, from both your party and the opposing party, continues to do the same thing, it’s likely that a large majority of the general public supports it (or is at least indifferent).  The only way to change things is to convince a critical mass (not necessarily a majority) of people otherwise.  Any other action is purely symbolic.   As Wil Wilkinson writes in response to Friedersdorf:

trying to convince folks to vote to send a disapproving message about Mr Obama’s national security policy seems an unpromising way to change public opinion. The root problem is that too few Americans think drone attacks and kill lists are completely beyond the pale. Persuade enough of the electorate that they are and policy designed to appeal to the median voter must needs follow.

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with a symbolic action taken on principle, but it’s important to note that there is a difference between that and taking action to effect real change.    Too many attempts at changing policy are designed to provide psychic satisfaction to the activists, rather than reaching out to people who may be persuadable if exposed to the right argument.  This is usually done by invoking the image of a remarkably powerful, immoral enemy in the form of either a lobbying block or an opposing party/candidate. That image can be galvanizing, stirring people’s passions, building mailing lists, populating rallies, and bringing in thousands in donations.  It also makes failure self-reinforcing as the enemy is blamed for any setbacks, increasing the proponents’ sense of both the fearsomeness of their opponent  and their own bravery and righteousness in standing up for what’s right.

But that only works on the people who already agree with you.  It’s not likely to convince anyone else.  The result is a brand of activism that is more about the activists than about the ostensible goals of the movement.  Instead of regrouping and rethinking tactics that have proven ineffective, activists double down, becoming an insular club committed to a set of truths it no longer feels the need to prove to outsiders, railing at a series of elected officials who are found wanting.

This mind-set is not only counter productive, it’s anti-Democratic, rooted in the idea that change should come from above instead of below.  Living in a democracy means not having the luxury of making your case to a handful of power players–the audience you have to persuade numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

A lot of causes would greatly benefit from the realization that success does not necessarily require defeating “special interests” or “moneyed elites” or morally repugnant elected officials, but respecting fellow citizens enough not to dismiss them as apathetic or brainwashed victims on whom your favored policies must be imposed.

The Doctor Punts

The Doctor Broods

[Spoilers]

The writers at Doctor Who have reminded us repeatedly that the Doctor is capable of ferocious violence when provoked and that this capacity is held in check only by strict adherence to clear, absolute moral rules.  As he told Madame Kovarian in A Good Man Goes to War, “Good men don’t need rules.  Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”

The Doctor’s faith in that check on his power was shaken last season as he realized, Batman-like, that his legendary battles against the malevolent forces in the universe have encouraged his foes to become more powerful and his allies to become more violent.

This crisis of faith in his own inherent goodness explains why the Doctor said little and did less in last night’s episode.

The story begins with the Doctor, Amy and Rory arriving in a tiny town—Mercy, population 81—on the American frontier five years after the end of the Civil War.  The town is being held hostage by an alien cyborg, a casualty of another recently ended civil war on a distant planet.  The cyborg demands that the settlers turn over Kahler-Jax, a scientist whose cruel experiments on his countrymen, the cyborg included, led to the end of the brutal conflict.  Jax doesn’t just take cover in Mercy, he uses his advanced technology to introduce electricity and cure disease, creating a sense of obligation among several of the settlers who refuse to turn him over.

Players and backstory in place, the story becomes an extended meditation on competing conceptions of justice and morality.  The cyborg seeks old testament style eye-for-an-eye justice; the town marshal, war-weary and grateful for Jax’ help, seeks to prevent any further violence; and Jax argues both that his actions during the war have to be judged by the desperate circumstances in which he took them and that his post-war good works should be sufficient penance even if his actions were wrong.

An earlier Doctor would have dismissed the cyborg’s mission as vengeance and demanded that he relent.  This Doctor is not so sure.  The cyborg responds to the Doctor’s tepid plea that Jax be allowed to stand trial by telling him to mind his own business:  “When he starts killing your people, you can use your justice.”  Instead of offering a counter-argument, the Doctor walks away.

He approaches Jax enraged, but draws back in confusion when the scientist begins to make his own case, describing 9 years of violence and destruction that ended one week after his ethically-challenged experiments proved successful.

A moment later, in his first and only decisive act of the episode, the Doctor begins to hurl Jax at the cyborg, having decided that the life of someone responsible for so much suffering is not worth the lives of the innocents in town.  Amy and the marshal succeed in throwing the Doctor back into a state of confusion, pressing him to adhere to his own strict rules of forgiveness and mercy, no matter the cost.

For the first time, the Doctor must act without the security of knowing that his actions, however difficult, are just.  Instead of clear moral choices, he must choose between different mixes of pleasant and unpleasant consequences, each with nothing more than an abstract imperative to recommend them.  Faced with the necessity of taking responsibility for his choices, rather than relying on a rulebook to justify himself, the Doctor chokes.

Rather than act, the Doctor chooses to avoid, helping Jax escape to another planet where the cyborg will follow him and the entire drama will repeat itself.  In doing so, the Doctor jeopardizes the people unlucky enough to be in Jax’ path, seemingly unconcerned with the safety of those not immediately in front of him.  In the end, it’s Jax who makes the hard choice, removing himself from the picture; releasing the Doctor from his dilemma; and saving the cyborg from a life of blood-thirst.

For long time fans of the show (I should say that for me “long time” means since 2005), all of this soul-searching is building to the resolution of a couple centuries’ worth of lessons for the Doctor in how to interact with people as something other than a playful demigod.  The Eleventh Doctor’s companions have served not just to stave off loneliness, but to force him to move out of his self-imposed exile and into a life of lasting relationships with mutual obligations.  At 1200 years old, the Doctor is finally growing up.

Being

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano takes issue with the “therapeutic narrative” of body image:

 You know the narrative I’m talking about: prepubescent girl with well-adjusted bodily esteem meets world; world (or mother, or father, or media machine, or ballet teacher or school bully or thoughtless grandmother) implies she’s too fat/gangly/bulb-nosed/narrow-featured to be considered beautiful; girl embarks on rampage of self-hatred, which may manifest itself in perfectionist attitudes toward appearance, disordered eating, psychological dependence on makeup, or just your good old-fashioned preoccupation with beauty; girl comes to terms with her appearance and goes back to a place of well-adjusted bodily esteem.

Whitefield-Madrano worries that this narrative can become as stifling as the beauty standards it claims to counter-act, forcing every woman to choose whether she is among the damaged or among those who have transcended the damage.  She continues:

If we’re going to find a way out of the mess that has 40 percent of women reporting unhappiness with their bodies, we must identify a narrative for the other 60 percent. That is, we need to find a language for that 60 percent—the majority—to voice their relationship with their bodies in a way that isn’t seen as being “all that” or a tale of triumph, but rather a small, normal story of inhabiting a human body.

So much time is spent trying to improve the content of women’s beliefs about their bodies, but we don’t often question the role that the prominence of those beliefs plays in their sense of identity.  Regardless of what story a woman tells about how she came to love/accept her body, is the placement of that view at the center of the story she tells about herself an indication that something is wrong?

An older relative once complained to me that black people my age took for granted rights that their forebears had fought and died for.  My (somewhat smart alec-y) response was, Wasn’t that the point?  If I think that being black while simultaneously being able to vote, or choose my seat on the bus, or purchase a home in whichever neighborhood I choose is a miraculous anomaly, then that says something about my notion of blackness and its inherent limitations.

That’s not to say that we should not be aware that there was a time when these and other rights were denied to large swaths of the population (or that they continue to be denied in places, if by subtler methods), but there’s a difference between a person’s awareness of the sweep of history, and her experience of herself as an individual living day to day.

Both the black person who maintains a constant awareness that walking around unchained is a privilege and the woman who holds to a narrative of her triumph over self-hatred are missing out on the experience of just being, without justification or explanation.  Every interaction with the world becomes warped by the thought that this is something that I, unlike those born without the burden of being what I am, had to earn.

Rather than tell that story—I once thought I was ugly, now I love myself—I think it’s possible to get rid of the need for any story at all by remembering that bodies are for feeling rather than being seen.  They are the point of entry for the sensual in our lives; a source of both joy and pain, rather than a problem to be overcome.

The Women of Copper

Franka Potente as Eva

[Major spoilers for the first two episodes, and one minor one for the most recent]

There have been complaints that the women of Copper, BBC America’s new show about cops in 1864 New York, all seem to be wives or prostitutes, a collection of society ladies and hookers with hearts of gold.  As Alyssa Rosenberg points out, there are certainly other options available for writers seeking to portray autonomous female characters in this time and place in New York City.  Still, however clichéd the setups for the female characters may be, it’s the men of the show who fall very quickly into standard tropes.

The show’s protagonist, Kevin Corcoran is a noble, brooding detective seeking justice where he can find it, all while trying to piece together how his daughter ended up dead and his wife ended up missing while he was away fighting in the Civil War; McGuire, one of Corcoran’s partners, is loyal and kind-hearted, if a little dim-witted; O’Brien, another partner, is conservative and narrow-minded but also loyal to Corcoran and fierce in the defense of his principles; and Morehouse, a wealthy lay-about who fought with Corcoran, is covered in a veneer of foppishness and cynicism that belies his often good intentions.

In contrast to these classics of crime dramas and period pieces, the women of the show are the ones with the greatest depth and potential for interesting developments, characters whose intentions and fates I don’t feel confident I can predict within a scene or two.

That the name of the 10-year-old orphan at the center of the case in the first episode is Annie must be intentional. The choice of name serves as an effective dig at cheerful representations of an America in which people, good and bad, receive their just desserts. This Orphan Annie is the victim of the depravity of several men as well as a society less concerned with preventing abuse than with preserving the myth that there is a correlation between wealth and nobility on the one hand and poverty and moral turpitude on the other.

But Annie is not just a symbol of innocence destroyed or injustice suffered in a crueler time. Having settled into what appears to be a safe place, she is now navigating both her own healing process and a world that is as likely to shun her as to give her a “proper place” in its ranks.  When her attempt to seduce Corcoran, her savior and protector, is rebuffed, she displays a mixture of embarrassment and, for the first time, youthfulness as if this is the first lesson she’s ever received in what it means to be a little girl.

Eva, a madame and favorite of Corcoran’s, is about to expand her business, partnering with a New Orleans-based colleague to open a 5th avenue branch catering to the tastes of the millionaires created by the war. Her attachment to Corcoran is likely to turn out to be a distraction from that plan, but I think it’s too early to assume this character will necessarily devolve into stereotype.  Her ambition to become wealthy off of the lust of rich men seeking an evening with Creole women offers an opportunity to explore themes of race, gender and class beyond the already rich environment that is the Five Points.

Mrs. Haverford, the British transplant married to one of Annie’s abusers (a man who murdered Annie’s sister for not complying with his wishes) is portrayed as a slight anachronism, a liberal-minded woman so horrified by her husband’s crimes that she demands that Corcoran avenge his victims. When Corcoran does so, Mrs. Haverford takes Annie into her home, purportedly to do her part to undo some of the damage done by her husband. She devotes time and money to a black orphanage, and refuses to conform to the behavior expected of a widow.

But all of her kindnesses strike me as a bit self-serving–ensuring her husband suffered for his crimes left her greater freedom than she could ever have as a wife. Taking Annie into her home did not require much beyond the expense of a nanny, while serving more than once as an excuse for her to solicit the attentions of Corcoran. Her desire to protect Rev. Garland, a black man accused of murder in the most recent episode, seems likely to be to her own benefit as well.

All three women are operating under constraints the male characters are not (with the exception of Matthew Freeman, a black physician whom Corcoran turns to for autopsies at a time when forensic medicine is in its infancy). Those constraints guaranteed that most women of the time felt compelled to present themselves as one of a handful of well-worn archetypes of femininity, but there’s no indication so far in the show that this presentation is all there is to them.

Even Corcoran’s wife promises to be something more than the victim Corcoran seems to hope she is (better to learn that she was kidnapped than that she left him of her own volition).

Where I would like to see more depth is in Sara Freeman, Matthew’s wife. Sara watched as her brothers were lynched during the draft riots, and lives in a constant state of anxiety and fear. That condition explains why she’s done little more than reach for her gun and stare wide-eyed at her husband’s constant flow of white visitors across the first three episodes. It’s early days yet, but I am hoping that Sara becomes something more than a heap of PTSD as the show progresses.

“We sigh at the same volume” A Father Responds to Romney

John Cook writes for Gawker:

Now, I happen to know something about the fastest route to the local emergency room. I was there just last weekend, at 2 o’clock on Sunday morning, with my one-and-a-half-year-old son (croup attack; he’s fine). My hard-working, louder-sighing wife was in our bed asleep at the time, holding down the fort with our three-year-old. Come to think of it, the last time our youngest had a worrying croup episode, almost exactly a year ago, it was also me traversing the fastest route to the local emergency room in the middle of the night, sighing quietly.  This isn’t because my wife is lazy, or can’t drive…It’s because we don’t live in 1962.

Cook notes that his household isn’t yet the norm–lots of people are still living pretty close to 1962–but there’s every reason to think that it can be.

Women’s Work

Ann Romney at Convention

 

Speeches delivered by candidates’ wives always make me a little uncomfortable.  No matter how accomplished she may be, no matter how talented a speaker, there is always this nagging thought that, in this moment, she is on stage not because of who she is or what she’s done, but because of who she’s married.  That discomfort is compounded when the candidate belongs to a party whose members have spent the last several months saying horribly ignorant and offensive things about women and their bodies.

Still, Ann Romney did a good job of delivering an appropriately vapid and saccharine speech at the convention tonight, stepping effortlessly into the role of the “humanizing” spouse.  But I found myself cringing more than usual at this one.

At its center, in an attempt to reach out to female voters, the speech stumbles into the old sexist trope that women are in fact the stronger sex, so strong that it is only natural that they should carry the greatest burdens with the least reward and nary a complaint.

After a little riff on the difficulties faced by “moms and dads across America” who end every day with a sigh, Romney continued:

And if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the women sighing a little bit more than the men. It’s how it is, isn’t it? It’s the moms who have always had to work a little harder to make everything right. It’s the moms of this nation, single, married, widowed, who really hold this country together. ..You know it’s true, don’t you? …You are the ones that have to do a little bit more and you know what it is like to work a little bit harder during the day to earn the respect you deserve at work and then you come home at night and help with the book report just because it has to be done. You know what those late night phone calls with an elderly parent are like and the long weekend drives just to see how they’re doing. You know the fastest route to the local emergency room and which doctors actually answer the phone when you call at night.

As a matter of policy, there’s plenty that a Democrat could say about which party is offering solutions for women fighting for equal treatment at work, in need of assistance in caring for elderly relatives, or seeking reliable access to healthcare for themselves and their families. As Irin Carmon noted, much of Romney’s speech only served to highlight her party’s shortcomings when it comes to issues affecting women rather than reassuring us that a Romney presidency would serve women well:

An election cycle in which her husband has declared birth control coverage to be a threat to religious liberty is an inconvenient time for her to talk about ‘that couple who would like to have another child, but wonder how will they afford it.’ A convention for a party that opposes any legislation around equal pay for women is an inopportune moment to discuss the ‘working moms who love their jobs but would like to work just a little less to spend more time with the kids, but that’s just out of the question with this economy.’

But what irks most is the implication that the “women sighing a little bit more” are part of the natural order of things, rather than the victims of outdated and unfair expectations that they should bear greater responsibility for the care of children and aging relatives.

Romney’s speech gives the impression that what is needed is a set of policies that will make it easier for women to do everything, rather than a cultural shift that would demand that men do more.

Humans of New York

“The Flare” Brandon Stanton

Vogue Daily throws up this mini profile and slideshow promoting one of the best things on the interwebs, Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York:

“If there is one thing that sets Humans of New York apart, it’s how personal the pictures are,” says Brandon Stanton, the 28-year-old trader turned photographer behind Humans of New York, a blog that goes further than merely documenting the look of its subjects; instead it chronicles, through written snippets of banter, a little of who they might be and why they dress like they do…’What makes the site so popular is that I stop these people and engage with them,’ muses Stanton, who boasts more than 230,000 Facebook followers, growing at around 1,500 per day. ‘The personality of New York is expressive, individualistic, and creative—I just photograph people doing their own thing.’

Coffeeandfingernails Tumblr

People who have known me for a long time know that I really like to talk–a lot.  It is largely for their sakes that I started writing things online.  This ensures that at least some portion of the thoughts running through my head have an outlet other than my weary friends. 

When I’m not having opinions, I am telling stories with varying levels of accuracy.  It didn’t seem to make sense to include those here, and so from now on they will end up here.

What a Feminist Looks Like (Cont’d)

palinrosie

A couple of weeks ago I weighed in on the question of why so many women who accept the precepts of feminism are uncomfortable identifying with the term.  Consistent with my strict “Do you, Boo” philosophy, I didn’t really consider it important which side of this line a woman fell on.  I didn’t see why having a majority of women claiming that term should be a necessary condition for advocating for women’s equality.

As I continued to think and read about issues surrounding the definition of feminism and the question of who can or should or must call themselves a feminist, I realized that there was a much more fundamental question that needed to be addressed:  why does this word exist at all?

What do you call a person who supports racial equality?  What’s the name for a person who favors civil rights for people who are LGBTQ?

We don’t have a name for either of those things because they are taken as a given.  Accepting the basic humanity of a person, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation is a moral requirement.  The people we name are the ones who refuse to do this.  They’re the ones with a title that allows us to pick them out and point at them with disdain.

Katy Waldman argues that getting to this point, where calling yourself a feminist is akin to calling yourself pro-puppy, is a goal of feminism:

That there needs to be a word for feminists is an unhappy product of our history. So as we adopt West’s definition of “feminism,” perhaps we can also start phasing out the term itself. Perhaps we can instead focus on labeling the outliers who are not feminists: the misogynists, chauvinists, and sexists.

But I would take it a step further.  There was never a need for a word for feminists, any more than there was a need for a term to define black people opposed to Jim Crow.  Requiring women to opt in to a belief in their own equality implies that that belief is an optional add-on, something that cannot be taken for granted.  It asks women, one by one, to assert that they expect to be treated with respect, as if this is something that should always be in question.

To be sure, there are women who really don’t seem to accept the principles of feminism, who seem to go out of their way to tear other women down.  But this isn’t something unique to women, it’s a phenomenon seen in every marginalized group.

And people often disagree about which women fall into this category.  Certainly women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann would argue that they do favor women’s equality but have different ideas on what that means and how to get there.  Is there a core set of positions that can provide the litmus test to determine who really supports equality and who doesn’t?  Have we ever managed to reach a consensus on what that core set consists in?

Rather than agonize over whether these and other conservative women should have admission into the club, I’d much rather debate substance:  what are the consequences of limiting women’s access to reproductive healthcare or abstinence-only education that stigmatizes female sexuality?

I assume that every person I meet expects the freedom to make their own choices and will respond with righteous anger if I try to force my ideas about How Things Should Be down their throats.  I see no reason not to apply this assumption to women.

Occupying Oakland

Photographed by and copyright of (c) David Corby

Downtown Oakland as viewed across Lake Merritt

I couldn’t decide whether to cry or punch someone in the face while reading John Mahler’s piece in the New York Times Magazine on Oakland and its version of the Occupy Movement.

During the two years that I lived there, searching for a way to describe what I loved about the city to people, I came up with the phrase “hip Sesame Street.”  It was not just a diverse city, but a diverse city in which people of different colors, ages, and economic levels interacted in a way I had never seen.  Oakland is a place where you can see a 25 year old black man and an elderly Asian lady laughing and talking on a park bench and not bat an eye.

It’s the best food I’ve ever eaten (fresh from farms just a few hours away); a city with a vibrant culture of art, music and poetry.  As in New York, some of Oakland’s proudest residents are transplants, people who find that this place feels more like home than any other place they’ve lived, including the place they grew up.

Of course, the city’s problems are no secret.  Violent crime, poverty and corruption are pervasive.  Going for a stroll downtown it’s upsetting to see the number of vacant storefronts, run-down buildings that were once beautiful.  You don’t have to be an expert in public policy to see that this is a city in desperate need of investment, whatever the source.  That explains the “peculiar effect on progressive politicians” described in Mahler’s article:

In 1999, the corporate-America-bashing former-and-future California governor Jerry Brown swept into the mayor’s office and promptly set about undertaking an ambitious, aggressively pro-business agenda for the city. Brown, who had a Labrador named Dharma, was soon cozying up to real estate developers, lobbying the state to loosen its environmental review process on urban construction and conjuring visions of a new Oakland, with a downtown ballpark for the A’s and a luxury resort hotel and casino. The centerpiece of his redevelopment plan, the 10K Project, was to lure 10,000 well-off residents to gleaming downtown condominium towers, establishing a new tax base and driving the growth of retail stores and restaurants.

This impulse runs counter to the strong tradition of radicalism that still thrives in the area.  As a new resident participating in local political meetings, I was constantly running into references to a perceived golden age of resistance, when Berkeley students and Huey Newton stood proud against the powers that be.  It’s a wonder my eyes didn’t roll out of my head during that time.

That romantic notion of its history leads some to undermine attempts to allow Oakland to live up to its real potential–becoming a thriving, multicultural city with a strong tax base for addressing the city’s ills.  Vandalism, grandstanding and sloganeering are easy and fun.  The work that goes into effecting real change is difficult and dull.  To paraphrase an old saying, real activism involves long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of despair.  Once in a great while, you take a step forward and, somewhere down the line, enough steps are accumulated to create the momentum required for a large shift.  Looking back, we have a tendency to see the shift without noticing the tiny steps that came before it.

What the “radicals” who go around bashing in windows and disrupting the city’s economy are really doing is punishing people for disagreeing with them.  Unwilling to do the hard work of convincing their neighbors, they engage in a masturbatory temper tantrum and convince themselves they are changing the world. Every day residents of Oakland go out and work and spend and attempt to build something for themselves and their families.  The people tearing that down are not just corrupt cops or dishonest officials but advocates for a revolution no one has asked for.

“Beautiful is Bullshit”

There is a lot to love in this post from Jessica Valenti on Nadia Ilse, the 14 year old girl who recently underwent $40,000 in plastic surgery in order to correct the “deformity” of teenage awkwardness.  Valenti writes:

If our end goal for girls is simply to have them feel “confident”—especially about their looks—then we create a trap where anything that makes a girl feel better about her appearance, no matter how harmful, is a reasonable solution. (How many times has plastic surgery been preceded by a “I’m doing it for me!” explanation?)  There may be a bit of head-shaking over young girls going to drastic measures to feel beautiful, but we never seem to question the idea that feeling beautiful is a worthy goal in the first place. We should tell girls the truth: “Beautiful” is bullshit…

I could not agree more.  However well-intentioned efforts to make women “feel beautiful” may be, they are all rooted in the premise that beauty is an attribute every woman can and must have.  Instead of teaching young girls that beauty is an imperative, we should be pushing the idea that it’s nice to be beautiful, but other things–compassion, honesty, sense of humor, intelligence–are far more important.  The goal should be a world in which recognizing that you are not the prettiest girl in the room is no more devastating than recognizing that you will never be a rock star.

But the ellipsis in the above quote is where Valenti and I part ways.  She continues:

We should tell girls the truth: “Beautiful” is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we’re second class citizens. Girls don’t need more self-esteem or feel-good mantras about loving themselves—what they need is a serious dose of righteous anger.

It’s one thing to insist that not every woman be forced to carry the burden of looking like a magazine cover whenever she leaves the house .  It’s another to pretend as though beauty itself is an artificial construct imposed on us by a misogynist culture.

Last night, I caught up on the last several episodes of Louie,  including one featuring Miguel Gomez.  As in this guy:

Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that “beautiful” is one of several terms I would use to describe Mr. Gomez.  I feel confident in saying that there aren’t many people out there who lust after men who would disagree with me.  And, for that reason, there are any number of men who would give their high teeth to look this way.

The desire to be beautiful is a natural consequence of the desire to be loved and sought after.  Pop culture may help set the standard for what beautiful means, but the desire to fit that standard is as natural as attraction itself.  Luckily for us all, most people are capable of falling head over heels in love with people who come nowhere near that standard.  Compassion, honesty, sense of humor and intelligence, among other things, end up being much more important to finding companionship than a nice set of pecs.

But it’s fruitless and dishonest to pretend that beauty is meaningless, or that it’s possible to live in a world where there isn’t one set of proportions that turns heads and another that turns people away.

Finding the Perfect Lie: Thoughts on The Dark Knight Rises

[Spoilers  from all 3 films]

There has been no shortage of reviews labeling The Dark Knight Rises as an allegory celebrating populism, capitalism, libertarianism and liberal democracy itself.  No doubt, it’s impossible to see images of young, angry populists marching through Wall Street and not suspect the film might have something to say about recent political squabbles, especially during an election year.  But in the full context of the trilogy I think the third installment is far bleaker than any political stance.

In Batman Begins Bruce Wayne decides that his violent, corrupt city needs a symbol, a benevolent lie that will channel the best intentions of the people of Gotham, granting them the hope and the will to make the city into something better.  By the end, it seems as though Wayne is well on his way, having confronted his own fears and saved the city from the plotting of a self-righteous zealot.

Yet, in The Dark Knight things haven’t improved much.  Rather than inspiring Gothamites to do better, Batman has inspired incompetent vigilantes and a brilliant mad man, thrilled by the challenge provided by the superhero’s ingenuity.

Wayne rethinks his plan, seeking to replace his elusive phantom with “a hero with a face”, a flesh and blood man to reform the city’s institutions from the inside.  But even chiseled blond Harvey Dent’s good intentions can’t last long in Gotham, as the Joker’s manipulation transforms him into a chaos-seeking monster.

Wayne retools once again—instead of a hero they can touch, Gotham will have a martyr, a man who is incapable of letting everyone down because he exists only in legend.

When The Dark Knight Rises starts, it appears as though Wayne’s Plan C has worked— at least, as well as any plan to save Gotham can work.  A draconian law passed in the wake of Dent’s death has cleared the most violent criminals off the street (even if a few innocents were swept up in the process).  There is still inequality and corruption but the city seems to have fallen into a kind of equilibrium that will have to suffice.

But the same city that was made complacent by one lie—that Harvey Dent died a hero—can just as easily be manipulated by another.  Enter Bane and his populist rhetoric, calling on Gotham to take its city back.  That rhetoric has been enough for some to compare Bane to the Occupy Wall Street movement, but, of course, Bane is no populist.  Like Wayne and Gordon, he is telling a lie in order to inspire the populace to act in ways he’d prefer.  We discover in the end that his only motivation is loyalty, and the same holds for the person giving him orders.

As it turns out, Bane’s attempts at manipulation are far more effective than those of anyone else in the trilogy. Whereas Wayne has struggled for a decade to nudge people into action, Bane gets immediate results, as angry citizens pull the hated rich from their homes and set up kangaroo courts.

Even the Joker, for all his brilliance, was not so successful.  Near the end of The Dark Knight, he rigs two boats with explosives and offers the passengers on each the opportunity to blow up the other in order to avoid being blown up themselves. The Joker fails to get people to destroy each other because he relies on naked self-interest, an instinct too easily overridden by loftier ideals. Bane succeeds by offering a convincing, uncomplicated story of good and evil, and inviting Gothamites to join the side of good.

Bane doesn’t have to convince everyone, just a critical mass of violent revolutionaries eager to act on their fears and resentments.  Presumably, these fears and resentments are not so different from those that made people look the other way as Gotham’s accused were denied due process in the name of public safety.

While the zealots institute their Reign of Terror, the rest of the city follows a strategy of going along to get along, exemplified by Anne Hathaway’s understated (and by “understated”, I mostly mean “not campy”) Catwoman.  Though she is both bothered by inequality and repulsed by the acts of the duped populists, her instinct is not to try to change either, but to survive both.

In the end, Catwoman answers the call, Bane and his co-conspirator are foiled, and a fourth Batman film is nicely set up. Batman will continue to scheme to save Gotham, unwittingly inspiring villains to become more ferocious in order to defeat him. If this volley of victories between good and evil represents any philosophy at all it is that of the Joker, who turns out to be the only truth-teller in all three films:

Do I look like a guy with a plan?  You know what I am?  I’m a dog chasing cars.  I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it, you know, I just do things.  The mob has plans, cops have plans, Gordon’s got plans.  They’re schemers, schemers trying to control their little worlds.  I’m not a schemer.  I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

Assimilation

hacker-girl-orange

In the last month or so there have been been several stories about the small subset of gamers who seem to resent the existence of three dimensional women who not only play games but have opinions about them. In addition to drumming up massive amounts of support for Anita Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter project reviewing sexist tropes in video games, these trolls drew new viewers (including me) to her video blog, Feminist Frequency, support she’ll no doubt use to draw that much more attention to the problem of misogyny in geek culture. A happy ending that does not make up for the absurd amount of harassment she has had to endure.

I followed but did not comment on any of these events because I did not feel I had a right to.  Unlike Aisha (see “play games” link above) I could not point to decades of devotion to any one bona fide geek pursuit.  I fell in love with the Twilight Zone at 11 years old and  the phrase MST3K rolled off my tongue by the time I was 14. I was posting online tributes to Carl Sagan by 18 and deconstructing the latest iteration of Doctor Who by 30.  And don’t get me started re: Bioware and reasons why they have total and complete access to my first born.

But I didn’t think any of this qualified me to step in and join those who called out the trolls harassing Sarkeesian because it all seemed too disjointed.  I couldn’t claim to be a gamer, or a space nerd, or a fantasy geek.  I was just an awkward girl who liked some random shit.

And then came this offering from writer and new Coffeeandfingernails favorite human being John Scalzi:

Geekdom is a nation with open borders. There are many affiliations and many doors into it. There are lit geeks, media geeks, comics geeks, anime and manga geeks. There are LARPers, cosplayers, furries, filkers, crafters, gamers and tabletoppers. There are goths and horror geeks and steampunkers and academics. There are nerd rockers and writers and artists and actors and fans. Some people love only one thing. Some people flit between fandoms. Some people are positively poly in their geek enthusiasms. Some people have been in geekdom since before they knew they were geeks. Some people are n00bs, trying out an aspect of geekdom to see if it fits. If it does, great. If it doesn’t then at least they tried it.

I didn’t know that I needed permission to own the title until that permission was granted.  And with the acceptance of that title (geek, nerd, take your pick) comes this observation regarding the young men who see fit to attack Sarkeesian and other women who do not act out the scenarios they have ordained:  it is perfectly natural, when you feel like an outsider, to latch on to what Ta-Nehisi Coates has called a consolation prize—a characteristic that at once singles you out for ridicule and yet can be worn as a badge of your uniqueness, the thing that makes you a precious snowflake.

As you move from margin to center, that characteristic is first appreciated and, eventually, owned—authentically, legitimately and creatively owned—by a majority that had previously brushed you aside.  That process, however frustrating you may find it, is a sign of progress, proof that others have begun to see you as a person independent of the thing that previously defined you.  The frustrating part is that you no longer own it—at least, you don’t own it exclusively.

As with almost everything, Coates has addressed this phenomenon beautifully:

Thus when Eminem starts laying claim to best rapper in the world, and lays claim to a kind of fan that Biggie could not, questions arise for black folks. It’s like they can’t even let us have our consolation prize.  White people: ever walk into a mostly black club and get bad looks? Not “I’m gonna kick your ass” looks but “What the fuck are you doing here?” looks. I can speak to that because, as a younger man, I’ve given those looks. It’s about power and the threat to our consolation prize of cultures.It’s about white people, not as people whom you do not like, but as an existential threat.

I do not mean to be a threat to anyone’s existence.  I just want a seat at the table without having to detail my reasons for showing up.

Falling in Love Again

 

 

Iconic Kiss

 

The first thing I do when I move to a new city is attempt to walk from one end of it to the other.  Along the way, I make note of cute shops, promising-looking restaurants, potential shortcuts, and good perches for people-watching.

It took years for me to realize that not everyone thought that an eight hour walk was the best way to learn a new place, that this was a habit I picked up growing up in New York, wandering through the Village with my mother.

Over the course of six years I managed to walk my way through six cities and found something to love in each of them (even you, Lake Ariel, PA, even you).  That absence was long enough to allow me to see the city with fresh eyes, so that the things that were once just part of the background suddenly pop out at me, a reminder that I’ve come home.

This isn’t the only city with beautiful architecture; or a diverse, colorful population; or the only city in which you can see the layers that each generation piled on top of the one that came before.  But there’s something about the way these different elements interact that makes New York beautiful in a way that no other place is.

The pics and video below are a chronicle of my reintroduction to a place I can’t seem to stay away from.

 

 

 

Also, NYC is full of free shows:

 

 

 

Choosing what’s best

Amanda Marcotte writes a smart and incredibly satisfying post on why it’s absurd to blame single mothers for being single.  She closes with a specific example of a larger, too often overlooked point–the best way to encourage healthy decision-making in young women, or, for that matter, young people, is to respect their right to choose something other than what we would have chosen for them:

Most of us know people whose eagerness to put a ring on it makes them ignore huge incompatibilities in their relationships. On the flip side, if you feel no compulsion to get married, you have a lot more time to spend finding a good match. Refusing to rush into it is no guarantee of long-term stability, but it sure must increase the odds. And more liberal attitudes and policies towards reproductive choice can’t hurt. Having the freedom to marry someone because you’re a good match and not because an accidental pregnancy forced the issue makes for longer, more stable relationships. If we want fewer women to end up as single mothers, ironically, the best thing we can do is stop pressuring women so hard to settle down with a man.

What a Feminist Looks Like

feminist11

Marissa Mayer, newly-appointed Yahoo CEO, has said that she does not consider herself a feminist:

I don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist. I think that I certainly believe in equal rights, I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so in a lot of different dimensions, but I don’t, I think have, sort of, the militant drive and the sort of, the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that.

The response to this from women who do claim that title is predictably disappointed and frustrated.  The assumption is that Mayer’s position is a calculated move to avoid rocking the boat in a male-dominated field.  Writing for Slate, Amanda Marcotte expresses the common view:

I will give credit to Mayer for her blunt explanation of why she won’t embrace the movement that shares her stated values and has allowed her to be who she is…As long as we all understand that “militant” and “chip on the shoulder” are euphemisms for “willingness to challenge sexism directly, even though it means that men will yell at you,” it doesn’t get more clear than that.

There is certainly something to that. The irony of so many reactionary voices accusing women and people of color of attempting to use their identities to gain special treatment is that members of both groups are far more likely to ignore prejudice in order to avoid being singled out. Everyone wants to feel like they belong and nothing isolates a person more than standing up in a meeting or during an outing with friends or coworkers and calling someone out for crossing the line. Every woman or person of color in an office full of men/whites has a story about a time when she bit her tongue in order to avoid being one of those.

That said, I don’t think we should be so quick to chalk Mayer’s comments up to capitulation to patriarchy. Her views are shared by millions of women who are not in male-dominated fields, who don’t necessarily have as much to lose by embracing that title. There are women who will speak loudly and proudly about their support for reproductive freedom, equal pay, Title IX, programs combatting violence against women, etc but who still would not call themselves feminists.

There are several factors at play here. No doubt, popular portrayals of feminists as humorless hypocrites do not help, and in every marginalized group, there is a division among those eager for sustained, uncompromising confrontation and those (perhaps overly) concerned about being labeled troublemakers. But to have such large numbers of women disavow any connection with feminism, even as they accept most or all of its precepts, needs more explaining.

I don’t remember a time in my life when I did not identify as a feminist. I grew up in a neighborhood in which almost all of the children my age were boys; my mother’s friends and both my parents’ siblings had far more sons than daughters. From a very, very early age, the adults in my life were constantly reminding me that I could not do many of the things that my friends could do because I was required to be ladylike. These scoldings only ever succeeded in making me angry at the thought that I should be limited in ways that my peers, who were no different from me in any meaningful way, were not.

This was the source of my feminism:  an unarticulated fury at not being allowed to make my own choices without the interference of others. It had little to do with other people’s attitudes or opinions about what I should be. I didn’t care that pejoratives like dirty, rough, obnoxious, willful and, later, loose might be attached to me in the minds of people around me (as one well-intentioned neighbor once pointed out to me when I was around 12, people will make assumptions about a girl who is always seen surrounded by boys). My only question was, am I able to do the things that I want to do?

How that question is answered by women around the country varies according to their class, race, education, ethnic background, and aspirations. There is certainly a lot more to be done in terms of removing obstacles placed in front of women in both their professional and personal lives.

But it is also true that much of the discussion being had by some feminists feels tangential to this question. I rarely recognize myself or my concerns in the posts I read on feminist blogs, and I often find them disempowering. I’ve found myself thinking several times over the years that the only people who have ever made me feel as though I were a frail flower, unable to handle the vicissitudes of adulthood without a big strong protector to carry me through are women calling themselves feminists.

The message I’d like to come away with is, here’s what you can do. The message I usually come away with is, here’s what they’re doing to you. It’s one thing to note some injustice and call for political or social action to combat it.  It’s another to take to the internet to scold some powerless jackass who has said/written/done something offensive.  Or to pretend that The Media, is a monolithic and irresistible force that necessarily dictates how we see ourselves and each other.

Where someone in power—a legislator or a supervisor, or boss—is working against me, it makes sense to yell about it from the rooftops.  But in all other cases, I feel perfectly capable of telling the offender where to go and how to get there and going on with my life.  Better yet, I’m happy to ignore him all together.

There seem to be no shortage of women who enjoy writing and reading about what men and some not terribly empowered women think about women’s rights, and I suppose it’s none of my business that this discussion is going on, even if I personally find it unhelpful. I can ignore that discussion just as I ignore the odd “Men’s Rights Advocate” obsessed with his oppression by the all-powerful matriarchy, without giving up my own very strong identity with the word “feminist.”  For me, that identity has been with me too long and meant too much to let someone else take it away.

But I can’t blame those women who take it a step farther and disavow the term along with the somewhat insular community that seems to own it.

Setting Boundaries

Daniel_Tosh_at_Boston_University

I have a simple, straight-forward rule when it comes to comedians:  You can be offensive, or you can be unfunny, but you are not allowed to be both at the same time.  About eighty percent of the Daniel Tosh clips I’ve seen break this rule.  The other twenty percent manage to follow it by being merely unfunny.  So when I heard something about Tosh, a rape joke, and subsequent outrage I thought, Well, yeah.

For those who aren’t familiar: an anonymous audience member posted the following about a Daniel Tosh show at the Laugh Factory:

So Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have. So I didn’t appreciate Daniel Tosh (or anyone!) telling me I should find them funny. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape.

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

The post made the rounds and eventually led to an apology from Tosh.  This incident has inspired some interesting discussions about whether there are lines comics absolutely should not cross.  Are some topics so hurtful they cannot possibly be made funny?

I think, for most comedians, “funny” is defined by what makes the particular set of people sitting in front of you laugh.  If the only way to get the audience on your side is to stand on your head and light your farts on fire for 7 minutes than you do what you have to do.  I suspect it was an understanding of this imperative that led Louis CK to fire off the supportive tweet that so disappointed some of his fans.  UPDATE:  Louis was not being supportive so much as watching Tosh from an undisclosed location in Vermont with no idea that any of this was happening.

The comedian’s shameless willingness to do whatever it takes to get a laugh out of us means that the person we are watching onstage is a reflection of the people watching back.  Are rape jokes funny?  Depends on the crowd.

The objection to that kind of moral relativism in comedy is rooted in the idea that jokes like Tosh’s are part of a larger problem, a culture that trivializes women’s experiences, especially rape and domestic abuse.  I agree that there is a positive feedback loop in which performers attempt to give the people what they want while simultaneously training them to want more of what they’ve been given.

But expecting a guy trying to get a laugh in a club to take on the burden of breaking that loop is unrealistic and unfair.   As long as there exists an audience that will laugh at a rape joke, there will be a performer who will tell it.  Shaming Tosh into a disingenuous apology and his peers into silence will not change that.  If anything, it fuels the kind of resentment that hardens positions.

That’s not to say that the woman who walked out of Tosh’s show was wrong to feel the way she did, or to walk out.  Given my offensive/unfunny rule, I would have done the same (though I would not have demanded that he stop his act because I found it offensive). I’m just arguing that the demand that Tosh stop making those kinds of jokes, or that his fans stop laughing at them, is both futile and unjustified.

Rather than declaring certain topics off limits, I think the best response is to show painfully unfunny comedians like Tosh what a smart, insightful joke on a difficult subject looks like (NSFW):

Roots

Don and Sally Draper

Over at Capital New York, Steven Boone complains that the acclaimed series Mad Men, described as “Roots for white people”, is too limited in its appeal:

I’m not sure ‘Mad Men’ is just ‘for white people,’ but it hasn’t meant anything to me. The party, in fact, represented the first time I watched a complete ‘Mad Men’ episode, despite all I’ve heard about the show from my critic friends.

Like Boone, I grew up seeing white as a default for human.  Too young to give much thought to how or why the life of a white man (rich or otherwise) might differ from my own, I happily imagined myself dining with the Carringtons, solving crimes with Simon and Simon and even taking some sweet jumps with the Duke boys (I can’t begin to describe what I felt when I found out what the stars and bars on the General Lee represented—or, for that matter, who it was named for).

I did feel the need to correct for gender in my fantasies—I always imagined myself as a female version of the character, still oblivious to how my race or gender might interfere with making my fantasy a reality.  That gender was a bigger obstacle to my identification with my favorite characters than race may explain in part why it’s easier for me to find a point of entry into Mad Men than for Boone.  The show feels less like Roots for White People to me than Roots for Women:  the story of where we were and how got here from there.  My strongest sensation watching the first few episodes was a desire to go find Gloria Steinem and kiss her on the mouth.

But, setting aside the show’s knack for handling gender, I think viewing its characters as somehow beyond the reach or concern of black viewers gives too little credit to both the viewers and the richness of the writing.

Boone singles out the long-suffering Betty Draper as an example of the disconnect:

Money and status seem to be on the line in nearly every encounter.  The direction and music seemed designed to convey that nothing is sadder than being overweight and shoved to the margins of the rat race.  Betty is living through the aftermath of a divorce and a cancer scare, sure, but the fact that she can’t suffer these misfortunes in style, like Jackie O strutting down Madison Avenue, compounds the tragedy…The ultimate nightmare for these folks is to lose the lifestyle that government and industry have sold to them since the end of World War II, as the (White) American Dream, the one that Don sells for a living. Their greatest unspoken fear is to go to the dogs, the dogs being, well, the redlined, depressed neighborhoods where I come from.

Unlike virtually every other Mad Men fan I’ve ever spoken to, I have a soft spot for Betty Draper.  More than any other character, she strikes me as a creature entirely of someone else’s making, lacking even the most basic resources (e.g., self-awareness and imagination) required to move beyond her shortcomings.  When we first met Betty Draper, she was already a miserable person, she just didn’t know it yet.  Since discovering her own misery, she has collapsed into an unattractive pile of binge-eating and petty grievances.  The collapse has only served to make her more alone, as the weight-gain divides her from her social circle and the pettiness has divided her from everyone else, including her daughter.

Nothing in that description of Betty’s sadness is particular to being a wealthy, pretty white woman in the suburbs in the 1960s.  Those characteristics supply the particulars of Betty’s problems, but the problems themselves—what happens when you go out into the world and discover it has little or nothing in common with your imaginings of it—is something we’ve all experienced, if in a much less dramatic fashion.  Being born rich and white and pretty does nothing to protect you from quiet desperation, and it follows that a rich, white pretty character, written well, can be as compelling an example of universal themes as any other.

I would also argue that money and status is on the line in nearly every encounter for all of us.  In every corner of the world, no matter how destitute, there is hierarchy and there is reputation.  People everywhere twist themselves in knots to keep up appearances, to convince their peers that they are a certain kind of person and not some other kind.  Being perceived as something less than what you are, or what you aspire to be, is painful for all of us, regardless of where we come from.

As Ralph Ellison explained when asked how black writers could “escape provincialism” when writing from the perspective of a minority:

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel–and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?–is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

That said, Mad Men’s appeal is as much about particulars as it is about universal themes.  Boone suggests that the Drapers might benefit from a few episodes overseen by Quentin Tarantino, “a product of multi-ethnic working class neighborhoods in L.A.”  I think the suggestion is an interesting one for a different reason.  Tarantino’s films are always ultimately about the technique of filmmaking, the absolute power a director wields in manipulating our emotions and attention through a particular camera angle or cast of light combined with just the right choice of music.

Manipulating viewers’ emotions is, of course, Don Draper’s bread and butter, a fact demonstrated nicely by the floor wax western for which Draper won an award last season.  Tarantino is particularly obsessed with the 70s golden age of film, works created by men Don Draper’s age, or slightly younger.  I think Tarantino is as likely to pick Draper’s brain about character as he is to mock him.

That Mad Men depicts a time and place that, among other things, set the stage for Quentin Tarantino, is a clue to part of what makes it compelling.  While my later awareness of race, class and gender may have alienated me from certain characters, I still watched and learned from them. They still serve as reference points for important moments in my own development and were an important source of information (or, sometimes, misinformation) about what I could expect my life to look like.

Mad Men has recreated the world that was an essential ingredient in the creation of those characters.  At its best, the show gives us a glimpse of the last days of a way of life that was torn apart in order to create the current one.  As such, it has something to say about the forces that shaped and continue to shape us all.

The Privilege of Owning Oneself

Campbell, Joan

In the second season of Mad Men, as Sterling Cooper attempts to seize the opportunity to land American Airlines, a large client faced with the challenge of reassuring customers after a plane crash in Jamaica Bay, Pete Campbell sees an opportunity for himself.  When Campbell is unable to grieve for his father, who died in the crash, he instead uses his loss as a selling point in the pitch meeting with AA.  The move is so cold, so disturbing, it’s hard to know how to react  Do you pity Campbell for being so emotionally repressed, or feel disgust at his callousness?

In subsequent episodes, you see how little there is that Campbell won’t do to get ahead.  His ruthlessness is not the kind that you grudgingly admire or at least respect—he is as petty as he is calculating, and makes his transgressions with all of the twisted glee of a young boy torturing a small animal.

It seemed natural to me to compare Campbell’s ambition with Joan Holloway’s in the most recent episode, as the action once again begins with his willingness to abandon any sense of propriety for the sake of landing an account.  When one of the three men who will decide whether to grant the firm its first car account, the beautiful but useless Jaguar, demands a night with Joan, Campbell does not hesitate to bring the proposal to her.  Joan ultimately takes the deal, helping the firm land the client in exchange for becoming a partner.

This turn of events has bothered some people, while others feel the need to excuse Joan by citing her coming struggles as a single mother or the trauma of divorce and disappointment.  But it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that she is not so different from Pete Campbell, seeing her advantage and being willing to take it—not as a forgivable act of desperation, but as the act of an adult making a trade off with her eyes wide open.

Joan’s decision has to be viewed in the context of the episode.  Peggy is finally ready to step out from the shadow of her mentor (her farewell to Draper is one of the best scenes of the show’s history); Megan insists that she should have as much freedom to meet the demands of her career as Draper.

And then there’s Joan. For five seasons, she has tread dangerously close to the cliché of the promiscuous young woman looking for love and only finding men who use her. It is to the writers’ credit that she and her relationships have always been something more complicated than this, but that archetype has always hovered over her storylines. Joan was “raised to be desired” and she has done everything she could to become, as the Jaguar tagline puts it, something beautiful that some lucky man can truly own.

In the episode before this, sitting at the bar with Draper, she seems to finally realize how undesirable that is.  Watching another drab executive sitting at the bar, trolling for someone who is not his wife, she pities the woman trapped at home whose only sin is being familiar, even as she recognizes that the executive could not be otherwise.  “It’s just the way he is.  And maybe it’s just the way she is.”  With that, Joan is done with looking to be kept.

An episode later, when the chance for money and professional advancement presents itself, she takes it.  As Campbell says, “We’ve all had nights in our lives where we’ve made mistakes for free.”

The initial shift goes unnoticed by Don, who offers her a few dollars of “mad money” to get home just in case she isn’t able to reel in the drab exec.  The other men in the office are equally oblivious to the changes around them, spending most of last week’s episode gathered in a fishbowl conference room, indulging a juvenile fantasy about mistresses and cars while the women of the show begin to live their own, independent lives. The talented copywriter Ginsburg seems to be the only one who notices—while his colleagues drool over the hiked up skirt of a young girl draped across the conference table, Ginsburg sees that the real action is with the young wife who took a break from pursuing her career to grab a quick piece from an obliging husband.

What’s interesting to me is, for all the talk of Joan’s “lowering herself” and the evils of prostitution, not much is said about the Jaguar dealer who made the proposition to begin with.  When Campbell suggests that he ask Joan out, he balks, aware that there aren’t many women willing to sleep with him for free.  If Joan is now “just a prostitute” he is just a trick, and not a particularly savvy one at that. In his desperation he is offering to base a business decision on one night with a stranger he will never see again.

By contrast, Joan has created a lasting revenue stream and has a voting share of an up and coming firm on Madison Ave.  And she isn’t owned by anyone.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Cosmo

Christie_Brinkley_(1) (534x800)285px-Girl_silhouette.svgHEART TRUTH FW11 NEW YORK 2/9/2010

On the day my law degree arrived in the mail I knew that it was imperative that I get it framed right away. I may have had the smarts to earn the degree, but that would not stop me from sitting on it, or leaving it around for the dog to chew on, or dropping a lit cigarette on it. If this thing were going to last more than a week, I needed to slip it into some sort of protective covering.

So I added a quick stop at the mall for frame-shopping to my plans for the day, which included driving over to a girlfriend’s house to pick her up and wander Los Angeles as we did in our college days. When I arrived at her house, it was clear that it would be a while before she was ready to leave.

She sat in her living room, glued to a show on E!/VH1/A&E—who would have thought the day would come when a show on of those channels could easily appear on either of the other two? The show was about Jessica Simpson. Or about leggy blondes, in general, I’m not sure. Either way, my friend was led to the same depressing conclusion: even if I lost every spare pound, if I starved myself to death, I would never look like her.

The logic was unassailable, and since it applied equally to me, I joined her on the couch and together we slumped, my degree, along with our plans for the day, forgotten in a haze of self-pity. It took about 20 minutes for me to pop up, turn off the television, and shout, to myself as much as to anyone else, “I came over here on my way to buy a frame for my goddamned law degree, I will not pout about not being able to trade places with a woman who once struggled to comprehend the label on a can of tuna.”

And with that, we went on with our day.

It’s possible for me to separate many of the moments of my life into one of these two modes: times when I’ve stared in anguish at pretty ladies in magazines; and times when I’ve been so focused on living and scheming for the future that I forgot to care.

And then there’s a third category in which I focus on just how and why it is that the images of women I see around me can create such anguish, and what if anything should be done about it. The standard argument runs something like this: we feel bad about the way we look because these images make us believe we fall short. Change the images to something attainable (or, at least, recognizably human), and we’ll feel less pressured/full of self-loathing.

That all seems to follow well enough, but I can’t help feeling I’ve seen this movie before. When I was growing up, I heard a lot of people argue that it was very important for little black or brown girls like me to see “women who looked like them” on magazine covers, in fashion spreads and the like. This was the Age of Christie Brinkley: tall, toothy, long-legged blondes who certainly looked nothing like anyone I’d ever known.

Thirty years later, the range of complexions on the covers at the checkout has moved well beyond Ms. Brinkley. Salma Hayek, Beyonce Knowles, Taraji P. Henson, Freida Pinto, and Kim Kardashian are just a few of the women of color who have appeared on covers in recent years.

All of these women have at least one thing in common: not one of them looks a damn thing like me.

The truth is no magazine editor is ever going to put someone who looks like me on any page of any issue. These images aren’t intended to reflect reality but to create a fantasy world in which everyone is only as flawed as they need to be to hold your interest. The images change as the larger culture changes—from a pleasantly plump ideal in the 1800s to the boyish flappers to the anything but boyish Marilyn Monroe to Twiggy through the leggy blondes of my childhood and so on—but the one constant is that they never look like anyone you know.

I understand that there are young girls—and grown women—fixating on these fantastical images, doing themselves real harm out of a desire to reach an impossible ideal. The question is, what do you tell them? That they are correct to look to Cosmo for proof of their self-worth and that the main problem is that Cosmo’s editors refuse to give it to them?

There are entire regions of my body that I simply do not care for; regions responsible for creating that tarp-pulled-over-a-magazine-rack look whenever I try on a dress better suited to one of the ladies listed above. I spent all of my teens and much of my 20s believing that that was one of, if not the, most important fact about me, an indicator of fundamental worth. There was some comfort in articles railing against unrealistic body images, but not much.

If anything, those articles confirmed that I was right to think that it was vitally important that it be shown that I, or women who looked like me, were beautiful. Which does more to elevate a woman’s form over her personhood, a retouched perfume ad or a 300+ word post on Megan Fox’s pores complete with labeled close-ups?

It’s not that I’m opposed to efforts to promote more realistic images of women in pop culture, if for no other reason than a concern for the women who consider it a professional necessity to actually live this ideal. But I also know that the gulf between me and a photoshopped Victoria’s Secret model is only slightly larger than the gulf between me and a Victoria’s Secret model in the flesh, and seeing a voluptuous size 14 isn’t going to earn me any kudos when faced with my boyish frame in the mirror.

The real comfort came from those moments of clarity in which I realized that my figure was pretty low on the list of important things to know about me, ranking well below degrees earned, friends made and the life I hoped to create for myself.

I think it’s more productive, not to mention empowering, to argue that it’s possible that you are, alas, not as pretty as the lady on the cover, and that there’s really no reason you should give a damn.

The Problem is Choice: A Defense of Mass Effect 3

[SPOILERS]

First some background:  In March of this year, video game developer Bioware released the much-anticipated third installment of Mass Effect.  The game tells the story of a human soldier called Shepard living hundreds of years in the future, who, with the aid of an intergalactic crew, saves the galaxy from a mysterious ancient threat.  Bioware games are known for allowing players a large amount of leeway in developing both the main character and the larger story, presenting in-game choices that determine how the character is treated by others and how the story unfolds.  Players also have a great deal of freedom in designing the look of the hero, which is how I can save the galaxy as a middle-aged black woman with a sharp ‘fro. 

It’s probably safe to assume that I am the only Bioware fanatic who started playing the games because a blogger at the Atlantic told me to.  I hadn’t fallen in love with a video game since Tekken 3, and I hadn’t found myself really immersed in one since the King’s Quest series (it still boggles my mind to think how far graphics have come since the awkward, pixelated Sir Graham of my childhood).

It was slow-going at first.  The first Mass Effect was pretty to look at, and who doesn’t love space, but I’ve always been a little weak when it comes to actually killing bad guys and rolling around a lot of uninhabited planets in a glorified jeep bored me to tears.  It wasn’t until I encountered Matriarch Benezia that I found myself sucked into the game.  First, there was the adrenaline rush—I died no fewer than 4 times taking on Benezia and her multi-species army, making that final win one of those awesome, dance-around-your-desk-in-celebration-of-your-bad-assedness kind of moments.

And of course, that was followed by the Tough Choice.  The Bioware writers do love their moral dilemmas, and this was the first really difficult one of the game.  You are face to face with the Rachni Queen, the last living member of an insectoid species that had previously provoked a galaxy-wide war.  She vows that, if you let her live, she will travel to a remote part of space and regenerate her species in peace.  You have to decide whether to trust her, and risk another bloodbath, or condemn her species to extinction.  Not five minutes after I had the pleasure of shooting the last Asari commando, I was forced to examine basic beliefs about how and whether I might have the right to take the life of a being that posed no immediate threat to me.

The first and (especially) second Mass Effect games did a wonderful job of balancing the pure satisfaction of shooting at shit with a complex, nuanced story that touched on issues of race, gender, violence and the effort to impose order on a diverse, chaotic universe.

And then came 3.  I knew before it was released that a hectic schedule would keep me from indulging right away.  I kept my head down and did my best to avoid spoilers as I heard people first rave about the game, and then begin to complain about how awful the ending was.  When I heard rumors that the ending might be changed to appease critics(thankfully untrue), I rushed to finish it so that I could have the original experience intended by the team of creators I had so come to admire across 4 games (the two Mass Effects and Dragon Age I and II).

As much as I enjoyed the first two games, Mass Effect 3 was the first in which I can say that I loved every second of gameplay.  There was no mission that dragged, no character that didn’t pull me in, no mini-game that became tedious.  And the third game managed to resolve the central tension of the first two in a way that impressed me beyond anything that the Bioware folks had done before.

Throughout the first two games, Shepard is constantly walking the line between a sclerotic galactic bureaucracy on one side and the pull to a lawless vigilantism on the other.  In the first, the focus is on the Council, a panel made up of the galaxy’s three most advanced species, that does as much to hamper Shepard’s mission as to empower her.  In the second, Shepard has no choice but to throw her lot in with Cerberus, a rogue organization run by a shadowy figure for whom the ends always justify the means.

Most of the Tough Choices in the previous games are variations on this theme; as a player is faced with one option that may have rough consequences but is in keeping with principle and another that violates some moral rule but is arguably justified by circumstances.

But the chaotic events of ME3 render that dichotomy obsolete as galactic civilizations are shredded one after the other.  Some are destroyed right away, others manage to linger a bit longer, but all are torn apart by something too large to be constrained by the choices of individuals.

In this new reality, even Shepard’s personal relationships become unpredictable.  Lovers have moved on, friends leave for other crews, and some of them die in gut-wrenching scenes.  Embarrassed as I am to admit it, there were times while playing the last game when actual tears formed in my eyes, when an hour after I’d stopped playing I still found myself feeling sad, as though I’d really lost someone important to me.

I can see how some people saw this as a betrayal.  After 80+ hours living in a universe of fairly clear-cut choices with somewhat predictable consequences, a player must now sit by, helpless, watching events unfold with only the most limited ability to affect the outcome.

The game could have ended with Shepard and her team dead but the galaxy saved.  It could have ended with the hero and his/her betrothed on a beach, toasting the defeat of the galactic threat.  The creators might have written up these and several more endings, and allowed the choices of players to determine which actually materialized.  The latter is what most of the disappointed fans seem to have wanted.  But for me, there was something honest and grown up about the shift from Tough Choices to Cold Reality—an acknowledgment that those battles for power and control that seem so hugely important can only come to nothing when placed against the vastness and chaos of the universe.

Moffat Puts Humanity in its Place

 

Words I never thought I’d utter:  A little over a year ago, I fell in love with a British children’s scifi show.  Doctor Who chronicles the adventures of “the doctor”, the last of the Time Lords, a race of aliens who had the power to travel through time, and served as its stewards.  The doctor leads a lonely existence, traveling throughout time and space both for pleasure and to keep others from interfering with the set course of history.  He has a fascination with the inhabitants of earth, and will generally invite at least one member of the species along for company.

The show has been on air off and on since the 1960s, but its most recent incarnation began in 2005.  Lead writer Russell T. Davies oversaw a show that often reached embarrassing heights of sentimentality, and occasionally veered off into self parody as with this image of the Doctor as Christ figure from the episode Voyage of the Damned:

Doctor Who Ascends to the Heavens

Despite those shortcomings, the charm of the show’s star, Scottish actor David Tennant, combined with a view of the universe as a romantic frontier and humanity as a young species forever poised on the edge of greatness was irresistible for softies like myself, however corny.  In episode after episode, the doctor rescues our fledgling species from the more advanced, and more sinister creatures of the universe.  When people were not hapless victims, they were great explorers, spurred by a uniquely human desire to discover the unknown.

Davies and Tennant both left the show in 2009, passing the torch to lead writer Steven Moffat and actor Matt Smith.  I don’t generally like changes to my favorite shows, but working in Moffat’s favor was that he was the writer responsible for many of the best episodes of the show, including both my favorite and second favorite of the series.  Working against him was my serious abandonment issues brought on by the loss of Tennant (to give some idea of the intensity of my devotion to beloved characters, it wasn’t until well into Tennant’s second season that I’d stopped comparing him unfavorably with his predecessor, Christopher Eccleston).

Having fully mourned the loss of Tennant, and unexpectedly faced with an abundance of free time, I am rewatching the first season and finding an appreciation for the Doctor as written by Moffat and inhabited by Smith that surpasses all my previous admiration for the show.

Though Moffat has said he views the show as primarily aimed at children, under his direction the storylines have taken on a much less romantic, much more complex tone than anything that aired under Davies.  Moffat’s elevation precipitated a downgrading of humanity, which has been placed in a universe in which earth is, at best an irrelevant backwater, and at worst, the province of a weak and prejudiced species that is in constant need of scolding and guidance.  While human beings continue to be the central characters of each episode, the plots make clear that humanity is incidental to the great events of the universe.

The change is only hinted at in the first episode, which serves mainly as an introduction to the characters.  But in the second episode, The Beast Below, we are introduced to an image of humanity that would have broken Tennant’s doctor’s heart.  The earth has become uninhabitable, and what’s left of the United Kingdom travels through space on an enormous ship searching for a homeland.  The doctor discovers the Queen’s terrible secret—the ship is powered not by engines, but by a space whale that has been continuously tortured for centuries to keep it moving.  Horrified, the doctor flies into a rage, at one point thundering, “Nobody talk to me, no one human has anything to say to me today.”

The full extent of humanity’s folly becomes clear when it’s revealed that the whale had volunteered to keep the ship moving.  As the last of its species, it took pity on human children as the earth burned, and sought to save what people it could by carrying them through space on its back.  Presumably out of fear that the animal would one day tire of its burden, human leaders turned a laser on the pain center of its brain, zapping it repeatedly to prod it on.  This distrustful, ungrateful, and cruel species is nothing like the precocious innocents of the Davies era.

Another demotion comes in the two parter, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood.  Here the human drive to explore the unknown has potentially disastrous consequences, as a group of scientists reaching deep into the earth’s core disturb an ancient race of sentient beings, Homo reptilia.  Displaced by the rise of the apes, the species retreated underground thousands of years ago hoping that primate domination would be short-lived.  The approach of human explorers is taken as an attack, threatening to plunge the planet into a bloody civil war.

Two things struck me about this episode.  The most obvious in light the discussion above is that, once again, human moral frailty is on display.  When one of the reptilia is taken hostage, rather than protecting her as a bargaining chip to be exchanged for human hostages, Ambrose, a hostage taker who has lost her family to the reptilia,allows herself to be provoked into killing the creature, making war all but certain.

But more interesting is how much less special Homo sapiens suddenly becomes.  It’s already been established that human beings are not the only intelligent specie s in the universe, and are in fact not very advanced in comparison to other species.  What’s more, the kindness of at least one creature, the space whale, has underlined just how cruel and shameful humanity can be when it’s survival is threatened.  With the introduction of another, equally intelligent, equally complex species on our own planet (one that in fact predates us), human beings can no longer make any claim to the centrality granted them by Davies.

The greatest demotion yet comes in the first two episodes of the current season.  We discover that there is a species, the Silence, that has existed in the shadows, just outside human consciousness throughout human history, guiding our every move through hypnotic suggestion.  The greatest human achievement, the moon landing, occurred not because of the human drive to know, but because, as the doctor explains, “the Silence needed a space suit.”

In a universe teeming with species crisscrossing the stars, effortlessly communicating across space and time, humanity is the equivalent of a small tribe on a remote island, allowed to continue in an ancient way of life because of the mercy of those far more advanced.

Much as I loved the sense of wonder often created by Davies’ far more human-centric universe, Moffat’s gives me so much more to chew on.  There is something comforting about a universe that is independent of human faults and prejudices, and a great deal more that is terrifying about a universe in which humanity might be destroyed on the whim of forces we neither understand nor control.  That tension makes for great television, and introduces a welcome dose of reality into a show about an alien who travels through space and time in a little blue box.

The Day After Mother’s Day

My mother wandering Europe in the 70s

For what would turn out to be our last Mother’s Day, I sent my mother two cards—one for that year, and the one that I had purchased but forgotten to mail the year before.  We were never really Mother’s Day people.

On the rare occasion I remembered to call my mother on the day itself (as opposed to two or three days later) there would be about 45 seconds of holiday formalities before getting to our actual conversation.  The call would start something like this:

“Hi Ma, Happy Mother’s Day”

“Thank you.”

“You doing anything today?”

“I was thinking I might shampoo the carpet.”

“Whatever makes you happy.”

Calls on her birthday followed much the same pattern.

But now that she’s gone, Mother’s Day looms rather large for me.  Beginning a few weeks before, that word, Mother, starts being repeated in every commercial on television.  Products with no particular maternal tie in—cell phones, laptops, cars, ice cream—suddenly become “just the thing for mom.”

And I find myself trying to avoid any mention of my mother.  Not for my sake, but for the sake of others.

It feels rude, when people are going on about their plans, or how their mothers drive them crazy, to mention the fact that I don’t have a mother anymore.  Suddenly they feel bad, and then I feel the need to awkwardly reassure them—“No, no it’s ok.  Really, I barely even notice anymore.”

It’s not that Mother’s Day is a day of sadness for me.  It’s just a day of somewhat cruel irony.  After 28 years celebrating the day sporadically and in the most half-assed way possible, I now spend it trying to avoid speaking or thinking of my mother.  It’s as though I’m being forced to make up for all of the Mother’s Days I forgot by being uncomfortably conscious of every one from now on.

I know there are people who will go to a parent’s grave on a holiday or a birthday.  In fact, our most elaborate Mother’s Day celebration was spent at my grandmother’s grave shortly after she passed away.  We actually got dressed up and bought flowers that year.  But it seems odd to celebrate in death what we rarely celebrated when my mother was alive.

And I frankly don’t understand funerals or cemeteries.  In fact, I think there’s a link between our lackadaisical approach to Mother’s Day and my total inability to understand or relate to the sanctioned ways of mourning.

My mother was, in many ways, an odd woman.  The highest praise she could give anyone or anything was to say that it was “different.”  She was constantly hunting for novelty—from acting classes and high heeled sneakers, to lectures on Jung and learning Reiki.  She looked for things that would make her happy and, though she arguably never really found them, she knew they were not anywhere obvious.  She had the courage to search for joy in the oddest places, and the much greater courage it took to abandon paths that turned out to be fruitless.

I’ve inherited her restlessness, her hunger for novelty, her insistence that things in her life either be just so or not at all.  It is, without question, an enormous pain in the ass.  I’ve never lived anywhere for longer than 2 years unless I was in school.  It was only two years ago that I, for the first time, took a job that was a natural and logical next step from my last job (as opposed to say, transitioning from law clerk to secretary to retail).

But every time I find myself looking around and thinking, “ugh, I did this yesterday, enough already!”, it’s a reminder that I’m walking around with my mother whispering in my ear, telling me to find my own way.

When my mother died, all I wanted to do is buy as many live crabs as I could carry, steam them with beer and sit around telling stories, cracking open crabs with my bare hands, and getting drunk on Coors Light while my mother’s old 45s played in the background (only for my mother would I drink Coors).  There is nothing that says Pat Frost like freshly steamed crabs, watered-down beer and Motown, and nothing that invokes her memory less than a funeral parlor or a graveyard.

And when it came to Mother’s Day, all those commercials, all the things you do—flowers and brunch—we never, ever did, because it just didn’t make sense for us.  I have never in my life had brunch with my mother.  I never gave her flowers, and she didn’t seem particularly interested in them.  It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Mother’s Day brunches or flowers, or the rest of it—just that, for us, celebrating Mother’s Day the way everyone else did would have required us both to become completely different people for a day.  And that seemed like an odd way to thank her for the role she played in my life.

My belated call and her determination not to waste a Sunday when the carpets needed cleaning more or less captured the essence of who we were with each other.  I was always well-intentioned but kind of absent-minded and my mother was always ruining my weekends with household projects.

Through a strange sequence of events, I find myself about 2 miles away from both the hospital my mother was born in and the house where she spent her first 12 years.  I’ll probably stroll over that way, though I don’t know what to do once I get there.  Stand and stare and picture my mother reading comic books on the stoop, or chasing after her older brothers, I guess. I’ll figure it out when the time comes.

Mother’s Day is over, and I am once again free to remember my mother the way I choose to.

Blooming Late

College graduation--here's to 10 years in the wilderness

 

I managed to get through all of my twenties without once deciding to do anything.  I decided not to do a lot of things.  I started by deciding not to go for a degree that would indicate to employers that I had marketable skills.  Among the majors I chose not to pursue:  physics, international relations, economics, business, music industry, anthropology, computer science, classics, history, political science, and, astronomy.  I received my oh-so-useful bachelor’s in philosophy just in time for a recession, and ended up deciding not to turn down a job as a secretary in an engineering firm.  The firm didn’t actually need a secretary; it was just an office full of men who believed having an engineering degree meant they were above answering the three phone calls that came in each week.

The original plan had been to spend a year in Americorps, being a productive and proactive do-gooder, before going into some kind of graduate program, most likely law school.  But, for reasons I never completely understood, I was never offered a position with Americorps, and so, in addition to not turning down the secretary job, I did not turn down an offer to work at a trendy clothing store in the mall.

Every day I arrived at the engineering firm at 8:30 am, reading emails, catching up on the news, and waiting for something to do.  That wait ended at 4:30, when I would rush home to change for the mall, where I worked from 6 until 10, folding sweaters and helping young girls find the pair of jeans that would make boys fall in love with them, bringing everlasting happiness.

About a month of that was enough for me to decide that I didn’t want to do it anymore, and I began filling out law school applications.  There were a couple of schools I absolutely wanted to attend, and several others that seemed perfectly respectable.  After being turned down by all of the former, I acquiesced in attending one of the latter.

And so went the next 9 years.  I fell into jobs, fell into cities, eventually fell into a career and even fell into a relationship, all without once deciding on any of it.

Some people reach a birthday ending in zero and decide it’s time to take stock of their lives and the choices they’ve made, wondering if they shouldn’t make changes.  I didn’t ask those sorts of questions on my thirtieth birthday, because I had long since given up on the idea that my life was a thing that I could choose or mold to my benefit.  So that night, I went where I was told to go, had what looked very much like an enjoyable evening, and then went home.  Who was I to ask for anything more than that?

I had elevated giving in to a high art, learning to close my eyes and lay prone while the current carried me wherever it chose.  And once I arrived I would do my best to make do.  From time to time, I would imagine what life might look like if I had the power to create it, but it always felt like a waste of time.  Like daydreaming about being a ballerina, or Queen of England.  This was the fate that had been chosen for me, and that was that.

But now, almost exactly halfway between 31 and 32, I seem to have been given a reprieve.  I have been released from all obligations, and not only do I once again have permission to make up my mind about what my life should look like, I am required to do so.

There is some residual baggage from my old life wearing me down—for example, a mountain of debt, courtesy of law school—but all of it pales in comparison to the stuff I’ve gotten rid of (or, to be more accurate, the stuff that’s gotten rid of me), the stuff that made making my own choices seem like a childish luxury I’d lost ages ago.

And it’s more than outweighed by the new advantages I’ve gained—an understanding of myself and the larger world that I couldn’t even approach ten years ago.  Suddenly, the better part of my thirties looks like a blank slate for me to fill in, rather than a sentence I’m forced to endure because of bad luck and bad timing.

Of course, that’s all incredibly terrifying.  It was the terror of facing that blank slate that led me to follow the current to begin with.  But now I know what the alternative looks like.  I know just how mediocre a life you can end up with when ending up places is your strategy.

My favorite feminist argument, the speech that, for me, said everything that needed to be said in support of women’s equality, has always been Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Solitude of the Self.  As much as I loved that speech when I first read it in high school, I did not have a visceral, gut-level understanding of her words until now.  I can’t think of any better summation of what I’ve learned so far than this:

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty.

Addiction as Plot Gimmick

  

I’ve always felt that the secret to really enjoying primetime television was low standards.  I don’t necessarily mean that as a dig.  Writing a 20 to 50 minute play that can appeal to a broad spectrum of households while offending no one and competing against hundreds of other channels, Netflix, Youtube and video games is hard enough.  Expecting someone to do that and mix in a dollop of genius or originality is really asking for the moon.

So, I tend to stick to the shows that recognize their limits, and thrive within them.  For the first two seasons, Sex and the City fell into this category.  Bad puns, two dimensional characters, cheap sex jokes.  It was a winning formula.  Then somebody decided to pretend that these women and their problems were real, and they started having affairs and getting cancer and the whole thing just fell apart.

Which brings me to Doctor Gregory House.  My defense of this show to those who would criticize it is that it’s essentially Columbo.  Grizzled old eccentric with few social graces who is tolerated because he’s the only person in the world who can do what he does.  Even a hospital administrator to play the role of the put upon middle manager, struggling to rein in a rogue officer as higher ups breathe down her neck.  Plus exotic diseases.  I did not want, and rarely received, anything more from this show.

But it became clear as time went on that the writers felt inadequate, believing their show’s weekly formula needed to be spiced up.  Clearly, these guys were unfamiliar with a little show called Law and Order.  So I was forced to endure more and more details of House’s various neuroses and anecdotes about his personal history.  There was even an embarrassingly awkward, multi-episode One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rip off, in which House finally seeks treatment for his Vicodin-addiction.  This proved to be the beginning of the end, as House’s recovery meant he was slightly nicer and more emotionally available—cue romance with the hospital administrator who had suddenly stopped complaining about higher ups and started wearing increasingly deep necklines.

Still I watched, cringing through episode after episode, until, finally, there was a break in the weekly shark jump.  House had been doing his damndest to Be a Good Person ever since rehab.  And then, in the season finale, he discovered that there was no pay off.  Bad things still happened, he still felt alone and miserable much of the time.  And for a brief moment, I thought this show was actually going to delve into something real.

Because this is an experience that’s been had by several people I’ve known.  At some point during the course of their addiction, they concluded that the problem in their lives was the drug.  Eliminate the drug, beat the addiction, and a whole world of prosperity and love and middle class utopia would open before their eyes.  This idea isn’t discouraged by counselors, (or at least, it wasn’t discouraged by the counselors my friends saw) and understandably so.  It’s something to hold onto while fighting through withdrawal, and the loss of friends and a whole world that had become familiar and comfortable, however destructive it may have been.

The problem is, when it’s all over, a person is faced with a life that is just as difficult and unforgiving as before, except without the escape.  One friend came back from a Narcotics Anonymous meeting especially distraught.  One of the other members, someone who had been clean for more than ten years, stood up and said that he knew it was a good day because he hadn’t eaten out of the trash.  This was horrifying to my friend.  Clean for over a decade, and the best thing you can say is I’m not eating garbage??  That’s what I have to look forward to?  I might as well just go back to dope!

I had this conversation more than once, and it terrified me.  I couldn’t bear to think of seeing a friend go back to that life.  Yet there was nothing I could say to argue the point.  All of the things that made using seem inviting by comparison never went away, if anything they had become amplified and other things had been added.  Some friends had come from abusive homes, and still lived in them.  Some had dropped out of school, and were now ten years older without a diploma or any (legal) work history.  Some wore their pasts on their sleeves, meaning everyone who met them suspected them and treated them accordingly.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe their lives, however difficult now, weren’t better than they had been when they were using.  It was that it was clear to both of us that, on certain days in particular, that difference hardly seemed large enough to justify the effort.  And if they had started using again, upset as I may have been, I would have also, in some ways, understood why.  So much of our cultural mythology reinforces the idea that people end up where they are as a direct result of personal virtues—willpower, discipline, work ethic.  But the truth is, for a lot of people, the choice is between options that are all bad, one only slightly more so than the other, and each likely to get them dismissed by those of us who came into the world with better.

This was a story that I’d never seen told anywhere, and for a moment, I thought it was incredibly brave and remarkable that a popular, primetime show on a major network would be the one to tackle it.  And then, just as House was ready to reach for his old stash—the hospital administrator showed up to make out with him.

I was only able to stomach a few more episodes after that before calling it quits.  Hooking up characters that had no business with each other; coming up with excuses for House to visit his hometown or confront his daddy issues; increasingly silly cases designed to allow characters to dispense dime-store philosophy, all of this I could take.  Actually, I’m not going to lie, that last one was a feature not a bug for me.  But walking up to the line of something bigger and better, just before diving into a new level of mediocrity is just a dealbreaker.

The Tired Nonconformist

Discussing the early years in which he was struggling to make it as a writer, Serling said, “I remember a five-month period late in 1952 when my diet consisted chiefly of black coffee and fingernails.”

Rod Serling made two attempts to get a teleplay based on the story of Emmet Till’s death on the air.  For those who do not know, Emmet Till was a 14 year old black boy from Chicago who, while visiting relatives in Mississippi, was beaten to death for flirting with a white woman.  Till’s murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Anticipating the sponsors’ fear of offending southern viewers, Serling first submitted a script about a New England jury acquitting the murderer of an elderly Jewish man.  By the time it aired, Noon on Doomsday had become the story of a “good, decent American boy momentarily gone wrong”, acquitted of killing a nondescript “foreigner.”

A year later, Serling wrote A Town has Turned to Dust, again closely following the events of the Till case.  And again sponsors intervened, this time moving the story to the old west, and changing the black victim into a Mexican man whose crime was falling in love with a white shopkeeper’s wife.  Serling said later that by the time the show aired, “my script had turned to dust.”  (In 1998, the Sci Fi Channel produced a show based on this script, set in the future and featuring a Native American victim.  While meant to be a tribute to Serling, given the history of this particular script, moving further away from the author’s original intent struck me as adding insult to injury).

Battles like these earned Serling the nickname, “TVs angry young man.”  He spent years fighting sponsors, pitching socially conscious scripts to men whose interest was in selling products—everything from soap to steel—and keeping viewers contented and shopping.

Finally, Serling waved the white flag.  He would stop trying to weigh in on the controversies of the day and instead confine himself to stories of space travel, aliens, and alternate realities.  Asked whether his new series, would “play it safe”, Serling replied, “If, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that’s what he means he’s quite right. I’m not going to delve into controversy. Somebody asked me the other day if this means that I’m going to be a meek conformist, and my answer is no. I’m just acting the role of a tired non-conformist.”

When most people think of The Twilight Zone, they think, Weird.  Weird stories, weird settings, weird characters.  Many of the episodes clearly exist for the sole purpose of asking what if:  aliens offering us an end to war and hunger, just so we get plump enough to eat; the last man on earth finding himself surrounded by thousands of books to pass the time, only to shatter his coke bottle glasses before reading the first line; a delusional man struggling to warn fellow passengers about an actual bogeyman on the wing of a plane.

But in the midst of all this weird was something more subtle and more profound.  One of my favorite episodes (coincidentally featuring William Shatner who appeared in both the final version of A Town has Turned to Dust and as the delusional man in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet described above) is Nick of Time.  A newlywed couple, Don and Pat, are driving to New York for their honeymoon when their car breaks down in Ridgeview, Ohio.  While the car is being worked on, they stop in a local diner for lunch, only to discover that one of the penny fortune telling machines in the shop can actually tell the future.  Don, a superstitious man, refuses to leave, asking the machine question after question about his life and career.  Pat, of course, refuses to believe the machine really works at first, but in the end decides that question is moot:

“It doesn’t matter whether it can foretell the future, what matters is whether you believe more in luck and in fortune than you do in yourself.  You can decide your own life…We can have a wonderful life together if we make it wonderful ourselves.  I don’t want to know what’s going to happen.  I want us to make it happen together.”

Even faced with a mechanism for knowing with absolute certainty what the consequences of every choice will be, we still have an obligation to take responsibility for ourselves and make the choices on our own.  Substitute for a penny fortune telling machine any dogma, or group, or leader, and this story is about more than a superstitious accountant from Ohio.

In a song and dance number that really must be seen, Craig Ferguson describes the British sci-fi series Doctor Who as a show about “the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force.”  For an American show that ran from 1959 to 1965, that kind of triumph was far from certain, even in the short term, let alone thousands of years from now.  Instead of assuring success, The Twilight Zone found a way to say what Serling’s sponsors were always terrified of saying:  we are a violent, myopic, and xenophobic species and yet each of us has the capacity for incredible restraint, vision and love.  Regardless of which side wins in the end, episodes featuring a war between our better angels and our inner demons served to remind us that both exist; that neither has yet earned the right to claim victory over humanity; and, most importantly, that we bear full responsibility for the final outcome.

Rock Misses Opportunity in Good Hair

Chris Rock is a funny guy.  But he’s not Ken Burns.  So when I heard he was making a documentary I didn’t expect an educational experience so much as RealityTV meets sketch comedy.  This is pretty much what Good Hair is—an hour and a half of Rock cracking wise at women spending far too much time and money on a hairstyle (a folly that is by no means peculiar to black women or, for that matter, to women).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     It seems strange that something as trivial as hair should be the topic of a documentary in the first place.  Even stranger that that documentary should cause so much consternation.  But Rock begins the trailer and the film itself with an anecdote that perfectly conveys just how sensitive a topic this is for so many women.  His little girl came to him and asked, “Daddy, why don’t I have good hair?”  This film is an attempt to answer her and, while his intentions are good (and I think the complaints that he has “put our business in the street” are nonsensical), there’s just no question he’s squandered an opportunity.  

 

I decided to go natural in the summer of 2009.  I began this project as I begin all projects:  I asked the internet what to do.  Now, whatever sociopolitical issues may be implicated in the hairstyles of women of African descent, the fact was all I was doing was changing my hair.  And, unlike a perm or dye job or even braids, this was a style that could be gotten rid of in an hour or less.  So, I went online in search of practical advice.  Not emotional support, or spiritual guidance, but the sort of wisdom that can be found in any issue of any magazine at your local supermarket checkout. 

 

But, as this process continued, I kept having these revelations.  It began with this one:  At 29 years old, I had never styled my hair in its natural state.  I had no idea how it worked–what products to use; how it responded to heat or humidity; how I would wear it for a formal occasion as opposed to a night out.  I couldn’t help but be awed by the fact that there could be a part of me that I had never seen, never touched, that was completely alien to me.  I needed strangers with blogs to tell me how to comb my own hair. 

Here’s where I started

 

And that was just the beginning.  Because, when I found these blogs (and there are  many), the content wasn’t just a light-hearted how-to.  There were teary-eyed testimonials, about hating the little kinks that insistently pushed out from under expensive perms every month and struggling to fight a lifetime of programming that said “new growth” needed to be yanked straight at the first opportunity.  Some women wrote about mothers and aunts who cried the first time their baby girls walked in with the tiny afro that had replaced long, chemically treated tresses.  They wrote about the freedom they now felt, how this had affirmed for themselves and to the world around them that they really were happy with who they were. 

 

A little shaken by all this catharsis, I soldiered on.  According to my new mentors, I had two options.  There was the Big Chop, which is exactly what it sounds like—chop off all the chemically treated hair leaving a Teeny Weeny Afro (TWA).  Or I could spend a year or so transitioning—wearing braids and twists and the like while I allowed my straightened hair to grow off gradually.  One of the few things I remembered about my natural hair was that there was a lot of it.  I remembered my mother approaching my head with all the determination and fury of a prizefighter, hacking away at it, beating it into submission.  If I was going to have to do that, I wanted to start out with as little hair as possible.  Hopefully, by the time my hair had reached its full fighting weight I would have learned enough to handle it. 

 

When the cut was done I stared at the mirror in horror.  I thought I looked as though I were wearing an afro wig on a sketch comedy show.  I couldn’t hide it in a ponytail, or plop a hat on top of it.  I was going to have to walk around with this thing on my head.  The stylist must have noticed the stunned look on my face, because she began to talk me down.  She showed me different styles, complimented my curl pattern, and reassured me that I had done the right thing. 

 

Aaaaaaand here’s where I ended up


 And, 15 months later, there’s no question that I did.  For the first time in my life, I love my hair.  It’s thick and healthy and no longer a stiff, damaged facsimile of someone else’s hair.  I’m no longer walking around with a billboard on my head that says there’s some part of me that’s so defective, so shameful, that I need to spend thousands of dollars and endure scalp burns and hundreds of hours in a salon in order to fix it. 

 

And 15 months later…

This is why I think Good Hair was such a disappointment to so many people.  Those of us who have gone from wondering, as Rock’s daughter did, why we didn’t have good hair, to talking people’s ears off about the latest product that pampers our most precious feature, hoped to see a movie that outlined that journey for others.  We were looking for vindication in a world where even black hair care magazines offer no advice to women who refuse to pack their hair with chemicals every other month. 

 

Instead, Rock proceeded as if none of us existed, as if every black woman in the country were spending a thousand dollars a pop on weaves, holding lovers at bay to protect hair snatched off another woman’s head, thousands of miles away.  That’s a much funnier image than interviews with dozens of women who started with a Google search and ended with a spiritual awakening, but it doesn’t do much to answer his daughter’s question. 

For my part, I’m grateful to the hundreds of women who have posted on blogs, message boards and youtube; who have provided both comfort and advice to thousands of us that they’ll never see or know.  They may never reach the audience Rock has access to, but they’ve made it that much easier for women like me to reclaim a part of themselves we didn’t know we’d given up.  

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Frida Kahlo

Frida with her husband, artist Diego Rivera, in 1932

For years I have had a love/horrified by relationship with Frida Kahlo. I would be in a bookstore or a library and see a book full of her paintings and run to it, only to find myself cringing at every page.

My favorite painting to look away from–my favorite painting period–is called The Suicide of Dorothy Hale. It is exactly what it sounds like–a woman committing suicide.

And it’s gory–the woman jumped from a skyscraper and she lay in the foreground, blood around her corpse, her eyes open and sightless. The painting was commissioned by someone who, if I have the story right, wanted to give a portrait of Ms. Hale to her poor grieving mother and who was silly enough to think that Frida Kahlo was going to do a dull, straight-forward portrait.

On reflection I realize that the reason I rush to those paintings I can’t stand to look at is kind of embedded in that story. Poor Mrs. Hale lived every parent’s worst nightmare. Not only did she outlive a child, but the child died by her own hand. In her grief, she sought an image that would in some way negate that tragedy. She wanted to see her daughter beautiful and alive and, most importantly, immortal.

Instead, Frida painted her broken and bloody.

It’s not just that her paintings were sad. My second favorite painting, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, is sad but it’s a beautiful sad; a romantic sad. It’s the kind of sad that you snuggle up to and get comfortable with.

Frida’s paintings make you uncomfortable, make you want to look away.

They are a reminder that, however we romanticize it, pain is just that. It’s raw and ugly and makes you cringe and, more often than not, no matter how hard you stare at it, it just stares back. When you look away, it still stares back. It remains, insistent, unyielding, inescapable.
Ok, so that may seem kind of bleak, but I think it’s also empowering. Terrible things happen, they’re happening right now and more of them are going to happen tomorrow. We go out of our way to avoid them, we’re overcome with anxiety at the prospect of dealing with them, we gloss them over, suppress them, act them out in ways that are counterproductive…
But suppose we just sat and looked them in the eye? Suppose we stared at them, and let them stare back?

My point is not that in doing this we come to realize that things aren’t as bad as we thought; that we can stare down our problems like we stare down bullies and watch them run and hide.

This is the bully that kicks your ass when you challenge him. This is the bully that keeps coming back, every day after school and gives you the most humiliating beat down of your young life.

I’m saying what if we stared down that guy? What if we just looked him in the eye and, when the ass-kicking was over, went on and lived another day, knowing it would end the same way?

I think there’s a wisdom in living life that way. It’s an insistence that you choose what your life will be, rather than letting circumstances choose for you. It’s an insistence on integrity, that you will be whole and true to yourself even when someone or something tempts you to sink into a hole.

It’s a recognition that you are not the terrible thing that happened, you’re Frida Fucking Kahlo and yes you have a unibrow and a mustache and a cracked spine and a fat whore of a husband but goddamn can you paint.