Nth Wave Feminism

Blogger on Hiatus

2012-02-13T07:45:00.000-05:00

I'm preparing to take a new job in six weeks, so my blogging has ceased for now, and, depending on how the new job goes, possibly for quite a while. As a conciliatory gesture, I'd like to share with you a post by a friend of mine, about some bullshit in the music world.

Airing Dirty Laundry

2012-02-12T10:27:00.004-05:00

First, an apology: I'm sorry I've been doing a bad job of keeping up with writing here. I'm traveling to Tallahassee (three hours each way, 2-3 days a week) to do archival research, so I've been sans internet access all day, and on the days I'm in town I need to do things like prevent student insurrections (grade papers) and ensure basic survival (grocery shop, sleep). So I can't promise that I'm about to become a better and more consistent blogger, but I can say that I WANT to be a better and more consistent blogger and will do my best.

Anyway. Onward. Trigger warnings for anti-queer hate.

By now, many of you have probably read this, a masterful piece in Rolling Stone about the Anoka-Hennepin school district and its issues with bullycide. If you haven't read it, go do so, and keep some Kleenex next to you. Rolling Stone is not in the habit of issuing trigger warnings, so I shall do so here: trigger warning for suicide and anti-queer hate.

And then there's this, a story about how Suffolk County, Virginia schools are considering banning "cross-gender dressing," which: I have no idea what that even means. Does that mean girls have to wear dresses and boys have to wear bolo ties or girls have to wear Mary Janes and boys have to wear top hats? What about people who aren't boys or girls? Do they wear space suits? The rationale here is that they're trying to prevent bullying, but what they are doing IS bullying. It's saying in no uncertain terms, "Just conform to this hegemonic binary gender expression and we'll leave you alone." As though there aren't gender-conforming queer people and gender non-conforming straight people. But perhaps more important, as though the people supporting this policy aren't bullies themselves. There is nothing okay about telling someone that they need to dress in a way that conforms to your expectations for them based on how you read their gender. It's horrendous.

Readers of Nth Wave and watchers of the news and even listeners to notorious asshole Dan Savage are aware of how straighties bully queer people. This isn't news to most people. Which doesn't mean it's something we should just get over and accept as a fact of life, of course. The Rolling Stone piece calls this a war on gay teens - I'd say it's a war on queer teens - and it is, and we have to keep fighting it.

But. There is also this kind of bullying and exclusion and violence within queer communities and radical feminist communities. Alert Reader Steve sent me this awhile back: it's a radical feminist collective blog hub. Don't get your hopes up. What it is is mostly a collection of radical feminists freaking out about trans people in a really gross way. And they are calling themselves radical feminists, not Republicans, not Bible-believing Christians, not Tea Party Patriots. Radical feminists. These people are advocating, directly or indirectly, anti-trans violence.

And then there's this Jack Halberstam interview in Lambda Literary, which I just read for the first time after hearing alllllll different kinds of people getting really excited about how great it is and a very few people pointing out that it's loaded with anti-trans bigotry.

There are things to like about the interview, like this:

The premise of The Queer Art of Failure is that at this moment, intense capitalist accumulation, we’re living with one model of success and failure and one model alone. And that model is, that to make money and to advance professionally is what it means to be successful, and everything else is failure. That’s given us a zero-sum model against which we can judge our achievements in life, and that’s very unfortunate, because it squashes out all kinds of people doing alternative things for alternative reasons that may be much more valuable to their communities and to the world. So if you’re absolutely dedicated to organic farming, recycling, playing in a punk band on the weekend, and blogging, and you do some temp work in your spare time, you’re making a big contribution to the world we live in but you are not able to feed into the model of success that we’ve set out. So the book suggests that in such a moment, the moment of Occupy Wall Street and the one percent and the 99%, we need better models of success and failure. We need to measure ourselves against different standards. And the book proposes that queer people have actually been doing this for a long time precisely because we quickly fall out of the prevailing model of success and failure by not managing to meet the standards of gender and sexuality set for us by our usually straight families. Therefore there might be insights into failure that come out of queer art and queer culture.

But then there's this:

It’s not totally important to my understanding of self that other people read me as a man. It’s important that they read me as masculine, and it’s important that they read me in some way that I’m at odds with female embodiment. But it’s also important that they read me as someone who is not going to have that tension resolved by getting some surgeries. We’re living in a moment where people are pretty creative about their relationship to gender variance, and I think that the queer worlds we live in can tolerate a lot of different gender designations, so I don’t see why we can’t hold onto “butch” along with a whole set of other markers and identity, difference, embodiment, masculinity, variance and so on.

Emphasis mine. How dismissive can you be? You know? "Getting some surgeries"? While it's true that not all trans people desire surgery - or hormones - for some people, access to surgery is a life-or-death issue. Halberstam just runs right over that in attempt to prove... something. I'm not quite sure what.

And then there are the radical queer feminist folks who talk about how hard it is to date trans men [PDF], and people like this lady who told me to my face that gender-conforming feminine women who people don't read as gay are "attractive" and other queer ladies aren't.

So, you know, here's an example of why tokenism doesn't work, I guess. One queer person cannot speak for all queer people, not even Jack Halberstam. Some queer people are bigots. Some feminists advocate violence. We've got to work on our own house repairs even as we try to get the straighties to stop picking on us all the time. It can be exhausting, but we're going to have to do it together so that we can all keep building. Burning everything to the ground isn't going to fix the problems faced by those kids in Michele Bachmann's school district.

"This is Panic Attack Rap"

2012-01-27T15:18:00.005-05:00

Title thanks to Das Racist.

We are in a crisis that happens to be playing out in schools but isn't only about schools. It's about white supremacy, and those cuts run deep.

I assume NWF readers are aware of big events and generally keeping up with the news, so you probably already know about the ABSOLUTE FUCKING RACISM happening in Arizona schools right now. Here's one recap, and more from Common Dreams:

Arizona is closing public school ethnic studies programs that accuse whites of oppressing Chicanos and Native Americans on the grounds that these historical lessons constitute racist hate speech. But scholars and activists are protesting the state’s latest move as racist itself because it keeps students from these communities from learning about their own history and heroes.

As Paul Ortiz - a fellow radical historian at my university - says:

These people want us to mow their lawns, pick their crops, clean their public restrooms, teach their kids, and truck their consumer goods from coast to coast and yet they will not allow our children to read books about their own histories? What is the problem with this country?

And then:

What I'm trying to figure out is this: what is happening today in white American culture that is driving this kind of rage towards children of color? Many of us experienced these types of abuses in the 1970s as kids but had hoped that the nation had moved beyond pulverizing the minds of its children. Guess not....

Right?!

The Tucson kids didn't take this shit lying down. Students from three high schools organized a walk-out. They met in a park, marched to the Tuscon United School District, and held teach-ins on the lawn. It's tear-jerking, it's awe-inspiring, it's heroic.

So, I didn't let this shit go untouched on my own Facebook wall. I had a conversation with Alert Reader Steve, who correctly pointed out that this is all part of the system and asked what I'd do to change it. I said this:

I want colleges of education and [the American Educational Research Association] and [Teach For America] to be less attached to assimilation, for instance. Instead of asking, "What's wrong with the brown kids that's keeping them from succeeding in schools," and placing the blame on communities of color, they could do some self-reflection and ask what's wrong with The System, and what they're doing to create schools in which only some kids can succeed. All the big research money goes to asking the "what's wrong with brown people" question, and when you ask the "what's wrong with the schools/system/us" question, you're a radical and they don't have to listen to you anymore. It's easy for colleges of ed and AERA to look at what's going on in Tucson right now and say "that's wrong," but haven't looked at their complicity in the system that allows it. They're still working under assumptions that the system that works for white people should work for everyone, for instance. They still, in general, marginalize other narratives of success and draw lines around what it means to be a "good kid" or a "productive adult." There is too much meritocracy at work. You should see the reactions that happen when you get white grad students to read Faces at the Bottom of the Well, for instance. I've seen it. It isn't pretty.

As for queer stuff - because, let's be real, the patriarchy is both white and hetero - AERA has been almost militantly silent. They have said they "don't take stances on political issues," even as kids are dying. Queer kids aren't a political issue. These institutions sanction a system that allows the queer kid to be kept out of school for "his safety" but lets the bullies have access to school. That happens all the time. They perpetuate a system that requires cis/hetero gender conformity. Etc.

In the cases of queer and/or of-color populations, schools are forces of colonization, socialization, and assimilation. That's gotta stop, because it's a milder form of what's going on here. Tuscon is a really visible attempt to silence and erase people, but in many ways it's more of a quantitative difference than a qualitative one.

#I'mnevergoingtogetajob

We should be panicking right now.

Image via.

On Coming Out When You're Famous

2012-01-17T13:58:00.004-05:00

Or, at least, semi-famous.

I'm kind of a comedy nerd, and I've long had mixed feelings about that. Sometimes I get disgusted with comedians - most frequently straight white dudes, but not always - who use their comedy to pick on people with less social capital than them. Misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are frequently part of comedians' acts. I'm looking at you, Andrew Dice Clay, Patrice O'Neal, Steven Wright, Tracy Morgan, etc.

But there are some comedians out there whom I usually feel are reliably progressive and cool. Jimmy Dore, for instance, frequently talks about how he believes that it's okay to pick on people with more social capital than you (Wall Street CEOs) but not less (homeless people). Louis CK, while sometimes a raging gender essentialist, can call out racists like you wouldn't believe. Jamie Kilstein not only does expressly political comedy, he hosts a podcast about progressive issues meant to counter the shit we get from the mainstream media. And Todd Glass, who used to co-host a podcast with Jimmy Dore, has been calling for homophobes to kill themselves for at least the last five years, which is about as long as I've been following his career.

Glass used to - and still does - talk about how people opposing gay rights and shit like that in the 2000s is like someone calling for segregation in 1989. It doesn't make sense, and people are going to be embarrassed as shit about this later, or at least, so we hope.

Well, yesterday, on fellow comedian Marc Maron's podcast, Todd Glass came out as gay. I sat down on the floor of my dining room and just listened to Todd talk about his experiences as a closeted gay comedian and didn't move for a solid 45 minutes. Then I re-listened to the podcast this morning, and I'll probably do it again later today. At first I wasn't convinced it was for real, but it is. Todd Glass is gay. This is really, really great.

It's not just great because I think gay people are great - though it is for that reason also - but because Glass is a really famous comedian. He's had enormous levels of success in the field, appeared on Last Comic Standing, and is frequently referred to as "the comedian's comedian." He's brilliant. And now he's out, and people like Dice Clay and Morgan and those other shitheads who know him are going to have to think again about their homophobic shit because one of their friends is gay now.

What got me super teared up was his statement that he's coming out now because he can't watch any more kids kill themselves and stay silent. He's 100% right. People need to come out, we need to be out, because, as I've said before, it's making the world safer.

Caveat: Don't come out if it's not safe for you. I get it. Some of us are privileged to be able to be out and not lose our homes or put ourselves at the risk for violence from family or roommates or whatever. Not everyone is. This is important.

I wrote a gushy e-mail to Todd Glass and I'm sure he's going to get more of those. People everywhere will be as delighted and filled with warmth as I am, I hope. If I could give Todd Glass a huge hug, I would. I'm so glad he's using his privilege to help people. He alluded to starting a campaign of some kind to help kids. Todd, I eagerly await the details. I'm so proud of you.

Racism Antidote

2012-01-02T18:13:00.000-05:00

For some reason I encountered a lot of random racism over the holidays, I have no idea why. That shit can wear on a person, even a person with a nice protective coating of white privilege, so I headed over to Yo, Is This Racist? to recover. I recommend it for whenever you have a need to see someone straighten out racists and also be very funny. And just because we heart you so much, dear readers, I've compiled a list of my favorites for your reading pleasure.

The Should-Be-Obvious-But-Sadly-Needs-Pointing-Out:

Black face is racist.
Confederate flags are racist.
Black sororities aren't racist.
Swastikas are racist.

On Privilege

Slightly more complex issues:

Just funny:

Bonus:

Math!

Happy New Year, everybody; I wish you a racism-free 2012.

Silencing Efforts: It's Time for the Homophobic Student Evaluations

2012-01-02T10:06:00.006-05:00

In the last year, my university switched to online student evaluations. This is bad in the sense that fewer students fill them out, and when they do, tend to spend less time on them. But it's kinda cool in that I get to see them much sooner and, if a student raises a point I want to consider, I have time to implement it before I'm halfway through the next semester.

I don't want to seem like an egomaniac or anything, but I'm a pretty good teacher. I've won the university-wide teaching award, and my evaluations are generally quite positive. This semester, some students wrote some particularly sweet and lovely things in their evaluations, and I find this quite touching, and encouraging. I also find it necessary to my survival in this field, because I also got a handful of students who wrote that they wished I didn't talk about queer stuff so much. They talked about my "gay agenda" and how I'm apparently biased.

They're right, you know. I do have a gay agenda and I'm totes biased. My agenda and bias paid off, though, because I made my classroom safer for some of my kids, the ones who feel uncomfortable and unsafe in other settings. That I didn't uphold heteronormativity, as was expected of me, or pretend to be "neutral" on these issues, is good. It's also fucking scary as hell. I don't want to stop teaching, ever.

Part of the reason I think that the kids felt like we talked about queer history so much is that they never hear about it anywhere else. As Kristen said, any amount of discussion about queer stuff above 0% is a lot to them, because it's novel. But I've written about how it is essential to teach queer history before. And because I like it and I can, I'm going to go ahead and quote Feinberg again here:

I always wanted to leave something important behind. Remember the history book you gave me for Christmas?... I've been going to the library, looking up our history. There's a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven't always been hated. Why didn't we grow up knowing that?... It's changed the way I think. I grew up believing the way things are now is the way they've always been, so why even bother trying to change the world? But just finding out that it was ever different, even if it was long ago, made me feel things could change again. Whether or not I live to see it. At work, when everyone else is at lunch, I've been typesetting all the history I've found, trying to make it look as important as it feels to me. That's what I want to leave behind, Ruth - the history of this ancient path we're walking. I want it to help us restore our dignity.

- Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Remember that? So, so important. My queer kids aren't finding themselves in history in other classes, so it's my fucking responsibility to make sure they find themselves in my class.

A lot of these students are wrestling with the idea that anyone who isn't a cis straight white man has bias. Because I'm out to my students, I take great risk, as do all out people in education everywhere. I can't cave to their expectations that I will be neutral. It's not possible for me. I'm not neutral. Neutral means invisibility, and invisibility means death, in the most literal sense. Queer kids are killing themselves, getting kicked out of their homes, running away from abusive situations. Am I supposed to be quiet when my kids are dying? Fuck that. I'll take making some privileged straight kids annoyed or uncomfortable over letting kids die because they think they're alone.

I wrote about a study awhile back that talked about how openly queer teachers are negatively reviewed thanks to "modern homonegativity" (the "I'm not anti-gay but..." shit), and - more interesting to me - comments on the study that come from people in the field, some of whom are openly queer. I'm going to re-post the comment I liked the most from the Inside Higher Ed piece here, and I want to emphasize that he's talking about doctoral students:

Michael Dumas: Interestingly, I just taught about LGBT issues last night in a doctoral class on diversity in education. The course is taught by two instructors, both African American, one straight-identified female, and one gay male (me). If this year's student evaluations are similar to last year's, I fully expect to see one or two students complain that "too much time" was spent on gay issues, even though the LGBT content is--coincidentally-- only about 1/10 of the subject matter covered. I also can expect similarly critical comments about how much time was spent on race and African Americans, even though both instructors are conscious about including other populations in readings, media and examples. I don't want to comment on methodological rigor of the study without reading it, but I can say that it is consistent with my experience, and that of a whole range of LGBT, women and people of color in the academy. And yes, negative and untruthful course evaluations can hurt one in the tenure and promotion process.   Now, as for the question raised above about why a professor would reveal her or his sexual orientation, the study states that sexual orientation was indicated in the autobiographical statement given to research participants. It did NOT say that instructors listed their sexual identity on the syllabus itself! And yes, students do talk amongst themselves about who their professors are as people; they see photos on our desks; they know about our involvement in various advocacy groups on campus; and, importantly, they make assumptions based on gender performance (length of hair, style of dress, speaking voice). So it is entirely reasonable that a student would be aware of, or at least presume, specific sexual identities.

Yesssssssss. You can go back to my earlier post on that, linked to above, to see my commentary on it. I'm posting it here for therapeutic reasons. I needed to read that again.

Look, I don't expect that my department is going to let me off the hook for the homophobic evaluations, ever. I have every expectation of having to explain myself. And so I wrote this post in large part to strengthen myself. I need to have all these thoughts at the top of my head when I get called in for the meeting. Maybe I will be surprised, but I expect that someone will tell me to tone it down, or be strategic, or talk about queer stuff less. I'm hoping the folks in my department will be allies, but I'm never sure. And isn't that a problem?

Image via.

Gay People Can Be Homophobic Too

2011-12-30T17:44:00.004-05:00

As anyone who's read this blog for half a minute surely realizes, Kyrie and I are really not into the bigotry thing. I don't care who it's coming from. I don't give people passes on bigotry for any of the following reasons (or any other reasons):

1. I know them.
2. I like/love them.
3. I am related to them.
4. They're smart, professional, good at their jobs, famous, whatever.
5. They have friends/relatives belonging to the group against which they are bigoted.
6. They themselves belong to the group against which they are bigoted.

That last point is called "internalized [homophobia/racism/misogyny/whatever]." It happens all the time. Therefore, having gay friends or being gay is not an excuse to be homophobic.

Sidenote: If you know me IRL, and you've ever said that I'm your lesbian friend in order to seem cool for having a lesbian friend or to make yourself sound like less of a bigot, we're not really friends.

People who think or say things like visibly queer people are just trying to get attention really need to check themselves. For starters, they're trying to police other peoples' self-expression. There are a lot of gay people out there who want us to all just be more heteronormative because they think it will make things easier for them in some way. Like, if we can be just like straight people, everything will be fine. We won't piss off straight people, and we need them, or so this argument goes. We'll get to have marriage or whatever the fuck.

Break to remind you that I don't really care about gay marriage beyond "queer people should have access to institutions that exist." It isn't the end of the struggs. Aaaaaaand: fuck needing straight people to like us, and avoiding pissing them off. I'll piss off straight people all day and night if it will make things safer for one queer kid. That's why I posted the picture of my tattoo again.

My silences have not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

That's Audre Lorde. Again. Always.

Some of us don't want to be just like straight people. Also also, not all straight people are the same [really!]. Plenty of straight people aren't into the normativity project either.

The idea that we should all be more normative and less visibly queer is super gross because it's upholding the idea that we should be a certain way, and that way is rooted in cis privilege and heteronormativity. My friend Kristen and I are having this conversation about good bodies and bad bodies, or heterocapitalistic bodies/rebellious bodies. She mentioned an old livejournal that basically criticized people for looking too dykey. Whatever that means. As she said, in her brilliant way with words [this was an IM conversation, you should read K's blog for other really interesting stuff]:

it was like you could be femme or androdynous but you had to be really skinny and well dressed, and people would get called like butch and bulldyke and stuff. which is homophobia, right, that you draw a line around skinny femme girls and skinny justin beiber girls and use homophobic language/policing to keep everyone else out. the same way LGB organizations want to keep out people who are trans and sex workers (good gay/bad queer) (bodies that conform to heterocap logic/bodies that rebel)

This idea that queer people should be less visibly queer is a way of telling us to get in line with the heteropatriarchy and I'm not having it. It also reifies the idea that there is a gender binary that exists, and men should look/act/be a certain way and women should look/act/be a certain way and there is a limited range of expression within that. You already know I think that's bullshit.

BUT there's also this whole other thing, which is that without visibly queer people - those of us who read super gay wherever we go or who work our asses off to raise queer visibility in all kinds of ways or who are "professional gays" or all of those things or lots of other things - without us? You don't get a movement, you don't get any progress at all. Conforming and limited- or in-visibility can work for some people, I guess, but Stonewall didn't happen because of people who tried to be under the radar. The people who have the most to lose are often the ones who suffer the most from heteronormativity/patriarchy/capitalism. If you think that that's just a way of "getting attention," you've got another think coming.

And all of this shit is stuff I've heard from gay people. There are gay people out there who want many of us to stop "trying to get attention" by "flaunting our sexual orientation." These people are not my people, I don't care if they're gay. They're homophobic. And they need to learn their history and open their eyes because their homophobia really hurts, and the people it hurts are often the people out there doing the most and/or taking the most shit because of the homophobia that these attitudes hold up.

And if any of them ever tell me I don't look gay again, I'm going to flip a table over and leave.

Financial Advice from a Laydee: Credit Cards and the Ethical Use Thereof

2011-12-27T11:22:00.000-05:00

Hey, everyone, hope the holidays are treating you well. It's that time of year where we reflect and make resolutions and decompress, so, if you'll allow me, I shall continue with the money talk. Getting your money in order does a great deal for stress-reduction. Finance is self-care, y'all.

So, credit cards. They are capable of both great good and great evil ...

THE GOOD:

Credit cards are great for online purchases, because they have fraud protection. Are you using debit cards to buy things online? STOP IT. PayPal? They're the devil. In 12 years I've had fraudulent purchases made on my card twice, and in both instances my credit card company [A.] noticed it before I did and [B.] held me liable for none of it.
I think they're also a better choice than debit cards for gas stations, because gas stations are notoriously rife with skimmers.

A skimmer

If you have a credit card, you should check out what protections you get from it. For instance, extra insurance on rental cars is pretty common. Some cards give you a few months' warranty on any expensive electronics you buy with them.
They can help you build a credit history, if that's important to you. There are other ways to live, but not having a decent credit history can limit your ability to borrow money or find an apartment to rent.
If your credit history is bad or nonexistent, you can get a secured credit card. They're not so much "credit" because you give them money up front to hold. But if you demonstrate that you can use it within the company's parameters, then they'll eventually upgrade you to the usual type of credit card. A friend of mine used this approach when she moved to another country where her American credit rating had no clout.

THE BAD:

Credit cards redistribute wealth from poor to wealthy. How? Every time you pay with a credit card, the seller has to pay a fee to your credit card company. The seller can't pass that fee along to you because their agreement with the credit card company expressly prohibits it. Folk with good credit (who are usually comparatively well-off) qualify for special rewards or cash back from their credit cards, which is funded from those fees everyone pays. It's like the opposite of how taxes should work in that we all pay more so that the least broke among us can pocket extra cash.
It's hard to avoid credit cards for a lot of purchases, like plane flights or computers, but when it comes to things like groceries I try to pay with cash. It's a simple way for me to help keep food cheap for everyone. Another approach (one that applies more to gas than groceries) is to look for vendors who offer a cash discount, since that's one way around the prohibition against vendor-applied fees.
It shocks me how many otherwise ethically-minded folk neglect this effect and advocate using a credit card for absolutely everything in order to rack up rewards.

What, not old enough for this?

Credit cards can be really, really bad for you if they're not compatible with your spending habits. I don't know whether they increase debt, but the average credit card debt in this country is something like $6k. J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly cut up his credit cards as a key part of getting out of debt, and recommends that others do the same.

Overall, it's like you have a tiny greedy bank CEO (or Viking, I guess that works, too) in your wallet, protecting you from fraud. That's a weird metaphor, but my point is that it's not always obvious how to use credit cards ethically. I've got a bit of a compromise going on ...

THE COMPROMISE:

I try to use cash for most everything I can, especially groceries, medicine, household necessaries, and utilities (well, I use bill-pay for the latter). This dovetails nicely with my budgeting method, wherein I withdraw a set amount of cash weekly. Win-win.
I use my card for car rentals, online shopping, tickets, hotel rooms, and big cost items where I need the fraud protection and/or warranties and insurance.

Next topic will be debt reduction, I think, but I'm totally open to suggestion for ethical/feminist finance topics.

A Letter to my Family

2011-12-23T09:42:00.000-05:00

These days I'm a lot more prone to responding to the articles my family sends me now and then. Including this piece by Fake Andy Rooney (original by Frank Kaiser). I originally responded, with an, "Um, I'm in the group he's knocking here," being not yet 40 myself, but I was told I didn't get it. Well, then! Time to bust out the big guns!

... But seriously, folks, I object to this because it lumps all over-40 women into one group with the same characteristics. While there are no doubt many women over 40 that have and value these qualities (for instance, it sounds like Other Relative identifies with them), there are others that emphatically do not. I'd like to see you try to put bright red lipstick on Susan Herr, or tell Gloria Steinem that she's sexy because of her willingness to praise others!

And yes, Sending Relative, it is ragging on young women; I'd say "get with it" yourself! When the writer says "women over 40 are x," (s)he's implying that women not over 40 are not x: i.e., whiny, not dignified, ugly in red lipstick. Implying that younger women can't have these qualities is just as shitty as saying all older women do. It's true that men are criticized in the piece, but it's for their taste in women; they're not viewed as an alternative target for the sexual impulses of old men (which is really heteronormative, by the way). You can tell from all the gendered compliments: do you really get the sense that the writer thinks men, unlike women, will watch a sports game they don't want to watch out of timidity or that they wear unflattering lipstick colors? (Also, if you read the original, un-plagiarized version, Kaiser makes it even clearer that he's drawing distinctions between older women and younger women. Who he appreciates for their "occasional innocence." Vomit.) You can arrive at the conclusion that young women are being implicitly criticized in this piece even without acknowledging the cultural context in which older and younger women are constantly pitted against each other, which, honestly, adds yet more weight to my argument.

Anyway, if you all think the article is awesome, then I'm glad you're enjoying yourselves. But if you send a sexist, ageist, heteronormative, and gender-essentialist article to a feminist blogger, you get a lecture in return :D Have a great holiday, folks.

Love,
Kyrie

PS: If you send me any more lists of tips on how to prevent getting raped, I will send you long discourses on rape culture. Consider yourselves warned :)

It's worth nothing that the post is also very cisnormative and gender-binary-enforcing, and the original post is also ableist; "I still appreciate the 20-year-old for her ... vigor."

The way this culture tends to bookmark older women as matronly and unattractive regardless of their individuality is a huge problem. But lumping them all into one group and fetishizing a set of characteristics you've arbitrarily projected onto them is certainly not the way to go about fixing it.

Fortunately in my case, Sending Relative seems to kind of like the occasions when I argue them into a corner, though I always forget this and automatically tense up for a counterattack. Note to self: do not underestimate family. Happy holidays, everyone, and best of luck to you if you end up arguing with your family :)

PENIS MOM HAHA BECAUSE MOMS DON'T HAVE PENISES!

2011-12-21T12:01:00.007-05:00

Except that some moms do. More on this in a moment.

First, a sidenote-style bit of business. I pulled my last blog, the one on Jane Ward's article about the relationships of trans men and femme ladies, because she wrote to me and said I mis-represented her. She offered, generously, to speak to me on the phone about it. I shall do that, once we set a time, and then revisit the topic.

Now, on to today's lesson. A person - Elizabeth, we shall call her, as that is her name - posted the link to this story on my Facebook wall. It's about a mom who objected to her school's solicitation of dads to help out with a construction project for a kids' activity. Go skim it, it's a quick read.

What follows is a summary of the conversation I had with Elizabeth. If I get her permission to quote her, I'll edit this and do so. Until then, I'll paraphrase.

I like the Penis Mom post all right until this part:

Ladies, this is not a situation of the men holding us back - we are holding ourselves back because we don't want to step forward if it is icky and muddy.

I think that's gross, and it's blaming women for hetero-patriarchal assumptions about gender norms, 100% of which are socialized. Some people like playing in the mud, and some don't, and the principal's assertion that SHE is a PROPER woman is ridic. But women aren't oppressed by the patriarchy because they don't like mud and to argue that they are is asinine.

Elizabeth pointed out that there's a lot of interesting stuff aside from that quote, including the fact that the word "penis" is somehow considered inappropriate for teenagers. She's right, I shouldn't just focus on that one sentence. Parents who think 13 year olds are too delicate to hear the word "penis" (imagine if the word had been "vagina") are probably totally terrified of sex as a concept and refuse to believe that their kids will engage in it and are probably also really into regulating the sex lives of strangers. Such people include those who are anti-choice and those who think that gay people are sinners. All three concepts are equally silly/awful.

Her larger point that it's intensely retro for anyone to argue that dads and not moms are the ones who should be invited to this is a good one. The concept the school folks were working with excludes anyone who doesn't come from a hetero two-parent household, really. And it tells the boys that they'd better be ready to set up a trébuchet and girls that they'd better never be into that. [And that no other people exist besides boys and girls.] Ugh. Heteronormativity for the win, again, some more. This is all gender training.

Also: I find it's much easier for us to get all up in arms about this kind of thing than it would be when dads are excluded from shit dealing with baking or whatever. You know? It's more acceptable for the weak to mimic the powerful than the other way around. I want to see this level of outrage around men not getting invited to after-school sewing shit and boys who want to wear dresses and whatever.

Elizabeth said she's not sure what to do about that, and I said: "About what? People who think that it's okay for women to, in at least some areas, tack to the more masculine activities, but it never appears to be okay for men to do things coded as feminine? Throw a fit about it. Like this lady did. And keep throwing fits about it."

There's also the issue that we can too easily erase people who are not male or female, or who are not men or women, or who are not masculine or feminine. If we can get rid of these ideas that people who were assigned one of only two options at birth must do certain things (and be with certain partners - again, homophobia alert) then we can more easily see, and accept, and cherish and admire and adore, the people who don't fit into our silly constructed gender binary in the first place.

Elizabeth made the argument that it's not really about "males and females," it's about power, and how, she says, Gloria Steinem argues that women should be looking for equal power, and that she (Elizabeth) is more interested in what as coded as weak or powerful.

Of course it has to do with "males and females." So many things are coded that way - almost everything, really. And things that are coded male/masculine are also coded as more powerful, and things that are coded as female/feminine are coded as weaker. And male/masculine and female/feminine don't even go together in nature, but in the cultural mind, they do.

It's an incomplete fight to say that women need access to the things coded as more powerful. That alone does nothing to upset the entirely constructed and fictional gender binary we live in. The trick to ending gender-based oppression isn't saying "women need to be invited to build machines in the mud," it's saying, "we need to stop coding things as masculine/powerful and feminine/weak." She's partly right that it's about power, but Steinem was working in a pretty limited second-wave context. I think we're beyond that now.

We need to do these things:
1. Realize that gender is constructed, and that there is nothing unnatural/aberrant/deviant/threatening about people not living up to the gender they were assigned at birth. Here's the thing: NO ONE lives up to the gender we were assigned at birth. Some people are just more obvious/visible about it, or disinterested in even trying.
2. Following from that, we can see that everything coded as masculine/powerful and feminine/weak is a lie based in bigotry and misogyny. And we can stop coding shit according to whether assigned-at-birth men or assigned-at-birth women do it.
3. AND THEN we can see that we're all just performing our genders (see #1 above), and I think life will get a lot easier for trans and genderqueer people, who get the shit kicked out of them in all kinds of literal and figurative ways for not conforming to the lie of the binary.
4. AND THEN we won't bat an eyelash if a girl comes to school in "boys' clothes" or a boy comes to school in "girls' clothes" and people will be free to be as masculine or feminine or whatever that they want, ANDDDDD masculine and feminine won't be the only choices. People will just be free to express themselves however they want and a lot of violence will end.
5. And we will, I fucking hope, stop having gay panic every five fucking seconds. I realize that a lot of comedians will be out of work, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

Financial Advice from a Laydee: Bargaining

2011-12-19T12:27:00.002-05:00

You guys, I am preeetty good at financial stuff. I am also perpetually bursting with financial advice and dying for an outlet. And since 'tis the season for it, I thought I'd start posting some of it.

What does this have to do with the rest of the blog? Plenty! For one, a lot of the financial advice out there is written by doodz. And, not to knock doodz, because they write tons of good stuff, but sometimes it doesn't translate. This is not because of our tiny math-allergic female brains, but because of society.

For example: bargaining. Every dood-written financial blog I've read eventually says something like, "You can get a discount on anything! Just ask for it!" Get Rich Slowly advocates doing this, as does Ramit Sethi. Once I decided to take Sethi's advice and try to negotiate a lower cable rate. I had in hand an advert for a low introductory rate that I did not qualify for, being an existing customer, and a set of suggested tactics from Sethi, including things like asking to speak with customer retention, that would supposedly help convince them to lower my rate. I stayed cool and friendly and I think I'm capable of sounding reasonably professional. And it did not work at all.

It also didn't work when I tried to bargain for a lower price on a used car. I chose to remain carless because the seller would not budge by even the smallest amount on the price. That just offends my principles. Who refuses to bargain on a used car? Incidentally, the only time I successfully negotiated a lower price on a car was when I was co-buying it with a dood. I could give you a couple more examples but let's just say it's a pattern. And it's not just me. Laydeez everywhere run up against walls when they try to buy cars or negotiate raises.

In fact, the only time I can think of that I successfully negotiated for something was with my landlord. When I first moved in, the dining room contained a giant free-standing wardrobe so that they could market it as a two bedroom. It took up an annoying amount of space and they refused to remove it. That is, until it came time to renew. Then, it became more worthwhile to deal with the wardrobe than to find a new tenant, especially one that might not pay on time regularly or keep the place spotless. And so I got my way eventually, not by negotiating but by establishing myself as a valuable tenant. And a couple years later, I got them to agree to shorter leases in order to keep me on. It's the usual drill: I did more work for less reward.

Sorry if this isn't very encouraging, but I think it's useful to know. The realization that I acquire bargaining power by building financial relationships rather than through charm means that when I move someplace new I spend a LOT of time looking for a good apartment, one that I am more likely to stay a while in. And I'm delaying buying a car, and if/when I do get one, I will plan on driving it to death. I may even hire a dood to negotiate the price for me. Perhaps most importantly, it means that when I look for a job, I pay attention to what they say about women. My current boss hires a lot of women and promoted that in my first phone interview with him, and that kind of thing definitely factors into a job search when you know you've got the raise-negotiation-odds stacked against you in general.

I hope this sort of thing is helpful. I'd like to continue writing about finance now and then because I am so tired of all the bullshit you hear regarding laydeez and financial literacy, like that "women also prefer to learn about money in person or in groups with others in their situation, as opposed to curling up with a book" (ref). Could that be because most of those books are written by men? Who are giving naive advice like, "go ahead, ask for a raise!" If the advice doesn't work for women, then women will stop reading and seek advice from their peers. Cuz bitches be rational.

Also! Readers, I'd love to hear about your experiences with negotiation, especially if you got it to work for you, and if you have any thoughts on how that intersects with any aspects of your identity.

Queer Families, Part 2/infinity

2011-11-30T11:15:00.004-05:00

So a couple weeks ago, I wrote a thing about my queer family and one small way in which we were creative. I also quoted a long chunk from a blog post by Leslie Feinberg, but I don't think I discussed it enough. So I'm going to quote it again right now and then talk about it more in depth. And then maybe next week I'll get into some other things. So here it is, you can read the whole thing here. I'm going to go paragraph by paragraph this time.

My estranged biological relatives know very little about the decades of my adult life. They are strangers, by my choice, because of their history of bigotry and abusive behaviors toward me.

This is so so so so common amongst people I know. You guys. This is why we need to declare safe spaces on our office doors and why we form our own families. And the thing about bigotry/abuse is that it can be perpetrated by people who would vehemently disagree with the label of "bigot," and often those people think of abuse as hitting and not as the constant requirement that their queer kid Just Not Be So Gay Because It's A Holiday And/Or There Are Children Present. Or as constantly refusing to use someone's preferred gender pronouns or acknowledge that person's gender identity. Cutting these people out of one's life to whatever degree and with whatever permanence is a completely legitimate choice.

Yet the capitalist state often cedes legal power to blood relatives by default. So, I’ve had to struggle to assert legal independence from the white, patriarchal, heterosexually-modeled nuclear family into which I was born.

Oh, the capitalist state. God. What a fucking nightmare. The capitalist state has privileged the nuclear family as a way of privatizing care for each other. Nuclear families are "legitimate" and intelligible. You need help? Ask your family. They have to help you, they're family. The sense of obligation this puts on people is intolerable. It's removing any legitimacy/social sanction for chosen families, and it makes community support optional. It makes community support questionable. It looks like socialism or communism and we have been taught that those are bad things because... I forget why. They're un-American or something? Whatever. I'm probably super un-American. I can live with that.

For four decades I have been forced to create and revise sets of legal forms for every state in the U.S. in which I’ve lived or sought medical care. These foundational documents state in clear language that I have been legally autonomous from my birth family since I reached the age of legal consent.

My documents state that Irving David Feinberg, Betty Vance Hyde, and Catherine Ryan Hyde have no legal rights in my life.

My legal papers also spell out clearly who does have the right to speak for me if I am unable to speak for myself.

Not everyone has to carry their papers around, just people The State considers questionable. Not having to carry one's papers around is a privilege. Having to constantly opt out of the state's preferred system is the particular duty of the oppressed. We shouldn't have to opt out of state-sanctioned relationships constantly.

Minnie Bruce Pratt has been my family, legally and in life, since 1992. As lovers, we have shared a home, life and struggle—in sickness and in health. We are domestic partners. We are civil union’d. Yet the state and federal government discriminate against our same-sex economic family unit by denying more than a thousand of the benefits that recognition of same-sex rights as a civil “marriage” certificate would provide.

Because I am female, and in a same-sex relationship, I have to live and travel with legal documents that expressly state who is, and who is not, my family.

This is the best argument I've heard for gay marriage, but it doesn't convince me to get on the marriage bandwagon. I want it for Feinburg if ze wants it. I don't think ze's looking to assimilate, anyway. I think ze's looking for relief from having to carry around a life's worth of papers with hir when ze goes to Publix or whatever they have in Syracuse. If marriage is an institution that exists, it's an institution gay people should be able to participate in, and this is why.

Even chosen family members who travel with their legal documents intact can find themselves barred from visiting their loved one in an emergency room, while vindictive relatives who are virtual strangers can proceed to the bedside to make life-and-death decisions. I carry a hospital visitation authorization, the new Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (MOLST), my domestic partnership and civil union papers, advanced directives, living will and last will & testament. In addition, I carry a copy of caregivers’ rights, and requests for secular-based care.

I have to legally state in paperwork that Minnie Bruce Pratt is my health care proxy, together with my attorney—who has taught issues of law and transgender. They have my powers of attorney. Based on legal documents that I’ve worked hard to prepare, my chosen family would speak for me if I were unable to advocate for myself.

Minnie Bruce and I both have to carry each other’s documents at all times, as well.

See? That's a lot of papers for anyone to manage all the time. I can't keep track of my pets' vaccination records. And it's a fundamental flaw in our social system that anyone has to do this just to be sure they can get the basics of respect.

Catherine Ryan Hyde is attempting to undermine all my painstaking documentation of chosen family relationships, by claiming blood ties give her intimate knowledge of my life and identity, and the right to re-write them.

Catherine Ryan Hyde sucks. Blood ties are useless, y'all. They don't mean anything. It's great if you love your blood family and they give you the support you need, but blood doesn't mean: respect, intimacy, love, understanding, care, communication, delight, home. Constantly having to identify your family through legal work-arounds, and at the expense of people who would like to see their blood status as privileged in your life and who accept no alternative, is a rough road to travel. We need to re-think the way we do everything, is what I'm saying.

The image of Leslie Feinberg is via hir site, which you should all go check out.

Open Thread: Apples to Apples

2011-11-25T11:32:00.000-05:00

Anyone else not participating in Black Friday? Good. Cuz I need some help. Apples to Apples, you guys, is a seriously boring game. But! To fix it we only need to come up with 750 interesting nouns and 250 interesting adjectives. Help me out?

Here are some ideas to get us started:

Nouns:
Revenge
Rage zombies
Lolcats
Chuck Norris

Adjectives:
The new black
Kosher
Epic
Right all the time

Okay, go. Because I don't want to be stuck at Christmas time, rolling my eyes when "Eleanor Roosevelt" gets paired with "Masculine." Urgh.

The Time Has Come to Discuss Tim Tebow

2011-11-22T17:24:00.005-05:00

Sometimes it feels like there is no opinion I hold that is socially acceptable. I know this is not true, but I often find myself profoundly at odds with many of the people in my life, especially those who hew close to the mainstream. My opinion on Tim Tebow is perhaps the one that is, at the moment, causing me the most stress to my jaw as I grind my teeth.

"But Jess! You do not give a shit about football, or celebrities. Why does Tim Tebow even enter into your consciousness?"

Because I'm a grad student at the University of Florida, is why, and have been since forever. I was here for his entire football career and I have personally witnessed dozens of my friends (and tens of thousands of people) become Denver Broncos fans overnight because he went there after he graduated from UF. Tebow was a superstar quarterback for UF, as I'm sure you already know (if you didn't already know that, we're probably BFFs, or we should be).

Here are two other facts about Tebow:

1. He was a missionary in the Philippines, Thailand, and Croatia. He continues to embrace missionary work through his foundation.

As a friend said on my Facebook wall:

The missionary work he is so beloved for (not that he likes to talk about it) always feels like borderline colonization to me. Here starving child, if you believe in Jesus you can have this yummy food. I mean it works (both in feeding the needy and as a recruiting tactic for extremist and/or terrorist group), and feeding the poor is great but talking to missionaries (including those in my family), oftentimes their help feels conditional and self-congratulatory. That, to me, feels like colonialism.

Another friend pointed out that "it feels like colonialism because it ABSOLUTELY IS." I agree with both of these folks. The missionary work skeeves me out.

2. He works with Focus on the Family. Focus on the Family is a Southern Poverty Law Center-classified hate group. The people they hate the most seem to be queer people (though they reserve quite a bit of ire for people who've had abortions). As I said on Facebook, his work with FOTF means that I can never like the dude as long as he's not actively recanting and working against whatever contribution he has made to a known hate group consisting of homophobes who want me incarcerated/institutionalized/fired/invisible. I don't care how soft-spoken and handsome the dude is - neither of those things really does it for me anyway - he does not treat his fellow human beings with respect. Good football playing and not being a steroid user or whatever isn't going to override that for me.

Since beginning writing this post, I've been de-friended by someone to whom I expressed, in a way I believe was polite and respectful, the feelings I articulated above about Tebow's work with Focus on the Family. I said to her almost exactly what I said here. People feel intensely strongly about this dude, and I can't even begin to relate to that. There are apparently people in the world who would rather cut off contact with someone than re-evaluate their feelings about a football player they don't even know personally. She didn't even argue with me. I'm not offended, but I'm really confused! What kind of cult of personality issues are going on here?

Anyway. I await the day that Tim Tebow gets over his bigotry and I can like him, too. Until then, I'll be persistent in pointing out that he's homophobic. And don't give me any of that, "I'm sure he doesn't hate gay people himself" thing. He could disassociate from a group that was classified as a hate group because of its work against queer people. He doesn't have to have said the words. His actions speak for themselves.

Tim, we are not speaking.

Image via.

Outrage (and a Warm Fuzzy)

2011-11-18T10:45:00.000-05:00

My old friend Kenny Ketner, who writes at Lubbock Left, posted a picture this morning of a protester getting pepper sprayed in the face at point blank range by a Portland cop. There is no evidence in the picture that she or the people around her were being violent in any way. From what I can tell, they may or may not have been blocking the road and/or the MAX railroad tracks.

Call me radical but I don't think it's appropriate to respond to civil disobedience with violence. In no other aspect of our lives do we find it reasonable to bend others to our will with physical force. Now, I realize that the police are tasked with keeping order. Which is why we grant them the ability to arrest people, using force only when arrest is being resisted, or when the arrestee (is that a word?) is being violent.

When there are too many people to arrest, that's a sign that there's some underlying problem, not that it's time to start using weaponry against the populace. Sheesh.

So, now that I've got everyone outraged (I hope), let me make up for it by also offering warm fuzzies! Another friend posted this article (it's a good day on the Facebook) about sex-positive sex education in a Quaker prep school in Philadelphia. If only we could get this kind of sex ed for all teenagers.

Queer Families

2011-11-16T13:42:00.004-05:00

I was raised by a [mostly] nice group of people who instilled the idea in me that family is really important. I still believe this, although my definition of family has changed somewhat. While I'm lucky to have a birth family I love,* I also have a family I chose for myself, and they chose me.

Last night two members of my queer family came with me to get a tattoo. That's it, in the picture! I already had the star - the words are new. It was a group endeavor. That quote - "Your silence will not protect you" - is by Audre Lorde, one of my favorite writers of all time. It reminds me to be brave, and not hide who I am, ever, for anyone. Her silences have not protected her, and mine will not protect me.

I am deeply honored to have Nic Bravo do the lettering for the tattoo. She's changed my life and I can't imagine having anyone else's handwriting on my arm for the rest of my life. Amanda, my best friend, came with us. Together, we placed the letters on my arm and rearranged it a half-dozen times until it looked exactly right. The tattoo artist said he's never seen a tattoo be a group project like that, but I couldn't have done it any other way. It was this little vignette of what queer family is about for me: support, expression, creativity, love, endurance.

Amanda and Nic are two really important members of my queer family, but there are lots of you - if I love you and you're reading this, you're part of it, even if you're straight. Kyrie is a member of my queer family. I am so lucky to have all of you. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially since going to the Chicago History Museum's queer history exhibit. It was amazing, y'all. So many queer people were represented, and they even examined heteronormativity and capitalism. The part that really got me, though, was a 25 minute movie about 12 queer families in Chicago. One was about a man who started a drag ballroom in Chicago for kids. This was how he was defining his family. I'm getting emotional just thinking about it now.

Leslie Feinberg, the author of Stone Butch Blues, wrote a blog post about this recently. I want you to go read the whole thing. Please go read it. It's too brilliant, and I don't know how much longer we'll have new writing from hir to read. The time might have already passed. Anyway, Feinberg has disowned hir family, for very good reasons, and desires no further contact with them. That must be challenging, but because ze's a brilliant person and writer, ze writes about the importance of chosen family really beautifully.

For instance, it is very difficult to give legal power to one's chosen family:

My estranged biological relatives know very little about the decades of my adult life. They are strangers, by my choice, because of their history of bigotry and abusive behaviors toward me.

Yet the capitalist state often cedes legal power to blood relatives by default. So, I’ve had to struggle to assert legal independence from the white, patriarchal, heterosexually-modeled nuclear family into which I was born.

For four decades I have been forced to create and revise sets of legal forms for every state in the U.S. in which I’ve lived or sought medical care. These foundational documents state in clear language that I have been legally autonomous from my birth family since I reached the age of legal consent.

My documents state that Irving David Feinberg, Betty Vance Hyde, and Catherine Ryan Hyde have no legal rights in my life.

My legal papers also spell out clearly who does have the right to speak for me if I am unable to speak for myself.

Minnie Bruce Pratt has been my family, legally and in life, since 1992. As lovers, we have shared a home, life and struggle—in sickness and in health. We are domestic partners. We are civil union’d. Yet the state and federal government discriminate against our same-sex economic family unit by denying more than a thousand of the benefits that recognition of same-sex rights as a civil “marriage” certificate would provide.

Because I am female, and in a same-sex relationship, I have to live and travel with legal documents that expressly state who is, and who is not, my family.

Even chosen family members who travel with their legal documents intact can find themselves barred from visiting their loved one in an emergency room, while vindictive relatives who are virtual strangers can proceed to the bedside to make life-and-death decisions.I carry a hospital visitation authorization, the new Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (MOLST), my domestic partnership and civil union papers, advanced directives, living will and last will & testament. In addition, I carry a copy of caregivers’ rights, and requests for secular-based care.

I have to legally state in paperwork that Minnie Bruce Pratt is my health care proxy, together with my attorney—who has taught issues of law and transgender. They have my powers of attorney. Based on legal documents that I’ve worked hard to prepare, my chosen family would speak for me if I were unable to advocate for myself.

Minnie Bruce and I both have to carry each other’s documents at all times, as well.

Catherine Ryan Hyde is attempting to undermine all my painstaking documentation of chosen family relationships, by claiming blood ties give her intimate knowledge of my life and identity, and the right to re-write them.

There are other aspects of Feinberg's post here that I really want to talk about, in terms of voice and representation and authority, but those are topics for another day. For now, though, in the spirit of the holiday season that's fast arriving, I just want to thank all of my beloveds. I couldn't do anything without you, and this tattoo that some of you helped me get will remind me that you're the people I'm being brave for. Some of us have birth families who support us to varying degrees and some of us don't, but I'm so glad we're here for each other.

* We all have struggles with our people, right? What I mean is, we're working on stuff, which I think is an endless project under just about any circumstances. I consider myself fortunate.

"But I'm A Good Person"

2011-11-09T12:53:00.002-05:00

...so I can't be homophobic or racist or a little sexist. Right? Because I'm a good person and good people aren't those things.

It doesn't work that way, guys. I have people in my life who seem to think that their being good people means they aren't homophobic, but they've got it backwards. You have to not be homophobic first, and then you get to be a good person. It sounds similar, but it's not: The first construct allows you to avoid any kind of honest self-evaluation. The second absolutely requires honest - and perpetual - self-evaluation. Works the same way with racism and any other kind of prejudice. You don't get to just declare yourself not homophobic and expect me to buy it. You have to do the hard work first.

I'm bringing this up because people suck sometimes. And those people can be really super important in your life. Maybe they're your parents, or your best friend, or your partner. And you want them to hear you and understand you and not just patch it all over with wallpaper. That shit won't fix the cracks in the walls.

It kind of leads back to the whole "culture of politeness" thing I've written about before. If we privilege politeness and getting along over anyone's individual needs, someone's going to get hurt. So now queer kids all over the country are having to figure out how they're going to deal with Thanksgiving, for instance, when their family's official line is "We completely accept you as gay" but they keep doing things to hurt you. It's no good. But when you point out to them that they might not BE homophobic, but in some ways they're ACTING homophobic, or saying homophobic things, the whole thing goes to hell.

I think we all need to be able to be honest about ourselves and who we are with the people in our lives. If we can't do that, because they "aren't ready to hear it" even if they "completely accept you," then those people have not done the hard work of perpetual and honest self-evaluation. How do we convince them to do that?

The Number

2011-11-04T10:23:00.000-04:00

I was reading this conversation between Nicole Rodgers and Hugo Schwyzer in which they discuss the concept of a "number" (i.e., the number of people one has had sex with), and came across an odd statement. In the course of discussing the Kinsey Institute's statistics on said number, Schwyzer states that "the skewed Kinsey numbers suggest that some people are lying." I think he's being nice. I think the numbers show that people are almost definitely lying.

What are these statistics?

Males 30-44 report an average of 6-8 female sexual partners in their lifetime
Females 30-44 report an average of 4 male sexual partners in their lifetime

If you take two distinct groups of people and count up the number of times sex occurs between members of each group ... well, that's one number. So if the size of the two groups is the same, the average should be the same. There might be 1 percent difference in the male vs. female population on the planet, but we need 50 to 100% more women than men to explain that difference above. Alternative explanations:

The study is at fault. The smaller the number of participants, the less representative the reults are, and the larger the uncertainties are. Additionally, there can be selection effects; you can't just round up a thousand people on the street and force them to participate in your survey.
Men have had more sex by age 30-44 than their female peers because they are getting busy with older ladies. If this phenomenon is more or less uniform with age, that means the typical male participant has had sex with 2-4 women that are at least 7 years older than him. And that's assuming the female participants never do -- if one out of four of those sexual encounters are between a female participant and a male sex partner 7 years older, then fully half of the male participants' sexual encounters are with a female partner at least 7 years older. If this is true, this would be amazing because it is totally opposite what our culture pressures us to do (i.e., sleep with older men/younger women). But I don't think it's true.
A large fraction of people are non-binary-identified or fluid gender identification. That would be awesome, you guys, but I don't think that's currently true, either.
People are lying liars. Or, to put it more kindly, men round up to seem virile and women round down to seem virginal. A related explanation is that men are counting oral and/or manual sex as sex and women aren't. But I think the motivation for counting this way is probably the same.

Like I said before, I totally think it's the "lying liars" explanation. I think this is a pretty neat statistic, actually, because this question is basically a way to calibrate your study. The answer should be 1:1, and how far you are from that tells you something about the quality of your study, whether it arises from your participant selection methods or your participants' willingness to provide honest answers.

I also wonder how many people don't realize that these two numbers should really be identical, and take it at face value that men sleep with more women than women sleep with men, period. There is just no way for that to be true, you guys. No way.

Dark Angel and Disability

2011-10-29T09:50:00.000-04:00

I really like science fiction, you guys. And, fortunately, there's a lot of kick-ass science fiction out there. I've never been much of a Trekkie (or Trekker), but Firefly and Battlestar Galactica are two of the best shows EVER.

When it comes to TV shows in particular, I get really attached. Following plot arcs and character development for a couple of years induces a raging sense of entitlement in me, I must confess. So that when BSG is like, "Hey, angels!," I'm all, "HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME." It's ... disproportionate.

Sometimes, though, I feel my rage is justified! Like with Dark Angel. I'm not even going to talk about the second season. I'm going to pretend that doesn't exist. No, I'm gonna carp about the first season, Logan Cale, and the depiction of disability. There will be some minor spoilers.

In the pilot episode, Logan gets shot trying to help someone (dude is seriously into being the White Knight/hero type) and it puts him in a wheelchair. Also in the pilot episode, it is clear that the show is going for a romance between Logan and the female superhero. And they made the injury permanent enough, and the romance compelling enough, that I got hopeful. I thought we might actually get to see two characters have a steamy, sex-having romance punctuated by the fighting of crime and corruption whilst one of them is in a wheelchair. Wouldn't that be nice, to acknowledge that differently-abled folk, too, engage in exciting sex and topple corrupt dystopian governments.

And for a while, it seemed like that might happen. Granted, Logan was rather preoccupied with regaining the use of his legs, but, you know, big shift in life circumstances, a struggle to adjust is a (but not the only) realistic reaction. He was also hesitant to pursue the heroine sexually while wheelchair-bound, but people can be insecure for all sorts of reasons, so again, realistic. But, unfortunately, the show was also obsessed with "curing" Logan, and threw robotic legs and temporary miracle cures his way until I was ready to scream.

The result was that paraplegia was treated as a temporary problem rather than a permanent feature of a person's life. And a good opportunity to feature a disabled character in TV storytelling and to quash some myths (like that people in wheelchairs never get any) was squandered. Science fiction, I expect better of you.

Disney: Teaching Girls To Live With Violence Since 1923

2011-10-27T09:04:00.004-04:00

A buddy of mine sent me a message with this picture, put together by the incomparable George Takei. Take a minute, read the captions, and then let's talk about this stuff.

I live two hours north of Disney World in Florida. I've been there a couple times as an adult, and went a few times as a little kid. There's something about Disney World that can be kind of intoxicating at first - the way every detail is considered, the fun roller coasters, the quick availability of ice cream - but I've come to see it as essentially a giant mall. Disney World exists to sell Disney products, and Disney movies are basically commercials for toys at this point, even if they didn't start out that way. I'm uncomfortable with that consumerism aspect. It's not just a general anti-capitalism thing for me, it's also about how we're training kids to think that they can introduce magic and fantasy into their lives through buying plush toys. The "magic of Disney" is really "the magic of thinking we can buy our way to a better life."

But Disney isn't just selling Lady and the Tramp dolls. It's also selling gender norms that fit right into the patriarchal power structure, as the picture above illustrates. Instead of elaborating on the captions in that picture, because they speak for themselves, I'd like to spend a minute focusing specifically on the relationship of women and violence in these films.

Beauty and the Beast is an easy starting point. Belle is in an abusive relationship. The Beast is terrifying and violent, and is very much of the "If you don't burn my waffles I won't hit you" line of thinking that many of us have encountered far too often in our lives. But the audience is meant to be rooting for her to win him over, and if she can do so convincingly, he will turn into a handsome prince and they will live happily ever after. She just has to figure out how to change him, is all! No big deal, guys!

But in real life, abusers like him can't be changed like that, no matter how perfect/beautiful/charming their victim. Any change they can manage has to be done on their own, internally, and probably with the help of a good therapist. Being a better victim is not going to end the abuse you're suffering.

The Little Mermaid deals with another kind of violence: the destruction of one's own identity in order to better fit into the mold that mainstream white culture tells us laydeez will land us some menfolk.* Ariel literally loses her voice. She loses her identity - as a mermaid, as a beautiful singer, as someone interested in collection random crap - in order to be something this man wants. And he is captivated by her, and intrigued by her voicelessness. It's working for him until he's put under the spell of a witch. Not only did Ariel lose her voice, she lost what made her a mermaid: her tail, her swimming ability, the capacity to live underwater. She distanced herself from her friends (a classic sign of abuse, by the way). This is a violence that is just as terrifying and real as the kind that was enacted on Belle, and in both cases, the women in question were forced to sacrifice themselves in order to get a guy. And I, at least, was never sure why even Prince Eric was worth attaining (The Beast is a clear loser). He was handsome? Rich? Is that what we're supposed to be telling our daughters is more important than their ability to express themselves in even the most basic ways?

Sleeping Beauty and Snow White both show the ways that violence can work on [conventionally attractive] women who then need to be rescued by [conventionally attractive and also void of personality] men. These women are considered worthy of rescuing because they are not challenging hegemonic femininity in any way, although their persecutors often are. Be thin, clear-skinned, [usually] white, vulnerable, and gentle, and some dude will come fix your shit up for you. So, we have men as the causes or perpetrators of violence as well as the protectors from violence. Not good.

Our kids, regardless of gender, are being sold these messages in big bad ways. This is education in consumerism, in gender, in body image, in relationships, and in power. The men have the power, the women just have to be worthy of having it used in their favor instead of against them. It's in considering things like this that I become enormously relieved that I am unlikely to have small kids of my own, because I'm not sure I could stomach dealing with their inevitable interactions with Disney. I know some of you are parents: how do you deal with this stuff?

*And of course, a significant number of us aren't at all interested in landing menfolk anyway.

A Small Blow Against Rape Culture

2011-10-21T10:00:00.000-04:00

Good news, everyone! The FBI has updated its woefully archaic definition of rape ("the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will") to something a little more realistic:

Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.

This is good news for a bunch of reasons:

The FBI now recognizes that men can be raped.
"Carnal knowledge" was a bit ambiguous, and could be interpreted to mean vaginal rape only. This new definition explicitly recognizes anal and oral rape.
Most importantly (in my opinion), this new definition identifies the absence of consent as the key element in rape rather than force. Now victims who were drugged, blackmailed, threatened, or otherwise coerced are also recognized by the FBI as rape victims.

While this update in definition is a huge step forward for the reasons I cited above, it is not without some remaining problems. The most glaring issue is that this definition only recognizes penetrative rape. If an aggressor envelopes the penis of an unconscious person with their vagina, that would not be considered rape under the above definition. There are a number of other non-penetrative sexual acts that should be considered rape when perpetrated on a non-consenting individual, none of which will be recognized by the FBI's new definition.

So, good on you, FBI, for recognizing that it's consent that matters. Now let's work on recognizing non-consensual, non-penetrative sexual acts as rape, too.

Knowing When to Shut Up

2011-10-19T11:25:00.003-04:00

I've been in a lot of spaces and meetings lately that are meant to talk about issues like privilege and queerness and that sort of thing. Inevitably, these gatherings draw a mixed crowd: Queer people, people of color, all kinds of gender identities and occupations and education levels. It's one of the best things about them. But there always seem to be people who have no idea what privilege means, even if they're talking about it.

A few weeks ago, Nic and I went to the TransCon Justice Summit in Miami. I would say that overall it was a good experience, and I met some pretty amazing people there. But there were also some folks who weren't so awesome. For instance, one cis straight-identified woman seemed to want a cookie for being able to be in a space with so many queer people and not freak out. She seemed quite invested in the idea that we'd all love her, but she struck me as disingenuous - as though she cared more that everyone thought she was a hero than about learning from the people around her. At one point, she and I were in a small group with a few other people and she, the only straight person in the group, immediately took it over and started planning our presentation. When other people spoke up, she was quite dismissive. It was gross. She had no idea that she is precisely the type of person who doesn't have to struggle to have her voice heard, in comparison with everyone else in the group, and she deliberately silenced the very people the conference was for.

So when I read this in the Bilerico Project, I was especially excited by this quote:

With a proper amount of decolinization, [sic] these two [straight white men] would have shut the hell up at some point and allowed someone else to speak. We cannot demand that others (Republicans, Tea Party peeps or whoever the "big bad" is this week) treat us with respect and then refuse to look at how race/class/gender privilege derails even the most progressive and well meaning attempts to institute change and determines whose voice gets to be heard.

Yes. This. One thousand times this. I have seen this happen so many times: in a critical pedagogy class this summer, which I helped facilitate and which focused on critical race theory and queer theory, the straight white people were either bent on talking about how they are oppressed, or actually pointed to the queer people and people of color in the room and accused us of oppressing them when we spoke our truths. I have rarely been so angry in an academic setting. Academia encourages this, though, and rewards the straight white people for talking about the experiences of marginalized people through the lens of peer-reviewed articles on oppression, in abstract academic language, and then telling the people who live the experiences that they're wrong, or not thinking about it the right way.

Another example: the head of Save Dade, an LGBTQ rights organization in South Florida, is a cis straight man. I've met him, and he's perfectly lovely. But I am unconvinced that having a straight person as the head of a queer advocacy group is a great idea. While I grasp the concept of straight people who are interested in seeing systematic oppression of queer people end, I'm not sure why any of them would think they have the right to be the head of a group for a community they are not part of.* Furthermore, it contributes to the problem of queer invisibility. We need more, not fewer, opportunities for queer people to be vocal. And it reinforces the idea that queer people are unacceptable to the mainstream and so we need straight people to speak for us. Fuck that. I'm way too radical to go along with that idea (although, to be frank, I don't really care if the mainstream accepts me).

So: Straight people, when you're in a queer space, let the queer people do the talking, okay? And when I, as a white person, am in a place with people of color in which we are talking about racial oppression, I'm not going to speak much unless specifically asked for my opinion. I think that if we can be aware of our own privilege and not wield it over other people in spaces that aren't ours, we'll actually be doing something to resist oppression. This is a step I believe we can take.

* Kyrie is extraordinarily sensitive about this, by the way. I would be interested in reading more about their feelings about these issues if they ever feel like sharing.

A Review of Drive: UGH

2011-10-17T10:21:00.000-04:00

Drive currently has 93% on the tomatometer, you guys. And I have no idea why. Spoilers ahead: skip to the second set of asterisks if you don't want the spoilers.

*** begin spoilers ***

It is just full of senseless violence. And I mean that like, the violence makes no sense. Now, I am not categorically opposed to violent movies. I enjoyed Kill Bill. I thought A History of Violence was pretty interesting. But this movie ... okay, look, the main character at one point states that he doesn't use guns. You might have a character do this because they are reluctant to kill, or because the find a knife quieter or more humane, or something like that. But in this case it's simply an excuse to have him kill people in grisly, hands-on ways. It's gross and disturbing. And you're supposed to kind of like this character, I guess because he's played by Ryan Gosling?

The utterly bizarre violence is not confined to the titular driver, though. Another character, who is supposed to be a ruthless businessman type, stabs his victim in the eye with a fork before cutting his throat. WHY MOVIE WHY THIS MAKES NO SENSE. Is it easier to cut someone's throat while they're thrashing around in agony? My guess is no.

*** end spoilers ***

Oh, and this movie has the least character development of possibly any movie I've ever seen.

But there's one scene in the movie that absolutely made me blind with rage (don't worry, this isn't too spoiler-y.) Blah blah, tough guys confronting each other in their places of business. One such place is a strip club, surprise, surprise. Which is, of course, an excuse to have a violent confrontation framed by a background of bare boobs. ARGHWOMENSBODIESARENOTPROPS!!! >:( :( The actresses playing the strippers just sit there completely motionless, expressionless, and reactionless. Now, I'm sure some will argue that the characters do so to show that they are used to seeing such things and that they stay still out of wariness. But you guys. Subtle facial expressions and some eye movement would convey this very well. This would, however, involve giving the actresses some direction other than, "just pretend to be statues," and would be more effective if you did a close up of one of the women's faces. You know, the face, Hollywood. That part of a woman's body that is sans boobs but shows expression? You know? No?

Seriously, don't bother with this movie. It's terrible on many levels.

Misogyny in a Can

2011-10-12T13:03:00.004-04:00

It's been a long time since I was a regular consumer of soda, and now I can barely stand the idea of drinking it. I used to be kind of addicted, and I don't like being addicted to things, so I quit. I was a real bitch for a couple of weeks, I'm sure.

For some reason - and I'm sure someone out there has done an analysis of this - soda companies seem to be marketing diet sodas to men more. Pepsi One started it off, taking the word "diet" out of the name - diets are for ladies, after all - presumably to attract a wider customer base. We can't have men feeling emasculated by their beverages, after all.

Now Dr. Pepper is in the game, with this ten-calorie can of soda that we all need to be aware contains BOLD FLAVORS. No wussy flavors for dudes. On the Facebook fan page, you can - if you want to add the app - learn what the Ten MANMENTS are. I did not do this. I cannot handle giving my information to Dr. Pepper, but Google helped:

Dr Pepper’s 10 Man’Ments

1. Thou shalt not OMG. If it’s not exploding, it’s not exciting.

2. Thou shalt not pucker up. Kissy faces are never manly.

3. Thou shalt not post pics of your outfit. Unless it’s battle armor and you have a giant sword and/or small bazooka.

4. Thou shalt not post furry animal videos. Exceptions made for beasts fighting to the death and bears destroying idyllic picnic scenes.

5. Thou shalt not make a “man-gagement” album. That is all.

6. Thou shalt not share your horoscope. Daily.

7. Thou shalt not Instagram your lunch. Real men each lunch, not tweet it.

8. Thou shalt not untag unflattering pics. We know you were there.

9. Thou shalt not end a comment with a =).

10. Thou shalt not make a Facbeook profile for your pet, baby and/or imaginary friend.

So... men - the men Dr. Pepper wants to market to - have no feelings, have a really conflicted relationship with photography, and only like animals if they're destroying each other. Sounds healthy!

We already know how much I hate this prescriptive bullshit. It's coaching men to be more "masculine," and in the process commenting on what women can and should be. It is also putting femininity down as clearly inferior. It's gross.

As Nic Bravo said, "Don't forget to never drink this again."

Again with the Pronouns

2011-10-07T10:53:00.001-04:00

I've written several posts already about pronouns. Obviously it's a subject I care a lot about. In fact, I've written so much on the topic that one might expect me to have thought about what pronoun I prefer people to use to refer to me. And yet, when asked in a group setting last week this very question (it was one of those introduce-yourself things), I was uncertain enough to avoid the question.

I was near the end of the group, so I had a few minutes to think about it. But I kept thinking, "If I got to choose ... wait, don't I get to choose?" Hence, confusion.

I have since decided two things: I like the singular "they" for myself. So if you want to be fancy, go ahead and use that for me. But here's the second thing: I just don't care all that much. Call me "she" all you want, too. Heck, call me "he" if you want; I get sirred all the time what with the short hair, and it does not bother me one whit.

I think pronoun preference and degree of caring about that preference are two orthogonal quantities, and I end up in the "whatever" zone. (Though I care a lot about calling other people by their preferred pronoun!)

How about you, dear readers? Ever been called upon to pick a pronoun?

Femininity and Masculinity in Television

2011-10-05T11:00:00.001-04:00

Linda Holmes at NPR's Monkey See is pretty brilliant, y'all. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I totally have a crush on her. Call me, Linda.

The story that prompted this particular outburst of hearts is her dissection of masculinity in television. While allowing for the idea that there are extremely problematic representations of women and femininity on television, she argues that the current crop of television sitcoms might be even worse for men. She discusses How To Be A Gentleman, Last Man Standing, Man Up, and Work It in particular.

Sarah Haskins, the brilliant person who brought us Target Women, has pointed this out before in her skit on doofy husbands.

Holmes makes a whole bunch of good points, and you should just go read her column. I'll wait!

Back? Okay. So one of the things Holmes talks about here is the concept of "realness." These horrid new shows are talking about what it means to be a "real" man. It's my sense that we've been in a crisis-of-masculinity moment for awhile now. If not, we wouldn't be panicking about a mom painting her very young son's toenails pink in a J. Crew ad. We wouldn't have to be aware that Tim Allen still exists. So these shows seem to be about showing their male characters how to be Men. And, because I'm an educator and think everything has pedagogical implications, they're probably teaching American men how to be "real," too. But they're not looking at masculinity through any kind of queer lens, so they have a defined vision of manhood that is based in a straight and cis view of it. Best not be too dapper, or one might be associated with femininity (which is bad) (I mean, duh).

So, the fact that women might be getting better representation on the screen doesn't strike me as a triumph of feminism. I'm thinking that instead of the power dynamic shifting in women's favor, there's a (perhaps subconscious) attempt at asking for a reassertion of the culture of masculinity, which is defined in clearly specific ways. Now, I don't think that all the men involved in these shows behave in the way men are portrayed on screen, and I think that a lot of the times they're probably saying something about how idiotic these men are. But there's something going on, and I don't think they shows are trying to make a point about how we've been too rigid about gender norms in our cultural history. You know?

Here's the thing: Even if the people involved in the show aren't endorsing this view of masculinity, they're still putting it out there, and there are going to be plenty of people who watch it and laugh knowingly and incorporate it - again, perhaps subconsciously - in their ideas about gender and how to properly perform it.

I don't think I can even get into how repulsive I find the concept of Work It, the show in which men dress in drag because they feel it is the only way to get ahead in the work force. I'll just say this: It's a fucking disaster. I know they're not presenting as trans people, they're dressing in drag, but in real life people who crossdress or are known to be drag performers often face a certain amount of revulsion from their bigoted cis straight colleagues. And I've talked about it before, but it bears repeating: trans people are underprivileged in the work force, get mistreated by the police, and generally have a harder time dealing with institutions like the health care industry than cis people do. To say that men should just "dress like women" and then they'll get ahead in the work force is to erase any discussion of trans issues. It's also making a pointed case for the fact that men feel so very disadvantaged that they'll do something horrifyingly misogynistic just to get a job they seem to feel entitled to. Which they are not.

These shows leave no room for a discussion of queerness, or the idea that being a feminine man (regardless of sexual orientation or trans status) is awesome. They are making life harder for people with non-normative expression because they are reifying gender normativity. Trans people, gender queer people, butch lesbians, etc., are also harmed by this. If there is a limited idea of what is acceptable for a man, it also limits what is acceptable for a woman, because if women are masculine, then what happens to masculine men? They can't stake out their ground on a constantly shifting landscape.

These television shows are being gender police, is what I'm saying. I advise against watching them. Does anyone have any shows they'd like to suggest as having less problematic views of gender, for those of us who do occasionally enjoy watching the teevee?

Nancy Upton and Plus-Size Modeling

2011-09-30T10:47:00.000-04:00

Earlier this year American Apparel decided to expand their line of clothes to larger sizes, and publicized the plan with an open competition to be their new plus-sized model. It's exciting that they're expanding their size selection a bit (though they could certainly expand it much more), but at the same time they announced the change and the competition in terms that one woman, at least, justifiably found condescending:

"Wow, they really have zero respect for plus-sized women. They're going to line them up like cattle and make puns about them until they're blue in the face" -- Nancy Upton, via Jezebel

In response, Upton and photographer Shannon Skloss created a series of photographs of Upton eating and/or covered in food that are both clearly satirical and utterly beautiful. To her surprise, American Apparel accepted her entry, and her photographs were voted to the top by viewers, technically winning her the competition.

Possibly because Upton made it clear during the competition that she would not model for AA, the company declined to award her the prize and instead sent her a chastising email telling her that she does not "exemplify the idea of beauty inside and out." Later they offered her a trip to tour their facilities in LA, which she accepted, and I think she's there now.

While I understand and support Upton's disinterest in modeling for American Apparel, I really would like to see her in a high profile modeling career. Not only is she both incredibly beautiful and modeling-industry "plus size," which I would like to see more of in fashion pubs, but the nature of her debut has given her a real voice.

I'm not much of an historian, but if you remember the 90's, you may remember "supermodels." They had actual names, names that we knew (Cindy Crawford! Christy Turlington!), and their public persona was an element of their modeling. And those elite few, at least, got paid enough to live on.

These supermodels were all fairly young, mostly white, and quite thin. I am not even remotely of the opinion that 90's era modeling was all that it could be. But it seems to have just gotten worse since then. The fashion industry has trended towards even younger, even thinner models, and a large number seem to be teen girls from Eastern Europe -- coincidentally, a population already hit hard by sex-trafficking. These models are nameless (they are almost never cited in fashion photos) and even faceless; eyebrow-bleaching may be interesting-looking as a style, but it essentially removes one of the most distinctive facial features on an individual. Most earn so little that they end their careers at the beginning of their adulthood actually indebted to their modeling agency.

Simultaneously, we have the problem that almost all fashion and most ready-to-wear clothing is made only for women size 10-12 or smaller. If you are larger than a size 12 (like about half the women in this country), you are limited to department stores and a few specialty retailers like Lane Bryant, and are effectively shut out of the fashion industry. And though I still have the luxury of fitting into "straight sizes," my clothes-shopping is hindered by the fact that there are almost no models of my size, and so I often have no idea how to make an article of clothing work for my body, because you guys, I am not a fashion genius.

Occasionally, though, there's a bit of a fuss and a small line of clothing is designed for a plus-size woman. Yes, lads and gentlewomen, I am referring to Beth Ditto, who is so fashion-y and punk-rock-y and connected-y that she was able to convince UK retailer Evans to create a plus-size fashion line. It wasn't for everyone, but it was pretty cool regardless, and I certainly got some ideas from it.

Similarly, recently plus-sized model Crystal Renn made a splash by not just being a fantastic model but by talking candidly about her experience in the modeling industry and how it triggered her disordered eating. She has since lost weight, but I still have this celluliterrific shot to treasure forever:

I am currently rooting SO HARD for plus-sized models with personalities because it seems these are the people who can succeed introducing larger sizes into the fashion industry, and because their success involves their names and personalities, which I would like to see much more of in modeling. So I was delighted when reader Karen alerted me to this post by Amanda Palmer who, tickled to see Upton's Dresden Dolls tattoo visible in some of her shots, is communicating with Upton about modeling her merchandise, and may possibly design something for her. YES PLEASE. The more plus-size clothing, the better, and I'm sure as hell not ready to see the last of Nancy Upton.

Gays: Are We Weird?

2011-09-28T11:02:00.005-04:00

I've been following Gene Weingarten, a humor columnist for the Washington Post, for years and years. I've read nearly everything he's published that is accessible online. He writes books, magazine pieces, and hosts a monthly chat on the Post website. He's one of the smartest people online, and a treasure. I already live in dread of the day that I can't read new work from him anymore, and I hope that he keeps writing for decades.

Sometimes Gene is brilliant. For instance, he once gave me this bit of advice on dealing with homophobic "friends" who use their religion to justify their bigotry:

Gene would dislike these people intensely.

You happen to be treading on an area where I am uncommonly sure of myself and obnoxiouisly opinionated. (With food, I'm sort of kidding. Here, I'm not.)

Yeah, I'm an atheist, but I don't disrespect religion; we're all seekers of truth and understanding, and science and religion go about it in parallel ways. I'm most comfortable thinking about religion as a form of philosophy.

So far, so good. My problems with religion are when it is so reactionary that it institutionalizes bigotry. At that point, reason and faith no longer coexist, they are at war. At that point I feel it is the duty of the moral person to jettison the bigoted faith for another. Or for none.

"Love the sinner, hate the sin" is astonishingly patronizing, and duplicitous. It's a cop-out. Love the slave as though he weren't your property. Separate but equal.

I had a very close friend, a devout Christian, who told me that she worried about me because, as a nonbeliever in Jesus, I would be going to hell. What do you SAY to someone like that? I said nothing, but I never felt the same about her. She's chosen an interpretation of her religion that consigns Mathatma Gandhi to hell. I'm supposed to RESPECT this?

Here's the thing you need to remember: All those people who tell you that homosexuality is a sin, but they love you? They don't. They think you are a lesser form of life.

Act accordingly.

Yes, exactly. Gene (#ICallHimGene) has said some absolutely brilliant things about atheism, education, art, literature, and history. He can be, at times, a raging gender essentialist, however, and one time he copped to some transphobia that he has since turned around on. But his willingness to stick to "women are/like/hate x" and "men are all dumber than women" stuff really bugs me. So, I recognize that he can sometimes be problematic. In the poll for his chat this week, he asked whether his cartoon for the Washington Post's Style Invitational is homophobic. I really wasn't sure what to expect, but because I am a Professional Over-Thinker, I figured I'd probably think it was.

Here's the picture, and I've copied his limerick below it:

There was an old man with a beard
Who said, “It is just as I feared!
I thought I’d seem straight
With this pretty young date,
But I still hear them calling me ‘weird.’ ”
— Gene Weingarten, 2011

In the poll, I said that it wasn't homophobic. The truth is, there are still people calling us weird. I believe that Gene is being honest when he says in the chat that he doesn't endorse this view, but he thinks that bigots do. I agree! Lots of people think we're weird, and mean it in a bad way. That's why they're bigots, after all.

But I like being weird! I think it means that I go against the status quo and the mainstream and all that stuff, and that the very idea of queerness presents a counter-narrative to normative views of sex, gender, class, race - all kinds of things. That's why I feel, sometimes, as though the movement for marriage equality and the DADT repeal is perhaps focusing too many resources on trying to mainstream gay people, when we could be spending that money on AIDS research and grassroots community development.

One gay man wrote into the chat to say that the idea of "weirdness" for gay people is outdated. I disagree, and wonder what world he lives in. Perhaps he is white, upper- or middle-class, cis, and monogamous? In other words, the only thing that differentiates him from most white upper class cis men is that he's gay. I'm glad that the people who can mainstream want to, and that they aren't feeling oppressed. But I think perhaps he's a bit myopic in his perspective. Being queer is still weird in lots of places, for lots of people. Some of us embrace that, and I think that's really healthy, and leads to some of my favorite things about the queer community, like artistic expression and drag.

What do you think? Is there value in embracing weirdness?

Oh, Hetero Dudes

2011-09-23T11:00:00.000-04:00

Hi, hetero dudes. Your lives are all the same, right? You meet a cute lady, spend a huge chunk of money on a ring, and, strangely, marry her despite having no motivation to do so whatsoever. It must be because she somehow manipulated you into asking. Yeah, that's it.

JK, marriage is awesome.* You will now likely live longer, and, outside work, are no longer expected to act like an adult. Which is good, because it's not like you know how to do, like, anything:**

But sometimes your shrewish wives ask you to go furniture shopping with them. OMG. It's not like you need things to sit on. Fortunately, Ikea now recognizes how horrible it is to expect men to shop for things for their own use in their own homes, and has kindly provided us with Manland, a daycare for adult men where you can eat snacks and watch TV until your mommy -- er, wife -- comes to pick you up:

In all seriousness, het men find this really insulting, right? I mean, those of you who aren't commenting on the Good Men Project about how women use marriage to dominate men or whatever. (BTW, I totally retract any previous endorsements of that site I may have made. Hugo Schwyzer's posts are still awesome, but the commenters are pretty much all MRA douchebags.)

This whole narrative is so illogical that it makes me want to scream. Or, ya know, write sarcastic ranting blog posts.

*for dudes

**How exactly do single men survive, anyways? NOBODY KNOWS.

The DADT Post You Probably Knew Was Coming

2011-09-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

So, after a 17-year fight, Don't Ask, Don't Tell is over, and gay and lesbian service members can serve openly in the military for the first time.

It's 2011, by the way. We put a man on the moon 42 years ago, and we just got around to deciding that it's not worth freaking out if a dude says "I'm gay" or a laydee brings another laydee to an awards ceremony.

This is being received as good news amongst non-bigoted assholes everywhere, and a lot of gay and lesbian service members are probably extremely relieved and happy. Some people even got married or came out to their fathers in videos that made this Grinch cry.

I was touched by a lot of the coverage of this landmark event in the struggle for rights, thinking of how many of my queer brothers and sisters in the military must feel so much better. I'm very much anti-war, and I still think this is a tiny, stuttering step in the right direction to making queerness something that people aren't tortured over and discriminated against. Not because laws change stuff, but because I'm hoping that homophobia decreases when people realize they've been serving next to gays all along and nothing horrible happened.

However, I'm going to have to be a bummer and point out that there's still a long way to go. GetEqual held a bunch of protests yesterday to highlight the things that still need changing. Gays will still be denied the benefits and protections of straight, married service members because of the Defense of Marriage Act. Workplace discrimination, immigration laws, and all manner of other laws and customs still put queer people in a disadvantaged place in society.

Also, trans people are not included in the DADT repeal, so they can still be discharged for being out as trans. There is a long history of the gay and lesbian movement leaving trans and other genderqueer people behind in the fight for mainstream acceptance. So, I don't think the DADT repeal as it stands is acceptable, because it is still a discriminatory policy. I am not okay with anything that excludes or disadvantages our trans family members. Not womyn-only spaces, none of it. If they're not free, I'm not free, period.

Also, the way Amy Goodman covered the repeal on Democracy Now points out that there are other problems with the repeal and the way it happened. Here's some transcript from yesterday's show:

AMY GOODMAN: In October of 2010, Democracy Now! hosted a debate on whether the movement against "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" was helping to legitimize U.S. militarism at home and abroad. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is an antiwar queer activist and writer. She was debating Lieutenant Dan Choi, the discharged servicemember who was a leading voice opposing "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." This is what Mattilda had to say.

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE: Dan Choi talks about all of America being a victim of the policy of excluding openly gay soldiers in the military, but all of the world is a victim of the U.S. military. So if we have to look at one culprit for all of the problems that are going on in the entire world, that would have to be the U.S. military. And as a queer movement, what we need is a movement for gender, sexual, social, political and cultural self-determination for queers in this country, for everyone in this country, and for everyone all over the world. We do not need to support the U.S. war machine, which is busy plundering indigenous resources and fighting at least three wars right now, you know, for corporate profiteers.

We need to be fighting for universal access to basic needs, things like housing and healthcare and the right to stay in this country or leave if you want to. We need to be fighting for comprehensive sex education, for AIDS healthcare, for senior care, for safe houses for queer youth to escape abusive families. And the problem with all this attention on the war machine, all this support for, you know, soldiers to serve openly in unjust wars, the problem is that the military is what’s taking away the ability to fund everything in this country that would actually benefit, you know, the people who need the most.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Aaron Belkin, your response?

AARON BELKIN: Well, I would say that things are even worse than Mattilda suggested, because it’s not just a question of the focus on "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" diverting attention. And I say this as someone who has been fighting "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" for years and who believes passionately that "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" needed to end, and that’s been my professional struggle for all these years. But at the same time, it’s important to be honest and to note that not only did we divert attention away from more pressing problems, but our very rhetoric, as a gay and as a queer community, in the "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" struggle reinforced militarism. What does that mean? It means that every time we talked about the importance of promoting unit cohesion and the loyal gay and lesbian servicemember, we reinforced the notion of the military as a noble institution. And that has a militarizing impact.

...Right. Just as discussions of gay marriage reinforce the idea that marriage is something we need to invest in as a society, discussions of DADT talk about how it's good for the military. I'm not at all convinced that the military keeps us safer. It seems to me that, as Aaron Belkin also says in this interview, excessive military strength undermines our security. This is the inherent tension in the queer rights movement, I think: do we want to be mainstream, or do we want to use queer rights as a way to talk about the inherent flaws in our heteronormative, pro-military society?

My main concern today is that the DADT repeal will be a reason to stop fighting for queer rights for awhile, that people will point to it and say "progress is inevitable" or "well we got that done, so now the gheys will vote for us in 2012, no questions asked!" Neither of those is true. We have to keep pushing for change, and this isn't going to make me vote for anyone, no matter how many tearful videos of coming-out stories I watch.

Image via.

Re-blogging: How to Help Trans* Kids?

2011-09-20T16:46:00.001-04:00

This is from the lovely Nic Bravo:

If you had a large sum of money (let’s say somewhere around $100,000 to $500,000) and wanted to do something to help young, low-income trans* kids, what would you do?

(please reblog)

Ideas, NWFers?

Schedule Adjustment

2011-09-20T10:27:00.000-04:00

Greetings, loyal readers. After an in-depth analysis of our blog stats (which consists of me looking at them a lot and going "hmmmmmm"), we've come to the conclusion that we might just be posting a little more than our dear readers have time to read. As a result, we are going to scale back a bit, giving you more time to read and us more time to write. You can look for posts by Jess on Wednesdays and posts by Kyrie on Fridays.

Happy procrastinating!

Class in America

2011-09-16T11:00:00.000-04:00

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class and lower middle class. Miss Manners has never heard of an American's owning up to being in any other class.

-- Judith Martin, Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

As usual, Miss Manners manages to condense my perceived reality into a couple of crystal-clear sentences.* I, too, have never heard anyone describe themselves as anything other than middle-class (possibly because Americans think of this country as a meritocracy), though we will occasionally talk about our "blue collar" forebears in oddly romanticized language. Those TV folk in particular speak as if they are addressing a country made up entirely of middle-class families.

This is completely at odds with reality; the truth is that our country is incredibly classist. The economic disparity between the rich and the poor in this country is more pronounced in the U.S. than it is for our international peers. Sociological Images has some great summaries of how we stack up internationally, and of how the gap between our rich and poor is growing rather than shrinking. If you move beyond simple economic classes, you find additional discrimination based on race, religion, gender expression, and sexuality.

I'm not quite sure, though, what language would be preferable. I hesitate to describe myself as "upper class" because I'm afraid of sounding like I think that's some sort of compliment, rather than an honest assessment of my economic privileges. (On the other hand, it also brings to mind debutantes and weekends in Martha's Vineyard, and it would be useful to stop equating wealth with these practices.) But we do need a better way of discussing class, because thinking of this country as filled with middle-class people sweeps real economic disparities under the rug.

And yeah, my references are all from Sociological Images. That is an amazing site, y'all.

*Then again, Martin and I seem to have led similarly privileged lives.

If You Work For the Federal Government, You're Not a Real Patriot

2011-09-14T18:10:00.004-04:00

The right wing in the US has some really screwy ideas. This is not breaking news. Some of them think that I'm more dangerous than a terrorist attack. Others are totes fine cheering about letting someone die if he doesn't have health insurance, or calling Social Security - an enormously popular program - a "Ponzi scheme."

But now they've decided that they get to have a say in whose coffins get draped in the flags after they die in service to our country. Federal employees who die in the line of duty but aren't in the military are, apparently, not sufficiently patriotic to have a flag draping ceremony. Which, by the way, costs almost nothing, especially compared to the enormous amount of money we spend on the military every year.

I have a friend stationed in Kandahar with the State Department. As he pointed out, the people who think he is unworthy of a flag probably don't spend all their days in a bunker while rockets and gunfire whiz into their place of employment or their homes. Some of them may be military veterans, but not all of them, and those who did serve in the military should be aware of the risks that people who are in dangerous places like Afghanistan are undertaking.

These are the same people who want to pour tons of money into the military because it makes them feel like big strong men, and who call the federal government "the nanny state." They don't want the government involved in their lives,* but they want the military to be as big as possible. It doesn't take a genius to realize that they have masculinized the military and feminized the government, and that they see masculine as superior to feminine.

These are also the people who don't want homoseckshuals to serve in the military, because in their minds, gay men (lesbians rarely come up in these "discussions," even though women - and minorities - are disproportionately discharged under DADT) are not masculine enough for the military. They make arguments about feminization, about fear for the security of the nation of gays are part of the armed services. Of course, there have always been gays in the military, but now they're able to serve openly.**

So it appears that the latest screwy idea of the Right is that federal employees, like gays, are not manly enough for the flag. They are insufficiently patriotic. This is how they want to re-define America, y'all: The only people who can be truly American are the ones who are truly masculine according to their definition, which is cis and straight (and, for the most part, white, and rich, and Protestant). They want their country back.

This is extremely dangerous, because it is an attempt to define who is worthy of respect in this country, an extension of their views on who is worthy of citizenship. Anyone who isn't worth having a flag draped on hir coffin is not worthy of the rights and benefits of American citizenship. This kind of fight is so hard to counteract, because the connections aren't necessarily clear to someone who hasn't spent tons of time thinking about the way gender and privilege co-function in society.

So, now what? I think we need to keep working to call out idiots like the politicians who oppose flag-draping ceremonies for federal employees and gay rights and abortion access, and not let them define citizenship for us. What form do you think that takes?

* Although they do want the government involved in any and all uteri!
** Yes, I am anti-war. I still think DADT should be repealed.

Featured Webcomic: SMBC

2011-09-14T11:00:00.001-04:00

Humor is a tricky thing. It's impossible to quantify what's funny, of course. Not only does it vary from person to person, but even if I only attempt to explain what I find funny the task is still impossible.

When the humor addresses topics like gender, race, disability, age, or size, there's the additional, also hard-to-quantify factor of fucked-uppedness. Tackling a controversial issue can result in an uproariously funny joke (ex: almost all of Archer) or one that falls completely flat, and that'll depend on your own prejudices. This is why it is so easy to accuse feminists of having no sense of humor, and so hard to explain that, no really, the problem with a joke is that the comic in question doesn't "get it."

Instead, I usually like to proffer examples of comedians who do "get it." Today's example is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, written by Zach Weiner. It's not always perfect, but Weiner seems to more-or-less "get" important issues. Such as:

Sexism

Dissecting the Straight Agenda: Pictures of Your Kids That Don't Embarrass the Family

2011-09-13T11:00:00.001-04:00

You guys, I was not a photogenic kid. I would argue that I am not a photogenic adult, either. But as a kid, I always looked like a bug-eyed weirdo in my photos. If I were someone who had pictures of myself as a child around, I would share them with you. Alas, I don't, and my parents aren't the types to digitize old family albums. So you're just going to have to take my word for it, and enjoy the silly picture here of me and two of my BFFs in which I am making a face that has been described as this: 8D

Fortunately, my parents weren't hung up on making sure that all pictures of their kids could qualify them for magazine ads. They just let us be the dorktastic weirdos we were* and captured that on film. Never once did my parents coach us in posing, except maybe to tell us to stop being goofy for one second so they could get a "serious" picture. Which: Mom? Do we have any of those?**

But not every parent has the same philosophy on pictures of their kids, as this guide for photographing children - located by Alert Reader Andrew Who Really Needs To Write a Post For Us Soon - makes clear. As he says: "Normative gender performance must be created, enhanced, and enforced at all times."

Exactly. Let's look at Point 3: "Feminine vs. Masculine."

Posing is all about body language. Watch that the poses you’re employing are gender suitable.

She is assuming that male = masculine and female = feminine. Even within the limited construct of binary genders, she is mistaken. This assumption is not based in reality, but in what I am going to call The Straight Agenda. Everyone knows that there are feminine men and masculine women and people who fit none of those labels. (Well, maybe people need more education on that last point.) So The Straight Agenda holds that all men should be masculine and all women should be feminine because that will halt the terrifying specter of queerness (#NoItWon't) and keep the patriarchy nice and comfy. There is no such thing as a "gender suitable" pose. I don't even understand what that means. Am I only supposed to like pictures of myself in which I look feminine? Are there poses that are neither masculine nor feminine?

Hands – open for a girl, closed for a boy

Be...cause... boys punch things and girls don't? I don't get this. Can't we all have open or closed hands at, like, any given fucking second? Whaaaaat is she talking about?

Position – A cute little side glance is adorable for a girl but a bit delicate or vulnerable for a boy. For boys, I love getting them straight-on.

SEE THERE IT IS! THE STRAIGHT AGENDA!

Ahem. Delicacy and vulnerability are adorable in girls but unacceptable in boys. Pardon me, I seem to have eaten something rotten. Oh wait. Actually, this is just an intensely nauseating point to make, and it goes right back to Andrew's point. We have to teach girls to be delicate and vulnerable, and we have to teach boys not to be. Some people might naturally be delicate slash vulnerable, and some people might not be, but if what you really want out of a photograph is to capture who your kid really is, and your son is delicate but your daughter is not, can't you just get pictures of them being who they are? Or is this about a) making you feel better about your kid's gender presentation because b) you don't want to face the prospect that your kid might be kind of gender queer? And here's the thing: if this woman had to write this shit down, she probably sees it all the time. So even for baby straighties, there is probably GASP an element of gender non-normativity. Which: gender is queer, y'all. We're all performing it.

Also, is there something rape-culturey about promoting vulnerability in women but quashing it in men? I can't decide.

Hips – Hands on hips for a girl, hands in pockets for a boy (with the thumbs sticking out – I love that!)

You know who else likes hands in pockets? Lesbians. So she's probably right about this one. If you keep the girls from putting their hands in their pockets, they won't turn out to be homos. That's the way it works, right? And we can't have boys putting their hands on their hips like some stressed-out RuPaul's Drag Race contestant, can we now? If you put your hands on your hips and you were assigned male at birth, there is something grievously wrong with you that might lead you to being cast on my favorite TV show of all time.

As a final blow to our collective morale, let's have a look at one of the pictures she uses to illustrate her point:

Ugh. This poor kid. The lady taking this picture has qualitatively defined which is better for hir because of the gender presentation of the child as she reads it. She'd probably be okay with someone she sees as a girl putting her hand awkwardly under her chin like that, because something in our cultural coding assigns "feminine" to that particular posture. No parent should ever have to see their son posed like this! Sad trombone!

Now that I've written myself into a deep blue funk, I'm going to leave you with a posed photograph I really like:

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Posing Guide Lady.

* This is a test to see if my siblings are reading the blog. Smart money's on "no." If you ARE reading the blog, dear J2 and J3, rest assured that I don't think you're dorktastic weirdos. I am only really describing myself. I think you are silly-face knuckleheads.

** My mom is definitely not reading the blog. This is not a test. But should someone link her to this because of this footnote: Jordan definitely looks better with the bunny ears I saddled him with in every picture taken during our primary school years, and you know it's true.

Marriage Could Do With Some Retooling

2011-09-12T12:14:00.002-04:00

I am tired of hearing about how teh gayz are ruining the concept of marriage. One, because that's homophobic. But also because there are a whole bunch of things about marriage that we are better off without.

For example, in France, "a judge has now ruled that ... 'sexual relations must form part of a marriage.'" This is in the context of a law suit in which a Frenchwoman, having already been granted a divorce from her husband, and whose husband had been found solely responsible for the breakdown of their marriage, demanded compensation from him for not having sex with her during said marriage, and was granted it. (Via The Gloss.)

This concept that marriage somehow negates the need for consent is an ongoing problem. In 2/3 of the United States, husbands are granted various exemptions from prosecution for marital rape; it seems that in many states, for instance, you can totally rape your sleeping wife, no problem. And France, the devaluation of consent has been made explicit by a 1992 ruling that consent to sex is presumed to exist in marriage until it is provably revoked.

If this is what marriage means, then yes please, let's rethink the whole thing. Now, I'm not laying this all on the shoulders of the first generation of legally married same-sex spouses; the above legal precedents for devaluing consent is a problem for all marriages, queer or straight. I'm saying that anything that prompts us to think about what marriage means is good for us, and not just because we can then be more inclusive in our social traditions.

Femme Invisibility

2011-09-09T12:14:00.003-04:00

In my professional life, I write about issues of queer visibility in higher education history. It has, over time, led me to think a lot about my own visibility as a queer person. I present as somewhat femme of center (#Idon'tbelieveinspectrums) because I have long hair, I dig eyeliner, and I sometimes wear skirts or dresses. I feel no need to apologize for this, as there is something sneakily sexist in assuming we should all ditch girly stuff and embrace boyish stuff no matter what we feel in our hearts. And, just for the record, I don't identify with femme anymore necessarily. I don't NOT identify with it either. I just don't think it really describes me, just like I don't think butch describes me, and one of the things I really like about queerness is seeing identities evolve over time. But I don't want to distance myself from a femme identity either, as though it is somehow less valid. It isn't, and because I get read as femme, I feel as though I can identify with the struggle for visibility.

But, looking a little femme means that people don't take one look at me and think "There's a gaywad!" unless I'm, you know, being decorated in rainbows for Pride. And according to the internet, a lot of people are talking about this. And clearly, it's something we need to be talking about.

There are ways in which I've made myself more visible, I think. I have a rainbow nautical star tattoo on my wrist. I have a nose ring and a purple streak in my hair, and the bag I usually carry has a bunch of gay pride buttons on it. And, as has been noted repeatedly, I plaster rainbows all over everything.*

It's been noted before that there's something easier about being femme, because you aren't as likely to be a victim of homophobia. This is probably true! But I don't want to sink into that comfortable place, for several reasons. First of all, I want my fellow queermos to know I'm part of the family. Second, visibility is my area of study. I think it's incredibly important for me to put myself out there - I've written about this before. I can't make space for other queer people if I'm not out there pushing boundaries. (And, as I have also said before, but it bears repeating: This is a personal choice. People should only ever be as out as they feel safe being, and I don't judge people who stay closeted, ever, unless they are Republican politicians.)

But what is it about girls with long hair and dresses that make people read us as straight? I think it comes back to this idea that sexual orientation and gender are intertwined, and this leads us to thinking that all gay men are swishy and feminine and all lesbians are softball-playing butches. Conservatives have used this against us, pointing out that our men are too feminine and our women too masculine, and therefore, we are somehow going to cause the downfall of the American patriarchy (we can only hope). I think that the people who transgress gender boundaries in bold, visible ways are brave (and often hot!). There isn't a right or wrong way to present or identify, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. We should all just do what we want. It's that simple. Kinda.

I might not have an Alternative Lifestyle Haircut, but I'm not trying to hide anything. Everyone is different, and until we get to the utopia in which sexual orientation is as incidental as hair color, I'm just going to go through life assuming everyone is queer until otherwise stated.

*No, not all gays are into rainbows, and that's cool. We've all got our thing.

Photo by Nic Bravo.

Read Heldman's "The Truths of Katrina" Right. Now.

2011-09-08T16:16:00.001-04:00

Today the Hairpin directed me to "The Truths of Katrina", in which Caroline Heldman describes, in great detail and with many citations, how the 2005 flooding of New Orleans is less the result of a hurricane and more the result of rampant corruption and racism. It's a year old, so forgive me if you've already read it. I hadn't.

The first part of the article presents what is apparently an honest-to-god real-life government conspiracy. Put away your moon landing concerns and check this out:

The judge chided the Army Corps, noting that they "not only knew, but admitted by 1988, that the [Mississippi River Gulf Canal Outlet] threatened human life ... and yet it did not act in time to prevent the catastrophic disaster that ensued with the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina."

Mayor Nagin received nearly $20 million to establish a workable evacuation plan in plenty of time for Katrina, but it’s questionable whether it was ever developed, and it was never disseminated (Palast, 2006).

Prison officials deny that anyone died in the crisis, despite several reports of deaths from both police officers and prisoners (Onesto, 2006).

After the massacre, the NOPD actively covered up the shootings (Maggi & McCarthy, 2010), including falsifying reports, planting a gun, and recruiting phony witnesses (FBI, 2010).

That referenced article from Greg Palast is even more damning; I recommend reading it as well:

Funny thing about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: no one can find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood. Whatever: No one can find it.

Heldman then discusses the racism that accompanied the disaster:

The "looting" frame was racially charged as evidenced with the now infamous AP photos of a black man described as “looting a grocery store” and a white couple described as “finding bread and soda from a local grocery story."

When those stranded at the Convention Center marched a long, hot three miles across the Gretna Bridge to get out of the City to a neighboring town, they were stopped by police officers with dogs who shot guns over their heads (Riccardi, 2005), called them racial slurs (Witt, 2008), and told them "we don’t want another Superdome."

At least eleven black men were shot, although some locals expect that the actual number is much higher ... Roland Bourgeois ... allegedly came back to the militia home base with a bloody baseball cap from Ronald Herrington, a man he shot, and told a witness that “Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot."

The judge in the case concluded that "on average, African-American homeowners received awards that fell farther short of the cost of repairing their homes than did white recipients." Nearly 20,000 Road Home Program grant claims that qualify for funding have yet to receive it, and these applicants are disproportionately black.

Overt acts of racial terrorism are also being employed: the letters "KKK" burned into the lawn of a young, black couple who moved to Gretna; the torching of a home in St. Bernard Parish that was to be rented to a black family.

The city has shifted from 67% black pre-Katrina to 58% black now (Jung, 2008), and, for the first time in two decades, the City Council is now majority white (Chappell, 2007).

It goes on and on, in amazing detail. It ruined my day, and, forgive me for saying so, but I hope it ruins yours too, because everyone should read this. The systematic neglect and violence that led to the deaths of so many black New Orleanians now has me wondering if this event might not be better labeled as the 2005 New Orleans Genocide.

If you're white, though, I hope you don't read Heldman's article thinking, "Oh, those poor black people." Because I agree with Helman that that's part of the problem:

"White people clearly understand Katrina as a racial issue. If we didn’t, whites would have experienced elevated anxiety about the possibility of it happening to us (as happened after 9/11)."

Those of us who are white need to start identifying with black Americans, not othering them.* Stories of 30,000 innocent people unconstitutionally and inhumanely incarcerated in the Superdome should not incite pity, but rather PANIC that this can happen to us. If, for some reason, one has trouble identifying with one's fellow human beings, perhaps it would help to remember that while some of us are protected by white privilege, our neighbors, friends, family, and future descendants may not be.

*And we really, really need to chill the fuck out about "bad neighborhoods." The Lower 9th Ward was considered a "bad neighborhood," and I'm sure that had a great deal to do with the violent reactions exhibited towards influxes of evacuees from the Lower 9th.

Talking About Things I Know Nothing About: Raising Gender Queer Kids

2011-09-07T11:00:00.002-04:00

UPDATE: Read this, also, about how parents talk about their genderqueer kids on Nightline. It's a great analysis.

One of my goals in life - and I am going to make this happen, dammit - is that I'm going to adopt a bunch of queer kids who are living in homeless shelters like the amazing Trinity Place. So, so many queer kids get kicked out of their homes, face abuse and sexual violence, and drop out of school. Sassafras Lowrey has done some amazing work documenting this tragedy, and also points out that family reunification might be the worst thing for these kids, because their families might be the ones victimizing them. So, being a queermo myself, and understanding that queer people aren't born into communities of other queers the way other marginalized people are born into communities of people like them, I think it would be cool to start a queer family. I'm hoping to recruit other queer adults into this project so we can get the work done together.

But even though queer kids are born to straight parents, there are straight parents out there who really want to do a good job raising their kids and helping them navigate this extraordinarily heteronormative world. The first letter of this Cary Tennis column, sent to me by Alert Reader Megan, was written by one such parent. Yes, it could be seen as problematic that this mom uses female pronouns for her child, but her child is six and she is just learning about trans and queer issues, it seems, and standing up for her kid in the face of some horrific backlash from neighbors.

Tennis gives her some good advice, and points out that this child is a miracle, part of the unlimited potential of human existence, and backs the mom up in her struggle against the judgmental assholes of the world. I wish I could give this mom a hug and whisper into her ear that she should talk with her child about pronouns.

She should also talk to the remarkable woman who writes Raising My Rainbow, about her adventures in raising her genderqueer son, CJ. CJ is very young, but clearly gravitates towards stuff we'd consider girly. His mom is amazing and supportive and writes openly about her own struggles with this. Her letter to her husband about what to do if she dies ripped my heart open. If you like reading about queerness, or child raising, or just good writing, check out this blog.

I've never raised any kids. The prospect is one I find terrifying. I admire the hell out of good parents who are raising their children to be intellectually curious, flexible, and honest. It's got to be challenging, but if we're going to keep the homeless shelters for queer youth from being overrun, if we're going to make the world safer for all kinds of people we should support parents who are raising their kids to appreciate the beauty of queerness, no matter how they identify.

Image via.

Suicide Prevention Week

2011-09-06T18:02:00.002-04:00

Hello, dahlings. Just a quick notice that it's Suicide Prevention Week. You can learn more about it at the Trevor Project, and pledge to be someone people can talk to if they need help. You can learn how to help someone in crisis and be an all-around awesome person. If someone you know is having issues around gender or sexuality and needs help, the Trevor Project is a great place to go. And if you have some spare change, I'm sure they'd appreciate it.

Gender Imbalance in Physics: Maybe Not the Result of Baby-Craziness?

2011-09-06T11:00:00.006-04:00

Women continue to be severely underrepresented in physics and mathematics. As we all know, this is the fault of women; the main reason behind this trend being that women want to have babies and academia is ill-suited to this, just as the nationwide pay discrepancy is due to women's relative timidity in asking for raises.

Okay, I got the sarcasm out of my system. Women don't negotiate raises for a good fucking reason: they are penalized for doing so. And while academia is fairly hostile to child-rearing, a recent study shows that this may affect men as much as it does women:

We also show that the impact of science on family life is not just a woman's problem; the effect on life satisfaction of having fewer children than desired is more pronounced for male than female faculty, with life satisfaction strongly related to career satisfaction.

You read that right, folks; these researchers found that teh menz care more about having babies. So can we stop blithely assuming that women's biological clocks are the cause of the gender imbalance in physics?

Now, it is entirely possible to construct some argument to get around this one result. For instance, pregnancy and breast-feeding are burdens more often carried by women -- but I think parents will agree that these tasks do not comprise the majority of the time requirement of raising a kid. Then there's the possibility that women's partners are less likely to stay at home. Do these factors outweigh their apparently weaker drive to have kids? To answer this, we need more studies. Not glib answers based on "common sense."

In the meantime, I suggest we admit the possibility that there may be some sexism at work in the academic community. Yes, fellow scientists, I have just implied that you yourself might be somewhat sexist. Yes, that applies to me, too. (I'm talking about internalized misogyny, not sexism against men, in case you're unclear on that.) Let's stop freaking out at the implication that we might be sexist, and start working on how we can be less sexist.

Happy Labor Day!

2011-09-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

Greetings, kittens. There will be no post today, as Kyrie and I are off doing Labor Day-esque things, like drinking and floating down rivers on tubes. So, let's all take a day off from talking about how organized labor is going to bring down America* and buy a mattress on sale. And don't over-do it on the baked beans, loves.

* It is not. I am a big supporter of organized labor, and I belong to a union. Just in case anyone can't read sarcasm through the haze of beer and charred meat so many people will have doubtlessly consumed by the time this posts.

Oh, Facebook, Part 1000

2011-09-02T11:00:00.000-04:00

Once again, a Facebook war keeps me up all night and makes me nearly incoherent with rage. A friend's wife posted a relatively innocuous story about her strange neighbors who sit in their garage all day long and apparently do nothing, and asked for others to bring up their strange neighbor stories. A couple of people made some comments about neighbors' OCD tendencies about grass on the driveway and such, and then comes this (trigger warning for trans misogyny):

here I come taking the cake... 70 year old tranny w/lip plug, ear plugs, and a nice pair of implants. Has 30+ cats, likes to wear granny jammies and sports some thick stubble on most days. Oh yeah, that's right, in yo face weird garage people! :)

And then she followed up with:

try explaining THAT to your four year old! lol

"That." Try explaining "that" to your four year old. Well, I'm going to try to explain a couple of things to you, assumed-adult.

1. "Tranny" isn't nice, especially in this context. It gets thrown around as a joking word by people in the community sometimes, and that is sometimes okay and sometimes not okay, depending on who's involved. But this straight-identified cis woman doesn't get to use it to talk about the fact that she thinks her neighbor is a freak. I pointed this out, and she asked me what would be better language to talk about this person she finds confusing. I brought up the word "trans," and also pronouns:

Honestly, we should always ask people how they'd like to be identified. But "trans" works well. And if your neighbor has implants and wears women's clothing, they might be trying to present as female, so regardless of facial hair and bone structure, you might do better to use female pronouns. Or you could always use the plural, which I encourage people to do when they are unclear of another person's gender (and, really, we should never make assumptions about anyone's gender). Leslie Feinberg, who wrote Stone Butch Blues and Drag King Dreams - both of which I highly recommend - prefers people use plural pronouns for them. There's also the gender-neutral "zhe" and "hir," which are more practical when writing than speaking.

The person on FB continued to refer to her neighbor as "he" for awhile, apologized for offending me, as though that was the point of all of this, and said that she was just trying to be funny. She also got sarcastic on me and said that she's surprised I'm not standing up for the "mental challenged" [sic] as well, since this person also has so many cats and has hoarder-like tendencies. This just pissed me off more - I'll stand up for anyone society marginalizes, shouldn't we all?

2. Weird piercings are pretty de rigeur amongst my friends, so if that's something that freaks her out, she really ought to expand her horizons a bit. Oh, we also have tattoos. SCARY. She later described her neighbor's piercings as "kind of hard to take sometimes," as though her feelings about their body modifications is all that matters.

3. She became very concerned that I think she's a bad person. I told her that's not the point:

It's about whether we're all going to stick to our rigidly-defined ideas about gender and what people should look/dress like and therefore consider some people more real or human than others, or whether we'll treat everyone with dignity and recognize everyone's basic humanity. You know? Gender's tough to understand, so I get it, but ridicule is hard to read when you could be talking about one of my BFFs (the only reason I'm sure you aren't is because I don't have any BFFs who have that many cats!).

Anyway. She sent me a message to tell me she has gay friends and relatives, as though I haven't heard that a hundred thousand times, and that she prefers love and not anger, which explains why she went straight to ridicule. She said that at one time she cared so much about women's rights that she got angry about it and now she realizes that isn't the right way to go. I'm not sure what got her there, but as you know, I really believe in anger. So this is what I told her:

What I've learned is that we're all responsible for our own feelings, and that it's incumbent on all of us to tell our own truths. My truth is this: Gender is an oppressive system for the people who are most important to me in my life, and for me, and so it feels like being stabbed when my people are ridiculed on Facebook or anywhere else based on a gender identity that might not be intelligible to the mainstream. If I let it go by I'd have been complicit, in my mind, because if someone were talking about one of my trans siblings like that on someone else's wall, I'd want someone to stand up for then. You feel me?

She never really got the point, saying she's sorry she hurt my feelings and telling me not to get too wrapped up in my queer family - which, fuck that, I couldn't live without them - or I might miss some of the beautiful people in the world. I think she's missing some of the beautiful people in the world by freaking out about her neighbor's stubble, implants, and lip rings, but whatevsies, y'all.

The whole conversation reminded me of this piece, called "Heaps of Woe," about racism at football [soccer] games. It's excellent, read the whole thing. The point is this: if we let racists act racist and don't do anything about it, we're making the world less safe for the targets of their racism. This is also true for queers, we can't let people - no matter how good they consider themselves to be - say shit about us without standing up for them. Just because I'm not transphobic doesn't mean that I get a pass on saying things to someone who is normalizing the idea that it's okay to snicker at one's unconventional neighbor.

New Fave Advice Columnist?

2011-09-01T14:49:00.000-04:00

Meet A Lady

Confession time: I like advice columns. I always have, and I am always excited when I happen across a new one. I have managed not to acquire a long blog-roll of advice columns, however, because most of them piss me off eventually. The Ethicist proved transphobic. Dear Prudence has advised readers to manipulate their lovers into losing weight. (Also, she advises that people seek therapy for, like, everything.) Dan Savage is way too prescriptive. And also he is anti-fat acceptance.

Miss Manners is always delightful, though. And I'm considering adding a new advice column to my pile o' blogs: the Hairpin's Ask A Lady. Partly because it's funny, and partly because the advice often seems ... kinda good, actually?

Some of my favorite quotes:

Oh, and people who call themselves rational human beings. You're a confused, hairless gibbon just like all of us, get over it.

My basic breakdown is: Come to me with a problem one time, you get hugs. Come to me a second time with a totally identical problem, you get strategy. Come a third time, and you are in Time Out.

All different girls prefer all different things. I am A Lady, I am not All the Ladies.

This one rang my alarm bells at first ...

Ugh, I hate "the patriarchy" and equivalently fussy terms (do not EVEN come at me with your "kyriarchy") ... let's call it the jerkcircus from now on, OK, I had everyone in the room vote, it's jerkcircus now.

But I have been won over by "jerkcircus." That there is a good word. Thanks, A Lady.

Is RuPaul's Drag U Gender Essentialist?

2011-08-31T13:00:00.004-04:00

Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I really love drag, and that I feel the need to have a television in my house primarily so that I can watch RuPaul's two shows on Logo, RuPaul's Drag Race and RuPaul's Drag U. The first is a traditional competitive reality show - start with 16ish contestants, eliminate one or maybe two a week until a finale between three or four contestants, with the winner being declared America's Next Drag Superstar and getting cash and other prizes. It's fun, entertaining, and I live for it when it's on.

Drag U, while also competitive, brings in three different women every week, and each will work with a previous contender from Drag Race to win a bio-drag competition. In other words, these cis women (at least, all have identified as such so far) will not be dressed as drag kings, but as drag queens.

Often, the storyline goes that these are women who need a confidence boost, which is tied with getting back in touch with their feminine side. Showing them that they can, in fact, walk in heels and pull off a look involving outrageous eye makeup is meant to push them out of their comfort zone. It looks like they have lots of fun, and they volunteer to go on the show, but there's something about it that I've been having to wrestle with: Is Drag U gender essentialist?

It all ties back into the performativity of gender, I guess - in most cases on the show, the women aren't really "performing" femininity before they get Dragulated (they aren't into makeup or fashion, they might work in traditionally masculine jobs like construction, maybe they're just tomboy-ish) and, presumably, they learn how to do so better after being made to look like drag queens. Not like feminine women - like drag queens. But drag was never meant to be a wholesale performance of femininity either. Drag is over-the-top, almost always humorous, and frequently an artistic expression. Men who perform as drag queens may or may not have feminine aspects to their out-of-drag personality, but while they're using cues of femininity in their drag performances, they aren't trying to "pass" as women most of the time (I say "most of the time" because I can't possibly know what's going on in any drag queen's head at all times).

So, Drag U is kind of confusing to me. As someone who really wants to learn to be a drag king, I totally understand the desire to engage in drag. And the over-the-top draggy-ness of the womens' presentation at the end - and the fact that they are put up in drag by cis male drag queens - doesn't read to me as prescriptive feminization the way many television makeover shows do it. In fact, I think this is a cheeky play on other makeover shows: there is no expectation that the women will hold onto the makeup and clothing they got in the show (unlike in What Not to Wear, which Kyrie has eviscerated here). Rather, it's the sense of confidence, that they can do something silly like wear enormous heels and head pieces and lip-synch to Diana Ross or whatever and come out of their shells, that is meant to be the take-home point. And I'm guessing that women who would find even the most playful and temporary performances of drag-type femininity oppressive would avoid going on this show, so there's certainly a selection bias here. Besides, they can go back to their everyday lives and be who they were before going on the show without the sense that they're letting people down by gaining weight back or not wearing clever little day-to-evening ensembles to work.

At the end of the day, these women are proving one of Judith Butler's points about gender: that all gender is performative, and therefore all gender is queer. And they got to hang out with a lot of fabulous drag queens while doing it.

I Stopped Reading Jezebel, but I Miss the Commenters

2011-08-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

One of the great things about the feminist blogosphere is that it seems to reverse the usual internet trend: the comments section is often the best part. I know we certainly get some great comments here :) And this seems to be especially true of Gawker daughter blog Jezebel.

Jezebel is aimed at women readers and is kinda feminist, though not explicitly so, if I recall correctly. Its comments section is heavily moderated so that you generally only get a comment published if it is germane, intelligent, and not redundant. Being funny helps as well. And I say this as someone who has attempted a couple times to comment without success; I appreciate the result of their moderation techniques to the point where it's hard to talk sour grapes.

The blog itself, though, has been problematic at times. They prioritize maximizing page views over consistency, and so occasionally betray their massive devoted readership in the attempt to bring in new readers; one such example, in which they published a guest post that criticized the value of consent, prompted me to stop reading the blog. But now and then other writers link to Jezebel, and I always scroll down to see what the commenters have to say.

For instance, check out the comments on the above post. (You may have to click "Featured" or "All" to view them.) There's a ton of good ones, so it's hard to pick one representative, but here's a comment I like from Hiroine Protagonist:

A woman's sexual autonomy is kind of the first principle of feminism. A Nice Guy who can't get laid and blames it on American puritanical attitudes is the first guy you meet as a feminist. You've really never heard this before? This is just ... circling the drain. Dude goes to Europe and projects his own wishful thinking on his ignorant interpretation of another culture? That women are so uptight and it's because of the semantic difference between consent and decision?

But there's a whole wall of awesome to go along with it; Jezebel posted a bullshit article, and the commenters totally call them out on it.

They did it again this weekend. Jezebel posted about an amateur comedian who related the tale of what sounds like a rape. (I initially wanted to post about how very tired I am of hearing sexual assault presented as zany hijinks, but I need a couple days to turn my incoherent rage into words.) People who maybe haven't thought about rape very much sometimes are confused when victims choose not to fight their assailants; if you're one of those people, it's a strategy rape victims sometimes adopt to minimize injury. It doesn't mean the victim wasn't raped. One of their commenters, Donovanesque, seems to suffer from this confusion:

[T]hat sounded like a really messed-up story to me, but not a rape story, since she had him pinned down, and later took off her pants and lay down.

In response, like, a bajillion other commenters straighten Donovanesque's ass out:

Judging from the inconsistencies in his intro and the story, I feel that he might have judiciously edited the story to sound less like "raperape". And he clearly lied to her in order to get into her room.

If anything in that story is fabricated, it's definitely the pinning down thing. He saw how awkward and uncomfortable people were getting, first he threw in the "she was bigger than me" thing so he didn't look like an overpowering male rapist and then he swooped in with the pinning down thing.

Just because a woman lays down or takes her pants off doesn't make it consensual. It could simply mean she's terrified for her life and is trying to minimize the physical damage she already knows she will suffer.

My friend handed her rapist a condom as she didn't want to get pregnant or infected with any STDs. She also wanted to ensure she had his DNA.

Things get a little heated and some people get a little rude, but in the end Donovanesque changes hir mind and some warm fuzzies are exchanged. It's an ... unusual form for a comments section to take.

Elmhurst College: Giving Queer Kids Money

2011-08-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

I write a lot about higher education around here - I'm a grad student, after all, and if that weren't enough, I study the history of higher ed for a living. More specifically, I study the queer history of higher ed. So when I learned - thanks to Facebook buddy Damon - that Elmhurst College in Illinois has become the first to ask students whether they identify with the LGBTQ community, my ears perked up.

Elmhurst phrased the question as, "Would you consider yourself to be a member of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) community?” and answering the question is optional. The answer doesn't play a role in whether the students are admitted, but a "yes" could put them in line for a scholarship (and given that this is a small private school, that's a big deal) and help the school direct the queer students toward resources available to them on campus.

Of course, the Illinois Family Institute is up in arms about it, because they think sexual orientation and gender identity are choices, such that anyone who identifies as queer is bringing persecution on themselves. But I don't expect this will be the only controversy surrounding the decision. Queerty asks whether poor students will identify as queer on the application to help pay for their education. Autostraddle points out that it might be unsafe for some students to answer "yes," although they certainly wouldn't be forced to.

I don't think I need to address the Illinois Family Institute's concern here. We all know that they're bigoted jerks with an interest in maintaining the hetero-patriarchy. I think Queerty was being somewhat tongue in cheek in their post, and Autostraddle doesn't think the question is a bad idea overall.

Queerty's point is interesting, though - there's no way to really verify sexual orientation or gender identity, and we shouldn't be going on missions to try to come up with a way to do so. I don't feel particularly concerned about high school students claiming to be gay who aren't, and Elmhurst probably has financial aid opportunities for students who come from low-income families. But colleges that have offered scholarships to minority groups have traditionally done so for groups who tend to be coming from a socioeconomically disadvantaged community: Native Americans, Black people, and other racial groups who have faced oppression at the hands of the white patriarchy. Queer people come from these groups, of course, but they come from everywhere. That's the thing: queer people aren't born into communities of other queer people the way Black people are born into communities of other Black people. This has a couple of implications: First, queer people tend to be born to straight people, so they don't necessarily have the community support from the beginning of their lives. Black people don't have to come out as Black to their families and face disapproval, rejection, eviction, or a host of other things that queer people sometimes do. Second, however, is that queer people are born all up and down the socioeconomic spectrum of society - queerness knows no class or race. So queer kids could come from extremely privileged households and not need one third of their college tuition paid for, or they could come from low-income households and require all kinds of financial aid if they want to pursue higher education.

This is not to say that I think that Elmhurst shouldn't offer this scholarship, or ask this question. I like both ideas, though I do hope that the already-privileged queer kids aren't the ones getting all the moneys. I think that the question itself is more important for the kids who can afford college without this scholarship, and may be just as important for those who do need the assistance. It signals that Elmhurst is a queer-friendly school, and that's no small thing. As the Campus Climate Index shows, not all institutions of higher education (even the public ones) are queer-friendly. Some, including my own institution, could use some work in these areas. Kids who are looking for a college where they can feel safe - and who isn't? - can take this into account, even if they check "no" or "prefer not to answer" on the application because they feel they can't be out at home. And given that institutions of higher education can too often be behind the times in dealing with diversity, instead of on the cutting edge, I think this is a really good shift toward remedying institutional queerphobia.

What is Up With the Blogosphere This Morning?

2011-08-26T11:00:00.003-04:00

I'm just criticizing everybody this week. Wednesday it was MRAs, the dregs of the humanity barrel (and I got my very own enraged would-be commenter, I feel so special). Today I'm going the opposite route, because I've got a bit of an issue with some feminist blogging.

Feminism is not a monolith, of course; you'll find a fair amount of disagreement on a wide variety of topics within the movement. At the same time, it's hard to be a feminist if you're not for equal pay. Or if you're anti-choice. Being opposed to the practice of slut-shaming is pretty par for the course as well.

In case you're unfamiliar with the term, slut-shaming is when you attempt to take a person (usually a woman) down a peg by implying that they're too sexual in some way, or sexual in the wrong kind of way. Most feminists agree that it is a bad thing to do, and that's the impetus behind the SlutWalk movement. It's definitely something I don't expect to encounter in the "Feminism" folder of my Google Reader account.

But this morning it's happened twice. First, we have Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon saying:

Suck it, Zooey Deschanel. (Though you probably were sucking something already, chin pointed downwards, and eyes cast upwards as if you're ingratiating yourself with someone three feet taller.)

Is it me, or did she just imply that Zooey Deschanel exchanges blow jobs for favors of some kind, for no reason other than Marcotte doesn't like the roles Deschanel plays? (And, for the record, wear a damn Hello Kitty shirt if you want. It doesn't make you less of an adult woman. For Christ's sake.)

Then I headed over to Feministing, and read this (about PETA creating a porn site):

They’ll lose the remainder of little respect they have left by the general public.

ARGH. This sounds JUST LIKE the things we say about women who perform porn. To my knowledge, Feministing does not take an anti-porn stance, so I find this rather hypocritical. And no, throwing in a "it’s not like sex-hating is okay either, but come on" doesn't negate the sex negativity you just engaged in. You can criticize PETA for all the sexist shit they do, you can discuss the ways in which you find porn problematic, but it's not cool to celebrate the disrespect that usually accompanies sex work.

Newsflash: Your High School History Book Might Have Left Out Women, Gays

2011-08-25T11:00:00.000-04:00

History is full of untold stories, which is probably what I love most about it, and why I want to study it for a living. And often, stories that are told are told from a certain privileged vantage point. On Tuesday, when I met my undergrads for the first time, we talked about how there is a lot of information out there for those interested in the stories of middle to upper-class white Protestant straight men. I try to spend as little time as possible on those stories, because there are so many others to talk about.

One thing that happens a lot is that history is sanitized and co-opted to fit into a conservative message. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, has been used by conservatives to oppose gay marriage and promote a kind of color-blind ideology that deliberately obscures the fact that the wealth gap between white people and people of color is widening. His anti-war messages are swept under the rug, and the fact that he was working on an anti-poverty campaign because he could see that poor people regardless of color needed to band together to work against the inhumane functions of US capitalism was so terrifying to people at the time that many historians suspect it led to his assassination.

This week, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial opened on the National Mall in Washington, DC. This is significant in that it is the first memorial that isn't to a white man or a war. He is the first black person to be honored on the National Mall. Teachers are using this as an opportunity to talk about Dr. King in a time outside of Black History Month and to try to drive home his anti-racism messages.

The story of Dr. King has become almost iconographic, but there are other people whose stories are just as important. Ella Baker, for instance, who differed from King in many important ways. She was a grassroots organizer, not an orator, and she thought that putting so much of the power of the movement in one person's hands was troubling. She wanted power more evenly disbursed, and she believed in radical pedagogy. She wanted to empower dispossessed black people and believed that they could interpret and navigate the world without formal education. The tensions between Baker and King - its most effective grassroots organizer and its most charismatic spokesperson - revealed fundamental disagreements over the roles of leadership, the importance of democracy, and the pathways toward social change.

Fannie Lou Hamer and Josephine Baker are two important women that my students have typically never heard of in the context of the civil rights movement. Hamer (that's her pictured above) was actually quite the engaging speaker, and was crucial to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the supremacy of the whites-only Democratic Party. She in particular so enraged candidate Lyndon B. Johnson that he referred to her as "illiterate" and planned a speech to air on television at the same time as her speech to the Democratic Party's Credentials Committee meeting. Fortunately for America, most news programs ran her speech unedited later in the evening. She made a difference in gaining political attention for black people. She worked for Head Start, Dr. King's Poor Peoples' Campaign, and sat as a delegate for the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Hamer is a hero.

Josephine Baker, as the link above discusses, was part of the Million Man March and gave a moving 20 minute speech at the rally - the only woman to do so. She was a performer, which is the role most people seem to know her in, and she used her platform to oppose segregation. She wouldn't perform in segregated clubs, and she was an active member of the NAACP.

Bayard Rustin is another overlooked member of the civil rights movement, though he was the organizer of the Million Man March, keeping track of even the smallest details. He was important to Dr. King and to the movement in general thanks to his capacity to organize. He was also openly gay. John D'Emilio wrote a really great biography of Rustin if you want to know more about him. But some people wrote him off at the time, and used his homosexuality to threaten the movement.

So, I think Dr. King should be memorialized on the Mall, and I'm looking forward to seeing the monument for myself the next time I'm in DC. But these other people should not just be footnotes in the story - they were just as important as King, if not as famous. But they weren't straight men, and therefore had a lower public profile and are left out of history curricula that barely include black people at all. It's important to talk about them, though, because they represent the diversity necessary to any movement: diversity of gender, sexuality, class, literacy, region, and focus. Without this representation, it's too easy to think that the civil rights movement happened because of one man - a characterization even Dr. King himself would surely have disagreed with.

Masculism =/= Men's Rights Activism

2011-08-24T11:00:00.001-04:00

So, this patriarchy thing. In order to maintain it, we have to distinguish between "men" and "women." And then we have to maintain that distinction, keeping a wide a separation as possible between the two classes, so that people don't question why we treat two groups of people so differently. Voila, gender.

Power is generally reserved for the "male" group, hence the need for feminism, but yes, the iron-clad and arbitrary distinctions between genders does, in fact, hurt men too. This fact does not mitigate the need for feminism in any way; on the contrary, granting people the same legal, economic, medical, and social rights regardless of gender is good for everyone. Of the people who are concerned with how our culture hurts men, there are those who understand this, and those who don't. The first group usually call themselves something like masculists, the second group usually call themselves Men's Rights Activists.

I think I've mentioned the Good Men Project before (I'm a big, big fan of Hugo Schwyzer, who writes for them often); another good source for masculist writing is available at No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? If you check these sites out, you'll find that it is entirely possible to talk about men and the patriarchy without being whiny and misogynistic. Obvsly.

But there also seems to be a large online showing of men who think all their problems are not, in fact, the result of the patriarchy, but the direct result of the work of a large conspiracy of evil FemiNazis™ who have decided to RUIN EVERYTHING. You guys, I'm not kidding. It gets pretty wretched. Instead of linking directly to any of these sites, I'll just link you to this post by Thomas MacAulay Millar, in which he has concatenated a list of popular comments from The Spearhead. Warning: these comments are vile and will likely ruin your whole day.

This post basically serves as a PSA: Men's Rights Activists exist, and watch out, because they are nowhere near as innocuous as their name might suggest. These guys make me very afraid, mostly because it makes me wonder how many people out there carry slightly less vitriolic versions of MRA views. It's a scary thought.

Women's Health is a Big Mistake

2011-08-23T11:00:00.000-04:00

We all knew that most Republican politicians these days are questionable on the whole women's health thing. Republican presidential contenders - the ones with a chance, anyway - are uniformly anti-choice and tend to oppose things like universal health care, paid maternity leave, and comprehensive sex education, all of which have serious ramifications for women's health. So it should be no surprise that the very idea that women and girls should have a vaccine that prevents cervical cancer is verboten in the GOP.

Rick Perry is proving this point. In 2007, he mandated that all young girls be given the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, through their schools, and that it should also be made free to girls between the ages of 11-18 who did not attend public school. Religious conservatives were stunned, and now that Rick Perry is running for governor, he has had to reverse himself and call his decision - one intended to prevent cancer, remember - a mistake.

But he knew it wasn't a mistake. Check out what he said at the time, courtesy of the story linked to above:

I challenge legislators to look these women in the eyes and tell them, "We could have prevented this disease for your daughters and granddaughters, but we just didn’t have the gumption to address all the misguided and misleading political rhetoric."

Right?!

But now Perry has fallen to this rhetoric himself. The HPV vaccine is good for boys' and men's health as well - and can be given to boys and men to help prevent its spread - but that isn't part of the dialogue here. It is clearly more important to Republicans to be sure that women are firmly under their control and that they are punished for having sex. At least, punished for having sex without any given Republican dude present. The number of sex scandals Republican men get involved in demonstrates that they aren't completely anti-sex, just anti-sex that they aren't personally benefiting from.

HPV is extraordinarily common. According to the CDC,

Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV. Another 6 million people become newly infected each year. HPV is so common that at least 50% of sexually active men and women get it at some point in their lives.

Fifty. Percent. Furthermore, 12,000 women get cervical cancer each year in the US. The vaccine prevents cervical cancer the way the measles vaccine prevents measles, but because only certain women have cervixes, and most men don't [and the men who do have cervixes present a whole other set of issues to queerphobic Republicans], then anything having to do with preventive treatment for this particular STI is taboo. The assumption is that women who don't have sex don't get STIs (or pregnant), so the sluts have it coming.

This is reprehensible. Perry actually did the right thing four years ago in encouraging vaccinations for public health. Schools require all kinds of other vaccines in order to prevent diseases like meningitis and measles from tearing through a school district and wreaking havoc on communities. This is no different. The fact that Perry has backed off means not only that he has no spine, but that there is a concerted effort on the part of Republicans to undermine women's health. I don't know about you, but I find this terrifying.

Welcome Back to School, Sorta

2011-08-22T17:22:00.000-04:00

It's the start of a new semester at my university; welcome back, fellow collegians. I don't know if you read your university-related spam, but our Assistant Vice-President of Public and Environmental Safety has decided to welcome us back with this admonishment: "Today, I ask all of you to start thinking about safety as a shared responsibility." A list of safety-related advice follows. Oy.

"But Kyrie," I am imagining you saying, "shouldn't you look after your own safety? Isn't that common sense?" To answer your second imaginary question first, I am not a fan of so-called "common sense." I see that term as an excuse to go by one's gut instead of thinking things through, which, though sometimes useful, definitely has its limitations. To answer the main question, though, if you want to do things to make yourself feel safer, by all means. But it's not your responsibility to render yourself as safe as possible at all times. We all have differing priorities and lifestyles. We can't all "avoid using ATM machines at night," and sometimes we want to turn off the AC rather than "lock[ing] the windows and doors of your car, apartment and residence hall."

What we do have an obligation to do is not commit crimes.* And, if crime prevention is the job of anyone, it's the job of the law enforcement and security personnel on campus. Any rational person, however, will realize that the police cannot anticipate and stop every crime from being committed. That's pretty obvious.

So what is the point of that email? To me, it reads as a pretty transparent attempt to preemptively deflect responsibility to those crimes are committed against, aka, victim blaming. Perhaps they hope that if more students believe that having their bike stolen is their own fault, the police will have to do less paperwork. Perhaps they hope that if a student is hurt or killed on campus, they can save face by pointing out that the student was walking alone after dark.

We've all seen these tactics used frequently and forcefully against rape victims: what was she wearing, how much did she drink, why was she alone with him. As a result accused rapists are rarely arrested and convictions occur at the rate of 13%. And that's just for the rapes that are reported, which are only 40% of rapes. This is what you get from heavy victim blaming. Do we really want all campus crime to be treated this way?

If the university really wants to help students be safer, it can provide statistics about the most common crimes committed on campus and where and when they occur. It can provide info about safety resources available on campus. And it can provide info about how to report and prosecute a crime if and when one occurs.

*In all fairness one of the "tips" in the email is about reporting suspicious activity, which, okay.

Today's Shocking Headline: Corporate News Media Suck!

2011-08-19T13:27:00.005-04:00

Remember a couple weeks ago when Newsweek published a batshit crazy picture of Michele Bachmann and called her "Queen of Rage"? Both the Washington Post and Slate called it sexist and in bad form. Bachmann is a legitimate presidential candidate (!!!!), they argued, and should be treated as such.

I suppose they have a point. Newsweek editor Tina Brown approved an unusually unflattering picture of the presidential hopeful. They could have done like they did to Sarah Palin and put a cute picture of her in her running shorts - a picture also called sexist by some people - or! A novel concept! They could have treated her the way they treat dudes like John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Bill O'Reilly, and made her look neither insane nor sexualized. But that'd be cray-cray, y'all.

I mean, Bachmann IS nuts. And as Cher pointed out, Michele may be the queen of rage, but her husband may be a raging queen. [Yes, I'm okay with making fun of people who read as really gay when they're trying to discipline the barbarians. It is a controversial statement, I realize. I'm with Dan Savage and Jon Stewart on this one, though.] So while I'm not unwilling to say that sexism is at play here on some level, I also had a big old snort at this cover. Not that I read Newsweek, let me be clear. Autostraddle has already demonstrated that they hate the gays. Just like Michele Bachmann! So I'm surprised they don't get along better.

ANYway. We shouldn't have much hope that Newsweek will treat its subjects fairly or its audience like adults. Where is the truly fair and balanced news? NPR, beloved home of Prairie Home Companion and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me?

Not so fast there, grrls and bois.

Turns out that NPR can try so hard to be "balanced" that it circles back into insanity. In this piece on whether gays can be cured through reparative therapy, they basically take the "here are two positions on this point! Who is right? WE'LL NEVER KNOW."

The criticism of this piece is that it presents two positions here - one that reparative therapy works, and one that it doesn't - and gives them equal weight, treating the matter as unresolved. It is not. The American Psychiatric Association, which has over 154,000 members, has said that reparative therapy is harmful. If you've gone through it or know someone who has, you're probably well aware of that. Interestingly, Marcus Bachmann has a clinic that offers to "cure" the homos of our fabulousity.

Sidenote: A friend (and fellow queermo) and I were at a bar talking to a strange dude whom we both read as straight. This NPR story came up, and he was like, "Listen. Everyone has different views. Some people like toe shoes, but they are harmful to the feet!" My friend and I looked at each other, finished our drinks, and split, rather than throwing the drinks on the dude and glitter bombing him. I don't care about toe shoes or whether you wear them, but I care a lot about whether gay people are being told there's a cure for their gayness. Gayness is awesome, you guys. It needs no cure. And that is a false equivalency if I ever heard one. Toe shoes? Really?

So if the news media isn't supposed to post batshit pictures of batshit politicians and it isn't supposed to act as though all opinions are equally valid, what IS a struggling form of journalism supposed to do? Well, I'm glad you asked. I have an idea that I think is pretty revolutionary: Don't be a douche.

Not being a douche can be achieved in a few easy steps.

1. Don't take corporate money. It makes you look like a tool of our corporate overlords. Which, um, you are. Try the Democracy Now! approach of listener/viewer support. It works wonders. The news is trustworthy, nuanced, intelligent, and covers things that GE doesn't want you to know about.

2. Consider whether it makes more sense to cover things like whether toast can save your diet or
the Verizon labor struggle or the increased violence in Iraq as the US tries to extend its December deadline. I have an idea about which is more important for citizens in a democracy to understand. There are lots of protests all over the place all the time, but mainstream media doesn't cover them. See point 1.

3. Don't act like all sides of a debate are equal. They are not, and that is a silly position to take. You can't have a "debate" about whether, say, reparative therapy is okay, or whether the poor people have enough stuff because they can microwave Hot Pockets if you have one mainstream Democrat and one foaming-at-the-mouth Tea Partier. Get people with interesting and informed views who can behave like adults. This right here is why I don't watch TV news anymore. The discourse has shifted too much for it to make any sense anymore.

4. Using batshit crazy pictures of people is okay, I think, in certain circumstances. Like, you are a tabloid. Or, that person routinely looks like a lunatic so you don't have to go digging to find a photo of an otherwise photogenic person. Or, they are actually engaged in something weird at the moment the photo was taken, and didn't just get caught with a weird facial expression.

5. It's also okay to talk about things like reparative therapy, but don't present it as though there are two equally valid sides to something that no one with any credibility can possibly support.

6. Don't take corporate money. Just don't. That means shutting down all cable news, and I am COMPLETELY fine with that. We'll find Sir Don Lemon another job. I'll bet Amy Goodman would hire him.

That's "Dr. Sweetie" To You

2011-08-18T11:00:00.000-04:00

Okay, I don't consider myself old-fashioned in any way, shape, or form. But you guys, what the hell is wrong with showing people a little respect? I mean, it's not hard. We have all sorts of social conventions for doing so. Some of them are not even terribly sexist! (Though many are gendered.) So wtf is up with every woman over the age of 30 calling me "sweetie?"

Unless you're related to me, you don't get to call me sweetie. Sorry. It's a grossly overfamiliar term for, say, a flight attendant to address me by. I wouldn't disrespect you with diminutives. Don't do it to me.

And yeah, blah blah blah, southern culture, I don't give a fuck. There's another term that's widely used in the south: "ma'am." That'll do just fine. It's a perfectly respectful term for a female-presenting person whose name you don't know. There's no need to resort to epithets that should really only be applied to children under the age of 5.

Unfortunately I am undermined in this by a culture that values youth over, like, everything else. And so you have hordes of people who resent being called ma'am because it implies they're old. Point one: no, it doesn't. Point two: wtf is wrong with being old? Please examine your ageism. Then, preferably, get rid of it.

Anyway, I keep resolving to make a fuss the next time a perfect stranger calls me "sweetie," and I keep forgetting to do it, because I am so used to a lifetime of complete lack of respect that it just kind of seamlessly blends in. But next time, you guys. Next time.

Yes, We Should Care About Those People

2011-08-17T10:46:00.002-04:00

All right, kids. I'm sick unto death of celebrities saying anti-queer stuff and then fake-apologizing for it while GLAAD is all, "Nice career you've got there. It would be a real shame if something happened to it." Tracy Morgan just did this, remember? From the same realm of dumbass dude comics comes Adam Corolla, for whom I have never had one iota of patience. And now he's bashing trans people, and so I will hate him forever.

I'm just going to quote him, with major thanks to Queerty for the transcript:

“When did everybody get fuckin’ lumped in with the gays? Really, I mean what percentage is transgendered, y’know what I mean? I mean, let’s just say I was a politician and I was like, ‘Hey transgendered folks, I don’t need your vote.’ I don’t think I could get elected? What do they make up, thirty percent of the population? Sure. ‘I went to school with a bunch of transgendered guys and now I work with a bunch of ‘em.’ What the fuck? When did we start giving a shit about this? About these people?

We gotta work it out with the—and now there’s all these variations where like, ‘I’m a pre-op, transgender, trans-neutral, trans-fat.’ Shut the fuck up! No. ‘I’m having hormone replacement therapy, but I still have my penis, but I’m not gay, but I’m attracted to men.’ It’s like what the fuck? I can’t do the math. I even, every time I see Chaz Bono I don’t know what, my cock looks at me and goes, ‘Uhh??! What do I do?’ I’m like, “I dunno, hide behind the balls. They’ll protect you.” They’re just a giant trampoline, they deflect anything that comes at you; the balls are very, they’re scrappy. Mm-hmm.
[At this point, Carolla spends a long time talking about how “old-school” and tough his balls are, saying that his balls used to “walk twenty miles in the snow just to beat off” and that his generation’s balls “stormed the beach at Normandy.” We’d find all the testicle talk odd, except that he once hosted a show regularly featuring “The Juggy Girls” jumping on trampolines and a game where losers could get a “Sumo Wrestler Tea-bag.” But we digress.]

Carolla’s co-host Emily Rosen continues reading from the stated aims of the Ernie and Bert petition and Carolla pipes back up:

Can the gays shut up? Just get married and please shut up? You’re ruining my life and what’s the, what does the ‘BLT’ stand for again? Oh, OK. They’re not “gonna save many worthy lives” [by marrying Bert and Ernie]. Yeah, Bert and Ernie butt-fucking are gonna save a lot of lives; it’s gonna be awesome. ‘Can you spell felch?’ What are we doing?! What is going on?

[His co-host says that the folks at Sesame Street "fired back" by stating that Bert and Ernie are not gay, they're just puppets]

Well sure, they’ve got their fist up guy’s asses. Literally up felt asses all day long. Of course. Can I say this? What’s with all the fucking training that’s going on? Like, I don’t feel like I had any training and I’m fine. Y’know what I’m saying?

[His co-hosts both agree that that's debatable] …

I want an apology from all the Asians and all the transgendered and the gay, the lesbian, bisexual, transgender community. Shouldn’t [the LGBT acronym] be something that like spells ‘YUCK’ or something? Y’know what I mean? Y’know like an acronym?… It’s important that I teach my kids about guys who wanna have their cocks cut off and a vagina put in their place. Alright. I’ll get to that as soon as I get home. ‘Hey kids, wake up. Y’know, there’s a small percentage of Americans who are really angry at their cocks. And they like them surgically removed and, uh, a hole put in their place. And it’s very important that you treat them with a certain amount of respect. It’s 1:30. And yes, I’ve been drinking. Natalia, sorry for peeing on you, but it was dark.’

Soooooooooooooo. It just so happens that the New York Times published an op-ed about how the marriage equality movement is leaving out trans people, so it isn't as though the queer community couldn't stand to get its own house in order here. But my goodness. I think the best way for me to deal with my incoherent rage is to write a letter that I'll never send. Isn't that what advice columnists are always telling people to do?

Dear Mr. Corolla,

You are an unspeakable douche.

Not-Love,
Me.

Okay. Lemme try that again.

Dear Mr. Corolla,

You are an unspeakable douche, and I have certainly never listened to your show and never plan to, but damn, dude. It's not that I'm surprised that you're such a monster, it's that I'm really over listening to transphobic ranting.

Of course we should care about "these people." You know why? Because they're human beings. And in my experience, they tend to be creative, thoughtful, and brilliant. I love queer people and genderqueer people because there is such a long tradition of strength, resilience, and creativity in the face of survival because of assholes like you. One trans person a month is murdered in America, and your hateful ranting is going to fuel those fires. You have blood on your hands.

Your point about your cock's response to Chaz Bono is kind of interesting, though. We only know what to do with bodies if we know how to eroticize them, right? So you can't tell of Chaz Bono is someone you're "supposed" to be into or not, because you are a Really Really Straight Dude, so if Chaz is a man, you're not supposed to be attracted, but if Chaz is a woman, you are. Here's the cool thing about queerness: you can, if you want to, start to let that go. Find that person, regardless of gender, attractive? Go for it. Find someone you want to wrap yourself around and wrap yourself around them. But I'm not sure you get that, because it jeopardizes your adamant heterosexuality. The thing is, if we can get to the point that we realize gender is as incidental as hair color to who a person is, we can realize that everyone's gender is different, and if everyone's gender is different, there's no heterosexuality for you to cling to as though it is your only life raft.

Also: There is such a thing as people who were assigned female at birth transitioning to a more male or masculine-identified gender, but in your "my dick is my whole life" panic, you forgot them. Also also, as Riki Wilchins put it, why does it have to be about losing a dick? Why can't it be about gaining a vagina? It seems pretty clear to me that in your worldview, one of those things is better than the other. You've got a long, long way to go towards more fully recognizing other peoples' humanity, yo. Call me sometime. I'll bring a brown paper bag to breathe into and maybe we can talk about why it would be good for you to open your mind a little. For starters, you might find yourself with the best friends you could ever hope for.

Ugh,
Jess

PS: And as to the TLBG (why not?) acronym being distasteful to you as it doesn't spell YUCK or something... go fuck yourself.

Shark Week

2011-08-16T11:00:00.002-04:00

I don't care what copyranter says, I think this ad is awesome. This is EXACTLY what I think about when I go to the beach while menstruating. Who hasn't heard those factoids about sharks' amazing blood-detection abilities? Throw that beaker of blue fluid away: what better measure of blood-stoppage could there be?

I appreciate it when ads acknowledge the diversity of female experience. Our menstruation concerns do not all revolve around white clothing. They can also revolve around logistics (primitive camping on heavy flow days? No thanks.), fiction (again with the vampires), or health (still not pregnant WOOOOHOOOOO). So yeah, pretty awesome that this ad addresses the "can predators smell my period?" question.

Suggestion for the next such ad: Komodo dragons. Go.

Maybe We Can Live With Some Segregation

2011-08-15T11:00:00.000-04:00

Faithful reader Boston Dreamer asks:

What are your thoughts on places like Harvey Milk High School in New York? Part of me sees the need for such an affirming institution, and the other side of me sees it as a cop out of sorts, allowing a school district to send 'those students' elsewhere rather than reforming the culture of the traditional school.

Just for some background, the Harvey Milk School is designed for, but not limited to, queer students. It is a fully accredited high school that is now run by the New York Department of Education. It has faced controversy since it opened in 1985, mostly from conservatives who want think that is an indoctrination process, or that it is somehow discriminatory. Some progressives have also criticized it, saying that it is a form of segregation to separate the queer kids from the straighties.

But here's the thing: Like it says on the front page of the school's website,

In an ideal world, all students who are considered at-risk would be safely integrated into all NYC public schools, but in the real world, at-risk students need a place like the Harvey Milk High School. HMHS is one of the many NYC small schools that provide safety, community, and high achievement for students not able to benefit from more traditional school environments.

That's... basically it, really. If the Harvey Milk School is helping kids get through high school and have a safer, healthier adolescence, I'm all for it. I think that sometimes we assume integration is always the best thing, but that's an oversimplification. Historians have long talked about the ways that integration was harmful to black communities, for instance: community schools closed, black teachers and administrators lost their jobs, black parents were made to feel unwelcome in their children's new schools, the kids were not necessarily better served, schools became internally segregated, etc. There is something to be said for having a school built by and serving your community. Not, of course, that segregation should ever be the law. It's just that it's not so simple as "integration is always a good thing for everyone forever." Some people benefit from these situations. And it's hard for me to see who loses in this particular case.

Queer communities have to form themselves, they aren't crowds we're born into. Consider that these kids might have parents, families, churches, and communities that think homosexuality is a sin or that gay people are fine as long as they stay in Chelsea or whatever. If they can go to a school that affirms their identity, they're going to be so much better off. I realize that they'd have to be out to their parents to go to the school, and that that could be a source of drama too. But I would rather this place exist than not exist.

Schools should be safe. They aren't always, and having zero-tolerance policies on queer bashing isn't always going to solve the problem. At Harvey Milk, kids are safer, more likely to graduate, and able to be open about who they are. I wouldn't throw that over for some "good liberal" hand-wringing about segregation, to be honest.

Feats of Strength

2011-08-12T11:00:00.002-04:00

My parents used to buy 40 pound bags of salt pellets for the water softener. My dad could simply have carried these bags in himself, but he let us kids take a crack at them instead. Being the oldest by three years, I was also the biggest and the strongest and the most successful at lifting the bags. And it made me feel AWESOME.

Feats of strength: you do not have to be a hulking bodybuilder to enjoy performing them. You can be a scrawny 12-year-old girl. Or an adult woman of thoroughly average musculature. It doesn't matter. It's still fun to test your limits from time to time.

Not that anyone indulges me these days. If someone needs help moving, they usually put out a call for a bunch of guys to help. I'm no Chyna, granted, but heck, I can generally lift half a couch. So it's disappointing to be overlooked, and it can be kinda enraging when it happens at work. In grad school, my old Sun work computer was due to be replaced with a fancy Mac. I waited ... and waited. I finally went down to pester our Mac support person about it, and she told me that my shiny new computer had been sitting in the computer support office for a week but could not be delivered until she could get a couple of guys to move it. Yeah.

Of course, I had my old Sun computer dismantled and in her office in a hot second, much to her surprise, and whisked away the new computer my damn self. I'm still annoyed that she decided for me that I could not lift a computer monitor.

So, public service announcement. Women are not always incapable of and uninterested in lifting heavy things. So don't assume we are. You just might get twice as many people to help you move next time.

Your Partner(s)'s Health

2011-08-10T15:09:00.000-04:00

I promised that argument I had on Facebook would prompt a series of posts, and here's the first of them! In this post, I'd like to discuss whether we have the responsibility to monitor and/or manage the health of our partners. (Note, I am specifically not talking about managing the health of, say, your kids. That is completely different.)

So. Many people enter into long-term romantic relationships with each other. Sometimes these relationships last whole lifetimes; more often, they last years or decades. However, our bodies can also change substantially over years or decades. So it is entirely possible for partner #1 to physically change in such a way that partner #2 now finds it difficult to eroticize them. Which poses a great challenge for the two if they wish to maintain a sexual component to their relationship. (This can apply to any two people within a poly relationship as well, of course.)

According to the internet, the most common way that this happens is when a partner gains weight. Not surprising, since the overall trend is to put on weight as you age, and since we have a cultural aversion to fat. I tend to agree with both Kate Harding and Dan Savage that, in this scenario, partner #2 has one of two options: [1.] learn to love partner #1's new, fatter body, or [2.] end the relationship.

This is by no means the majority opinion, though. Most people (and this includes friends of mine, friends of friends, advice columnists, bloggers, and TV personalities) are of the opinion that you are justified in encouraging/manipulating/coercing your partner into modifying their body back into a shape you find attractive. Did I say attractive? I meant to say "healthy." This is where the conversation veers off in a new direction, in which everybody claims responsibility for monitoring the health of their partners.

You guys, I object to this concept. I assert that I retain complete autonomy in my health care decisions regardless of my relationship status. Whether those decisions increase or decrease my health, they are mine alone to make.

Now, other relationships may function differently. Some couples prefer to completely share the responsibility for both partners' health. Here's the thing, though. Entering into such an arrangement is also a health care decision you make. And you have the right to rethink that decision any time you like. Furthermore, the fact that you have such an arrangement does not mean that any other two people on Earth are obligated to do things the same way. Furtherfurthermore, we shouldn't assume that other couples have the ability to make health decisions for each other.* If a man shows up in a doctor's office seeking a vasectomy, you don't get to quiz him about his wife's opinions. If a woman's lifestyle leads to her gaining weight, don't give her girlfriend tips on how to induce her to lose weight. That shit is problematic.

*I'm not talking about when one partner is incapacitated by illness. Obviously that's a different situation, in which you have to get someone else to make the decisions.

Queer on the Job

2011-08-09T11:00:00.000-04:00

I've talked before about how I'm open with my students about my queer identity. I mentioned that this is a dangerous position to a certain extent, and that the idea of whether to be open on the job is contested amongst queer people. I think it is an entirely personal decision, and I would never, ever fault anyone for not being out at work or anywhere else. We all have to navigate our own lives the way we see fit. But the person I am is not someone who's good at hiding stuff, or playing the game, or pretending to mainstream-ness, or whatever. It's not about me hitting peoples' gaydar as much as it is just not being good at keeping my mouth closed or my identity secret. And there is certainly an element of choice, too. As I said in my previous post, it's about creating space for people to be comfortable in my classroom with being queer. And I teach in a college of education, so I feel these issues are especially pressing, considering how hard it is to be out in a K-12 setting.

A new report by the Williams Institute (that's a PDF) shows that 38% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults have experienced harassment at work because of their sexual orientation, and around 1/3 of LGB adults are not out at work. This number is surely significantly higher for trans people.

As Queerty points out, there are plenty (plentyyyyyyyy) of people out there who would say "Just tone it down and stop being so... you know, GAY in PUBLIC and then you won't have any moar problemz!" Well, that isn't going to work. Asking people to tone it down to fit in is asking for assimilation, and that's not cool. I mean, if you're a mainstream type of person or assimilation is fun for you, rock on with your bad self. But it isn't for me, and it isn't for most of my friends (next time we have coffee I'll tell you about my 4th of July fireworks adventure with the Gender Mafia and you'll laugh and laugh and be jealous of the delicious kettle corn and of my awesome queer family).

For me, trying to pretend that I'm part of the white middle class straight protestant mainstream capitalist America stuff is just not going to happen. My friend Dierdre said once that if she were going to just go along to get along, she'd have to take out part of her humanity and shoot it, which is exactly it (D: I apologize if I'm misquoting you, please correct me in the comments if I am). You don't have to like who I am and the way I express myself, that's cool. But we should, at a minimum, be able to avoid persecuting each other for things that don't affect anyone else, really, right? I mean, laydee-types who like b00bz are not ruining your family or your ability to do your job or anything like that. So I'm not going to tone it down for you, that deliciously flamboyant gay dude isn't going to tone it down for you, the hottie gender outlaw who you just can't figure out isn't going to pick a gender and stick with it to make you more comfortable. Learn to live with being uncomfy, you know?

I wish I could wave a magic wand and make everyone more accepting of - and excited by! - nontraditional gender expression or out-and-proud queers or whatever. I can't. In the meantime, though, for me, the answer is not to try to hide anything. This might mean no academic job for me, but I'd rather shred my PhD by hand than pretend to be someone I'm not to get a job at Straight Doodz U. I can figure something else out. That's a privileged position I'm in, and I get that not everyone is. So what are we going to do to make workplaces safer for those of us who don't fit in and who can't just go find a job working at a place where it's Okay To Be Takei?

Anatomy of a Garden-Variety Anti-Feminist Troll

2011-08-08T11:00:00.001-04:00

Facebook, y'all. The best/worst shit happens there. Not so much on my profile, because I ban anyone even slightly sexist/racist/homophobic in order to maintain a happy fun place for myself. But oh, my friends' friends. Some of them are seriously fucked up.

Last week I teamed up with one of my friends to argue with a fat-phobic anti-feminist. In case you're curious about the context, she had posted a link to this piece o' crap from AskMen with a comment about how it obviously sucked, not expecting much disagreement. And then this guy, who will henceforth be referred to as Douche,* crawled out of the woodwork. To be honest, he has inspired a whole series of posts from me, which you have to look forward to, but first let us examine his troll-ness, because it is fun.

The thing about trolls is that they are all very similar and none of them realize it. Here's a bunch of stuff you will come across again and again in the comments sections of unmoderated feminist blogs, as expressed by Douche:

"i didn't even bother to read ur comment at the top": What a good friend!
"I think u might be being a bit over-sensitive." Oh hey! Are we playing antifeminist bingo?
"Are u guys going to become those crazy feminists who give the rest of the rational group a bad rep??": We are playing anti-feminist bingo!
"I'm actually a feminist lol." Lol indeed, dude.
"Really you take everything here entirely too seriously." It's always charming when a guy (and a supposedly feminist guy, to boot) offers to dictate what women should get upset about or not.
"the way women obsess over their bodies nowadays, and the terrilbe things that happen to men if they imply that their woman has gained weight": Er, what?
"the article u posted is meant to be taken as a joke": Okay, I have that square already. I can't win this bingo game if you keep using the same approach.
"It also doesn't mean you need to get bothered by every 'wife in the kitchen' joke."
"I still think the article is worth a few giggles, not getting ur panties all bunched up lol"
"I think both of you are so high up on your high horse that ur head has gotten lost in the clouds."
"You're not seeing clearly anymore, ur just playing the victim." Finally, a new square. Unfortunately, I do not bingo. Sadface.

Perhaps you are wondering why on earth we would even bother arguing with this asshole. I shall tell you. First of all, this was not an anonymous commenter on a blog.** This was someone my friend knew personally. And now she and all their mutual friends now know exactly the kind of asshole he is. Which is valuable, if disappointing, information. Second, I think it's important to stand up to assholes, especially in one's personal life. And third, it's important to back up your friends when they're doing said standing up. Anyone who looks at her profile will see two coherent feminist viewpoints and one increasingly enraged and incoherent anti-feminist viewpoint. It sets an example.

Also, I like to post this stuff now and then because often one of my guy friends will respond with, "Wow, someone actually said that?" Yes, people "actually" say fucked-up, over-the-top sexist, racist, and homophobic stuff ALL THE TIME.*** Folk who are relatively privileged think they can just brush it off, but you actually can't just brush off a lifetime of this crap. And the bigots will likely assume your silence is tacit agreement. I don't think we changed Douche's mind about anything, but he has probably realized that this one tiny corner of the internet is, in fact, hostile to anti-feminism. If that happened more frequently, I do think we'd all have to hear less outrageous bigotry.

BONUS: More bingo.

* I specifically like to refer to anti-feminists as douches because it's so appropriate. Douches, after all, are terrible for women's health.

** I am generally in favor of banning trolls rather than feeding them. Which is what we do here.

*** And it's not "just trolling." Douche, after first denying it, then told us that he was trolling at first but really he's serious. And I bet that's the case for a lot of trolls.

Blogcation

2011-08-01T11:00:00.001-04:00

Everyone needs a vacation! We're taking the first week of August off. See you next week, NWFers!

Hearts 'n unicorns,
Kyrie and Jess

Are Single-Gender Colleges Possible?

2011-07-29T10:26:00.003-04:00

It's a great week for reader recommendations, as Alert Reader Drew points us to this piece on trans issues and all-women's colleges from Insider Higher Ed. The piece is titled "Women's Colleges and Ex-Women," which I suppose is meant to be funny, but kind of hits me wrong. Trans men aren't "ex-women," you know?

The main issue this article addresses is how all-women's colleges should handle it when some of their students transition and identify as male. Of course, we know that transitioning doesn't require people to transition from female to male or from male to female - there are all sorts of other points on the gender map a person could pick, and it can change over time. This article doesn't go into those issues at all, though. This appears to be the central question:

What place do gender roles have at a decidedly feminist institution? Or at any women’s college, for that matter?

This is a thorny issue for the institutions - as the article points out, questions include what to do about sports, bathrooms, dorms, professors who won't use a student's preferred name, gender-neutral housing, etc. But they need to figure it out, and quick. As one of the people interviewed in the article says, higher education should be at the cutting edge of all issues of diversity and inclusivity. I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly, but haven't found it to be true in my experience.

Anyway, my thought is this: Are single-sex institutions something we should have? I realize that this is a big question and one that implies completely changing some prestigious, historic institutions. But I think we should just ask the question and walk through it. I know that some woman-identified people prefer an environment consisting entirely of only woman-identified people, but... how realistic is this? Trans and genderqueer people might not feel they belong at either all-women or all-men schools, and while they could go to schools that aren't gender-based, what if they don't figure themselves out until college? I mean, plenty of people don't, right? And what is a school going to do if someone identifies, brilliantly, as a queer trans femme dyke? If gender is something we perform and not something we are, can we have schools with admissions based on gender? Presumably Mt. Holyoke wouldn't turn down someone for being a boyish/masculine/tomboy-type woman - for not performing "woman" in the culturally prescribed way, which I'm not convinced anyone really can anyway - so where does the line get drawn? What I'm wondering is, should there be a line at all?

Maybe the answer is for women's colleges to admit anyone who self-identifies as woman/female/femme/genderqueer and not ask any more questions. And men's colleges can use similar criteria. All schools should have gender neutral housing [which the University of South Florida is doing!] and bathrooms, and all faculty and TAs and residence hall advisers should learn about trans and queer issues, which would improve student life for so many kids.

As someone who works in higher education, at least for now, and who has a lot of investment in queering academia, I think these conversations are critically important. Accessibility to higher education means being fully inclusive of all kinds of people, and so trans and genderqueer people need to feel safe and happy at their institutions, and see that their identities are just as valid and honored as those of self-identified cis women and men.

Breast-feeding Optional

2011-07-28T11:00:00.001-04:00

Despite being a member of the nulliparous set, I know it's a heck of a lot of work to produce and raise children. Props to you parents out there. Thanks for, you know, contributing to the continued existence of the human species. I appreciate it.

Most sane people know that child-rearing takes time, money, and sometimes personal sacrifice. Also, gestating and birthing babies is certainly hard on the body. And yet, we as a society feel perfectly free to step in and say, "That herculean task you're undertaking? You must do it exactly as we prescribe. Else you're a bad person."

One example is the way we completely proscribe alcohol for pregnant people. Though light to moderate drinking has not been connected to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (this site summarizes the topic pretty well), our disapproval is so severe that even informed pregnant folk don't feel comfortable having a glass of wine in public. And that's just one of a long, long list of things that are forbidden to eat, drink, or do during pregnancy.

It's not over once you give birth, of course; your choices remain highly scrutinized. In particular, parents are highly pressured to breast feed. Now, I am not anti breast-feeding. I know it has demonstrated health benefits for the child, can function as a form of contraception, and is deemed highly rewarding by some parents. But at the same time, it is highly constraining for the breast-feeding parent. I've written about this before, but just take a look at the World Health Organization's recommendations: exclusive breastfeeding, breastfeeding on demand, and no use of bottles, teats or pacifiers for six months. You weren't planning on doing anything for those six months, right? Like, I don't know, working? Shame on you.

They also recommend that breast-feeding continue for at least two years. Okay, let me get real here and remind everyone that women (and otherwise identified folk who birth children) are, in fact, people. It is a bit much to expect people to curtail basically all activities for six months per child, and then not to travel without their kid for two years per child. These blanket requirements tie women down and constrain their lives. Some may be able to deal with these constraints, but others cannot or will not. And, as the Crunk Feminist Collective points out, some women just may not want to. (The idea of breast-feeding a toothed, talking toddler weirds me out, and I bet I'm not the only one.)

Like I said, I'm childless and not planning to change that, but the WHO recommendations get my dander up on behalf of parents everywhere. There are a lot of beneficial things you can do for your kid, but I bet you can't do all of them. Choices have to be made. And it pisses me off that parents' (especially womens') quality of life is expected not to factor into those choices.

Did My T-Shirt Mess Up Your Freedoms?

2011-07-27T11:00:00.001-04:00

Alert Reader Karen points out that one half of a lesbian couple had to turn her "Marriage is So Gay" shirt inside out at Dollywood. That would be Dolly Parton, a gay icon, by the way. Clearly, she did not personally run the sensitivity seminars for the staff at this place, or she'd laugh in the face of someone suggesting that this was an appropriate course of action. At least, I hope so.

Karen's question is, "So if this shirt had been one of those 'man + woman = marriage' shirts, would that have been considered offensive as well?"

Probably not, even though that shirt is offensive, because it's coming from a place of bigotry. But those values are, in many ways, more mainstream, despite the fact that 53% of Americans support gay marriage. That fact notwithstanding, the number of self-identified evangelicals to self-identified queers is 10:1.

I have the same "marriage is so gay" shirt that the woman in question had to turn inside out. I have definitely noticed that people sometimes seem uncomfortable when I wear it, but I've never been asked to change, and I honestly don't care. I like making people uncomfortable sometimes. But these ladies had their kids with them, and didn't want to cause a scene, I get that. I'm glad they're doing something about it now - they're asking the park "to implement policies that are inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people; conduct staff sensitivity training; and issue a public statement indicating that the park is inclusive of all families." Word.

The park's policy as of now is to ask people "with clothing or tattoos that could be considered offensive to change clothes or cover up." You know what I think is offensive? Asking people to hide their self-expression because someone at this park gets to decide what is acceptable, and what a family looks like, and what a person should put on their body. If you don't like tattoos, don't get one. But we seem to have this whole cultural idea that it's more important to protect people from seeing anything unpleasant than it is to allow people to express themselves. Aren't we supposed to be the land of the free? My tattoo or nose ring or whatever hurts you literally not at all, so just get over it, okay? And if my t-shirt slogan means you have to have a conversation with your kids, will the world cave in? Or if you have to have a conversation with yourself?

"But Jess! What if someone is wearing a 'God Hates Fags' shirt or sending their kids to school in a shirt that says 'Islam is of the Devil'?"

Look, I do think there's something of a difference here. Those messages of hate speech are just that, hate speech, and they are explicitly designed to make people feel unsafe and unwelcome. But I don't think they should be illegal either, we have to be able to deal with idiots productively. The shirts themselves aren't the problem here, it's the bigoted asshole fucks behind the shirts, and we need to get past them and their fabulous signs and talk about how we can make society so safe and accepting of everyone that fringe shitheels like these folks don't even register on our radar anymore.

We need to quit policing each others' bodies and what we put on them. Your swinging fist is your business until it hits my nose. Wear what you want, I may or may not like it, and you shouldn't care if I do.

Image via.

Overkill Can Be an Excellent Thing

2011-07-26T11:00:00.000-04:00

I read a blurb on Feministing about the prospect of a male birth control pill; specifically, that research on such a pill is now being funded with the understanding that men would actually take it. So that's good.

But then the discussion veers into whether and to what degree women are comfortable sharing the responsibility for contraception. To which I would like to say, are you kidding me? Ladies, this need not affect your contraceptive choices at all. A male contraceptive pill could be used in conjunction with any current method of contraception on the planet.

The fact that we view this as some sort of either-or proposition is the result of our tendency to see birth control as a one-method process. I've harped on this before, but the numbers are not great. If you really don't want kids right now, it is an excellent idea to use multiple methods. Doubling up on methods has always seemed like a blindingly obvious thing to do to me, anyway, and it amazes me to find how many people automatically assume that one method, regardless of effectiveness, is good enough.

Part of this attitude could arise from what our doctors tell us. I was recently discussing barrier methods with a gynecologist, and asked whether the diaphragm could be used in conjunction with condoms. She gave me a funny look and told me that would be overkill. You guys, assuming that diaphragms don't reduce the effectiveness of condoms (or vice versa), the two together have a typical use failure rate of 2%, greater than that of an IUD. That is not what I would call overkill. More like possibly not enough kill. (Remember, failure rates are yearly.)

I suspect that this one-method attitude also contributes to the lack of options we generally have. For instance, as far as I can tell, there is exactly one brand of contraceptive sponge available in the entire world. It is the Today sponge, which has a caustically high concentration of nonoxynol-9. Let me tell you, that sponge can fuck your shit up. Though Wikipedia will tell you there are two other varieties, both of which have either less nonoxynol-9, or none at all, and supposedly are less irritating (and in the case of the Pharmatex sponge, possibly STI-reducing), it took me an extended internet search to figure out that both the Protectaid and Pharmatex sponges have been discontinued. Cervical caps have a similar issue; there is exactly one you can buy (FemCap), and it is one that is poorly rated for comfort compared to earlier models.

This is one of those issues that the free market should ideally solve by producing a wide variety of products. But our assumption that one method is good enough means that most people are going to use the pill or condoms, leaving a relatively small customer base for alternative methods. Given that products have also to be approved by the FDA, that probably kills most of the incentive for birth control innovation. Which is a terrible, terrible thing if you have any difficulty with the most popular methods. And they all have issues.

I've rambled on a bit here, but my point is, for the love of god yes please male birth control pill. More options are a good thing, especially when they can be taken simultaneously with existing methods. And I haven't even touched on how very awesome it is to let men take more responsibility for their own reproduction: if I was a hetero cis dude I'd be all over that.

And just for fun: what's the best you can do layering contraceptive methods? The best I can come up with is pill + copper IUD + female barrier method + condoms = 0.0015% annual typical use failure rate. Now that, my friends, just might be overkill.

Queer History is Not Optional

2011-07-25T12:18:00.006-04:00

"I always wanted to leave something important behind. Remember the history book you gave me for Christmas?... I've been going to the library, looking up our history. There's a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven't always been hated. Why didn't we grow up knowing that?... It's changed the way I think. I grew up believing the way things are now is the way they've always been, so why even bother trying to change the world? But just finding out that it was ever different, even if it was long ago, made me feel things could change again. Whether or not I live to see it. At work, when everyone else is at lunch, I've been typesetting all the history I've found, trying to make it look as important as it feels to me. That's what I want to leave behind, Ruth - the history of this ancient path we're walking. I want it to help us restore our dignity."
- Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Forgive me for including such a long quote at the top of the piece here, especially given that we'll be talking about Stone Butch Blues on the blog soon. But that quote (and the book itself) is really important to me. Leslie Feinberg really hits the nail on the head with that quote. They clearly understand the importance of queer history - the novel itself is queer history - and the part of that quote that really gets me is when our protagonist, Jess, asks, "Why didn't we grow up knowing that?"

That's the question I ask myself all the time, it's why I study queer history, and it's why I have been cheering on the California legislation (called the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful Education Act) to include queer history in public schools. But, of course, that's going to turn into a big fight, Prop 8-style, even though California Governor Jerry Brown already signed it into law.

Queer historians of education have made excellent cases for the inclusion of queer history from many different angles. Jackie Blount writes about how educational institutions have regulated sexualities and gender. Roland Sintos Coloma looks at the ways heteronormativity replicates Western concepts of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Catherine Lugg writes about the ways laws and policy have impacted educational practice. Karen Graves examines how culture has resulted in the persecution of queer teachers. As Karen wrote in And They Were Wonderful Teachers, "Schools are prime sites for cultural reproduction, contested terrain for those who wish to preserve or challenge the status quo."

The way FAIR works is that it will turn all the kids gay. Jaykay, y'all! Actually, it requires social studies classes to teach about queer civil rights movements and the historic contributions of queer people, and it adds sexual orientation and gender identitiy to existing anti-discrimination laws.

So there are, of course, those who oppose the bill, and in many cases those people are the usual players in the usual games. The California Catholic Conference opposes it for all the usual reasons having to do with hatin' on the gays. And the Capitol Resource Institute has started up the familiar shenanigans trying to overturn it.

It is vitally important that we win this fight. As Scott Bravmann said in Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference, "In addition to its critical, descriptive, explanatory, and strategic uses... history also helps circumvent the censorship, denial, and amnesia that have continued to inform so much of lesbian and gay existence." Queer people need to see ourselves in history, lest we believe the stories that we are just deviants, that we have never contributed anything positive to society, that we aren't fully human. Queer invisibility in history is an actual problem for people, not just an academic point.

The historical study of queer people is relatively new, largely because queer people have increased their own visibility in the last few decades. The homophobic oppression at the government and grassroots levels in the mid-20th century has kept queer people, and therefore queer studies, repressed. Anti-sodomy laws rendered homosexuality illegal in most states until the 1990s, and times of intense persecution, especially in the Cold War, prompted people to stay closeted and invisible. Invisibility of queer people in the historical record, then, mirrors the problem of queer invisibility in mainstream society in general.

We all know that bullying of queer kids in schools is a problem, as is suicide by queer teenagers. Increasing queer visibility through the curriculum can only help, I think. If people feel more connected to their history, and if schools can demonstrate that we really are here and everywhere - and, indeed, anywhere - we will be that much closer to achieving full equality in the United States. Queer people are part of the past, present, and future of American and world history. As Marlon Riggs said, "When the existing history and culture do not acknowledge and address you - do not see or talk to you - you must write a new history, shape a new culture that will."

Capitalism Is Not The Answer

2011-07-22T11:00:00.000-04:00

Happy Friday! My adopted home state of Virginia makes me proud once again. This time it's because it includes one lady with a lot of junk to sell and a dream. And that dream is that no Muslims or queers show up to her yard sale.

Road trip, y'all!

JK.

Anyway, seriously. She wants to be sure to not sell her stuff to gay people or brown people (what about gay brown people?). No "LGBT people, illegal immigrants, and muslims, anyone else is warmly welcomed! no drama, terrorism, or illegal transactions with non-US citizens / illegal immigrants / people taking jobs away from people who belong and are legal in this country is desired."

So first and foremost, we know she's barely literate. Second and secondlymost, I love how it looks like she thinks the queers bring the drama, the Muslims bring the terrorism, and the "illegal immigrants" bring the illegal transactions. #stereotypeFridays

This is a good illustration of how the free market is not going to solve inequality, the way some libertarians (*cough*Rand Paul*cough*) seem to think it will. I've heard people argue that capitalism will prevent discrimination because people will always want to sell their stuff to whoever will pay for it, so obviously restaurants will always seat black people! That's how it's always been!

Right?

No, of course not. That's what Jim Crow was all about: white supremacy, and not thinking that black peoples' money was as good as white peoples' money. If black people couldn't shop at Macy's, Macy's made less money, but it was participating in the myth of white supremacy, and that was worth more to the bigots. See? So this dumb woman in Virginia cares less about being able to sell all her garbage at her yard sale than about making sure she sells it to the "right" people.

We can't let everything in this country be privatized if we want to make sure everyone has equal access, because the people who have all the stuff we need access to can be jerks. So just because I'm a gaywad or you're Latin American (and therefore she can't tell if you're "legal," because straight white people are always totes legit, and as though there is such a thing as an illegal human being) she can tell us that we can't come into her yard and buy her My Little Ponies. And that ain't right.

Neanderthals Were Totes Refined, Apparently

2011-07-21T11:02:00.001-04:00

So, comparing Africans and those of African lineage to animals is a thing. It's a totally fucked-up thing, but it's something we see again and again in representations of black people both in the US and internationally. You should definitely check out the link above, because Sociological Images recaps this trend pretty well.

So when I saw this news item about how the genetic code of Eurasians may contain a bit of Neanderthal DNA, the phrasing got my attention. Instead of "white people totally interbred with cavemen," we get something quite different. Neanderthals, despite being traditionally depicted as primitive caveman types (accurately or not), are described here as "the physically stronger Neanderthals, who possessed the gene for language and may have played the flute." Then there's this BBC graphic that shows black racial groups splitting off from the evolutionary track in much the same way that we're used to seeing invertebrates splitting off from the evolutionary track to mammal-hood.

Both kind of bug me. Some of the adjectives just seem ... cherry-picked. I suspect that if a different species were discovered to have similarly contributed to the African gene pool, said species might be described a little differently. And it's also possible that the corresponding evolutionary diagram might still show more detail on the Eurasian side of things. Admittedly, I don't have any examples of this, but my spidey-sense is tingling.

Sneaky Sexism

2011-07-20T11:19:00.000-04:00

One of our derby people posted a fantastic link yesterday. It's all about one woman's realization that in her zeal to prove herself one of the guys, she was also devaluing anything feminine, as well as women themselves, along the way.

I am going to make one blanket statement about women doing supposedly masculine things; props to them for challenging gender roles. But if we have to devalue "feminine" behaviors in the process then we're still being sexist. And it's this form of sexism that is incredibly common at present (and that motivated my post on working with men vs. working with women.)

There are a lot of things we denigrate because we consider them "girly." Emotion, for one. Fashion. Movies about relationships. The color pink. Fruity cocktails. Tiny dogs. And so forth and so on. None of these things are actually exclusive to women. And for some, even the association is false: Men are plenty emotional. But because we consider these things feminine, we also consider them lesser. And as a result, most men and some women are embarrassed to be seen slurping down a daiquiri. Even though they are made of deliciousness. And then everybody loses out.

The Pronoun Problem

2011-07-19T11:00:00.005-04:00

Last week I complained about Google+'s restricted options for gender: male, female, or other. Since then, they have added the option not to declare one's gender, citing "privacy" as the primary reason. This is an improvement, but still not good enough.

First of all, I am dubious that pronouns are really the reason social networks ask you to put your gender front and center. I suspect it's more about data collection and targeted advertising, which is why I focused on ads in my last post on the topic.

But if the whole issue does really boil down to pronoun choice, then why not simply ask users which set of pronouns they prefer? Heck, some people who identify as "female" simultaneously prefer "he" as a pronoun, so it's a simpler and more accurate approach. Many people will choose "he" or "she," I would choose "they," still others will choose pronouns like "zie." And one of the choices on this drop down menu should be "define your own." Some people would love that chance to provide correct pronouns, and yes, others are going to take the opportunity to be smartasses and comedians. And that's fine. Your profile should express who you are, and if who you are is a smartass, then fine.

I don't know enough about other languages to predict all the gendered language issues that can arise. But do you know who I bet does have a good idea? Non binary-identified people who speak those languages. And those individuals will also usually be the ones with the best solutions.

Gender is complicated. It necessitates a text field. Get with it, internet.

I'm Pissed At Obama

2011-07-18T11:21:00.005-04:00

All right, y'all. Can we talk about Obama for a minute?

1. He has the Nobel Peace Prize. And how many wars are we in right now? Three? We're more unpopular in the Arab world than we were under Bush, according to Glenn Greenwald. And this Libya shindig is unconstitutional, and things are not going great in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The TSA searches also got ratcheted up under Obama. I'm not feeling like his foreign policy or his domestic security stuff is any better than it was under Bush II.

2. There's an awful lot of talk about raising the debt ceiling, but none at all about taxing the corporations that haven't paid taxes in quite some time. The wealthiest 400 people in America could afford to pay off everyone's mortgage in the entire nation. Maaaaaybe they could pay more taxes so that we don't have to put Social Fucking Security on the line, you know? In the meantime, 95% of Americans are getting poorer every year. [If you, like Kyrie, enjoy a good chart or graph, please check out that link.] And while we're up, "the market" is not an independent entity. It's a tool used by the rich to stay rich. It would be great if Obama would actually do something about that instead of caving to the people with the money every time.

3. Also, we wouldn't have to be worried about Medicare if we weren't spending all our moneys on the war. This is going to be a problem with the base.

4. Still waiting on those DADT and DOMA repeals, duder. People are still getting discharged and deported and all kinds of things under blatantly discriminatory policies. Let's fix that ASAP.

So, you know, thanks for the Lily Ledbetter Act. That was rad. More of that, please.

Porn, Prison, and the Myth of Male Weakness

2011-07-15T11:00:00.000-04:00

First of all, let me state that I have no opinion on porn. I have tried to generate an opinion about it, and I have repeatedly failed. I just have no idea whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, or both, or in what circumstances it can be good or bad. You're on your own there.

But I do have opinions about this Feministing post about a Michigan prisoner suing for the right to access porn in prison. We are supposed to be opposed to the use of cruel and unusual punishment in this country -- though we often fall short of that ideal -- and censorship seems to me to be cruel indeed. If pornography is legal and acceptable reading material for the rest of the country, I think it should be for prisoners as well.

There is also one little part of the above post that really bugs me, and it's this bit: "I’d assume that a sexually satisfied prisoner would probably be more well-behaved in prison than a sexually frustrated one."

This is buying into the concept that people, especially men (and this prisoner is a man), are not in control of their own sexual urges. It is what Hugo Schwyzer calls "the myth of male weakness" and boils down to the assumption that any little amount of sexual frustration can push a guy over the edge and cause him to do horrible things. Which is absurd. (Schwyzer has a whole series of posts on the topic and they're pretty great reading.) Adults of any gender should be able to handle not getting everything they want all the time. And yes, that applies to adults in jail, too. If we make porn available to prisoners, it should be because we consider it ethical to do so, not to pacify them like they're animals.

We're Coming For Yer Masculinitiez!

2011-07-14T11:00:00.004-04:00

So, my friend Steve likes to poke me with sticks sometimes, in the form of horrifically annoying blog posts and news items that he puts on my wall. Yesterday he posted something that is really way too easy to pull apart, but you know what? I am really tired, and it is eleventy billion degrees in Florida, and so this is what we're doing. 'Kay?

So I will probably be quoting most of it here, but if you want to, go read this quick little thing about how, by asking questions about gender equity, the New York Times is trying to turn men into women. Quelle horreur!

Before we begin! I think being a stay at home mom is just fine, and I am not dissing your lifestyle choice [seewhatIdidthere]. But using it as a platform to judge other people who don't stay at home is dumb. Do what you want. I think we can all agree on that, yeah?

Block Quote The First:

First, mothers who stay home have not drawn the shorter straw. The Times treats child-rearing as a career-interrupting inconvenience that complicates the “real work” that evidently occurs in an office building. The truth is that staying home with the kids is a privilege, a short-term job that lasts a few fleeting — yet formative — years. The real question is why more mothers don’t stay home with the children, instead of demanding a two-income lifestyle, business attire, and the way-overvalued “adult conversation.”

Ummmmm okay. Adult conversation may be way overvalued in her mind, but that is probably because she is a pea-brain nitwit who can't keep up with the grownups. And I don't disagree that it's silly to conceive of "real work" only taking place in an office building. I think raising kickass, open-minded kids is work in every sense of the word, really, whether one is a stay at home parent or not. But not everyone considers being a stay at home parent a privilege. I would consider it a slow death. And it becomes clear pretty quickly that she thinks women shouldn't be working in offices, and that THAT is not real work.

Next:

Second, men and women are different.

YOU DON'T SAY! Dear Ms. French [have you considered changing your last name since it's so damn un-American?]: Please list the ways women and men are different. Then go ask your grandmother to do the same thing, and some high school kid, and someone from another culture, and a queer person, and your best friend, and that checkout kid at Publix with all the tats. Make a list of what they all say. Are they exactly the same lists? And if not, why not?

What the New York Times really wants to do is challenge gender roles generally.

Well then! The New York Times and I have something in common. Quick, someone cue "Friends in Low Places."

After all, why don’t men take off work to stay home, instead of their over-worked, stressed-out wives? Well, it feels silly to point this out to a panel of experts, but men and women are different.

Uhh you said that already. In the same paragraph. Way to be an eagle-eyed editor there, chief. I'M SORRY if that is too masculine a word for you. And here's some answers to her question:
1. Sometimes men do! It is not unheard of.
2. Because asshats like you are out there telling them that they're not "real men" if they do that, even though I have no idea what that even means and neither do you, clearly. Jerk.
3. Socialize \ˈsō-shə-ˌlīz\ (transitive verb): to fit or train for a social environment.

We have complementary skills and abilities. Women, for example, are the ones with stretch marks and breasts that nourish.

Having stretch marks and boobs is a skill and ability? Wowza. As for that being a woman-only skill slash ability, go tell that to the dudes with stretch marks. And the dudes with breasts that nourish, for another thing. It's like she's never heard of trans* before. See, I'm already fucking with yer list of different skills.

Men cannot gestate a baby, no matter how manicured, effeminized, and metrosexual society tries to make them.

Yes they can! They totally can! Thomas Beatie is on his third already. And he's pretty masculine. I also really love how she's all panicked about making sure we know that just because a cis dude gets his nails filed, he can't get pregnant.

This means that childbirth is harder on women than it is on men. For example, my first two children did not practice “nipple diversity,” meaning I couldn’t drop them off at a sitter with a freezer full of frozen breast milk and a cabinet of bottles.

OMG DIVERSITY NOOOOOOOOO!

Of course, sometimes in a challenging economy, moms need to work to put food on the table. Many women, however, work to ensure yearly vacations, drive the best SUVs, or serve some sort of “self-fulfillment.” This causes parents to strain against nature’s order of things by hiring out child-care, breast pumping, using formula, and sometimes asking men to trade their jobs for aprons. No matter how you try to manipulate it, having children is hard on the mother … and it’s not the fault of the father.

So it's okay if a woman works so that her family doesn't starve to death, but not okay if she wants to go on a nice vacation. Or be fulfilled! Ceiling cat have mercy on our souls. Fulfillment is for men, dummies. Women are breast milk machines and daz it. And also, do you sense a bit of "she doth protest too much" in the last line? I'm thinking she has to remind herself constantly that she shouldn't hit her husband over the head with a frying pan just because he knocked her up and now she has to abstain from adult conversation.

PS: Which nature is it, exactly, that dictates that only two adults are meant to have anything to do with child rearing? Animals in nature don't behave that way, lots of cultures aren't arranged that way, it seems to be a lot more difficult. Ohhhhh wait. It's about making sure women are never fulfilled. Got it, got it.

And finally:

“How can we get men to do more at home?” the New York Times asks. They might as well ask, “How can we get men to be women?” Because raising and feeding young children is not a 50/50 proposition — no matter how many experts weigh in on the issue.

A) This makes no sense.
B) What if men want to be women? Or more feminine? Is she the gender police?
3) Does she think women are that terrible that she needed to write a whole column about how only women can lactate to prove that the New York Times experts are undermining America? #internalizedmisogynyThursday
Unicornz) Could raising children be, like, a 15/4/25/5/10/3/2/35/1 proposition? That sounds like my kind of family.

In conclusion, this woman is a straight/cis-privileged white middle class lunatic but I'll bet we all had fun tearing into her today, didn't we? Good.

In Which Netflix and I Forget About the Deaf

2011-07-13T11:00:00.000-04:00

The other day I was bitching about Netflix Watch Instant and how it generally doesn't have subtitles. This is because I am a language idiot and have to use subtitles to catch half the dialogue when I watch movies, but Jess pointed out that this obviously sucks for the hearing impaired. And I felt like kind of an ass for not thinking of that already. But not as much of an ass as Netflix.

TV has close-captioning. Movies usually have subtitles. It is notable that Netflix (and Amazon, if I'm correct) chooses not to offer this basic feature. Notable enough, apparently, that the ADA has filed a lawsuit against Netflix over this very issue.

It's also made me ponder the ways in which the disabled might be excluded from the first wave of technological developments. I'm not really sure how the blind tend to navigate the internet (though I'm learning!), but Flash, etc., cannot be a good thing. And anyone remember when Amazon introduced an audio feature on the Kindle which would read any book out loud, and publishers pressured them to remove it, so that it is only available when rights-holders authorize it? Yeah, that's pretty shitty, too.

Granted, it can be difficult to anticipate the needs of all of your customers, but that's what user testing is for. When I first created my website, I pestered every person I knew to visit it, then watched them navigate it. That is how it works. If you're a company like Netflix, you don't have to rely on your friends; you instead create a large, diverse group of users who will notice different aspects of the product in question. And if you have to exclude disabled individuals from that group, that's a pretty good sign that you have trouble right off the bat. Including differently-abled individuals is essential, not some incidental, oh-it-would-be-nice-if-we-could-do-that feature.

Oh Google, Why Can't You Just Let Me Love You?

2011-07-12T11:00:00.003-04:00

Jess and I have complained before about the lack of options for one's gender choice in Google profiles. (FYI, Alsica's gender should be "fembot.") Now they've done it again (with even fewer options) in their new social network, Google+, which requires you to choose from "male," "female," or "other."

This is a logistical problem for me; I am female-gendered but refuse to enter this information on social-networking sites. I feel that should be my prerogative. It's also extremely shitty that anyone who does not identify as either "male" or "female" is forced to identify themselves with the flavorless catchall of "other." Obviously, that is explicitly othering.

A whole bunch of people, including some who do not usually blog about gender, have pointed out why this is a problem; check out The Mary Sue, Randall Munroe (yes, he of xkcd!), Sarah Mei (I may have to check out this Diaspora thing), and Dopp Juice. Their arguments against the mandatory gender field include allowing women to mask their gender in a potentially hostile online environment, not being dicks to non-binary-identified folk, and just plain rethinking gender.

As faithful readers may guess, the last reason is the most important to me. First of all, my online presence does not have a physical body, and it is absolutely absurd that gender is considered its single most important characteristic.

Second point: on every social site I've used, people like to get creative with their profiles. People tweak names, nicknames, relationship statuses, interests -- you name it -- to reflect their personalities and senses of humor. Why not gender? I would love to see even those who adhere to the gender binary get creative with that field. (And for that matter, Facebook, why will you not let me declare my relationship with Mathematica? YOU CANNOT STOP OUR LOVE.)

I can only assume that sites like Google+ wish to know my gender for the purposes of targeted advertising. Now, I'm not totally anti-capitalist. I don't begrudge Google the opportunity to make money off the services it provides. But I question the effectiveness of using gender to try and target ads. How about instead of a mandatory gender field, you have a mandatory interest field, like a list of a hundred or so common topics of interest from which you have to choose five? Instead of constantly getting ads for yogurt, cleaning products, and weight loss tips, I could instead get ads for hiking gear, computer peripherals, and booze. Do you realize how many more ads I would click on in that kind of advertising utopia, internet? Do you? Please, take this idea for free, from me, and fucking use it.

Why Not Stick to Shoes, Indeed

2011-07-11T11:00:00.001-04:00

UPDATE: Mycoskie has issued an apology for the association with Focus on the Family. As you can see in the comments, not everyone accepts his apology. We'll see what happens next.

This one managed to get by me until it had already been over for a week, but it turns out that the guy behind the TOMS shoes One For One Giving program, Blake Mycoskie, has been hanging out with the enemy. And by the enemy, I mean Focus on the Family. He even gave them a coupon.

This is pretty disappointing to me personally, as someone who has been wearing TOMS shoes for awhile and loving them. They're perfect for Florida, they can survive the washing machine, they're versatile. And the giving program is coo, or at least it sounds cool on the surfacel: for every pair of shoes you buy, they donate one to a poor kid in another country. So it reeeeeeeeeeally sucks that they're okay with Focus on the Family, who would, among other things, like for poor kids to languish in foster care instead of being adopted by gay parents. Just for example.

Look: I can't buy things from an organization that actively works against me, and I'm certainly not the only one who's disappointed to learn of this. Mycoskie has a blog, his most recent entry is called "Why Not Stick to Shoes?" I was really hoping it would be addressing a firestorm of criticism over his association with right wing extremists, but instead, it's about his new eyewear line. Borrrring. But people left comments asking about his association with FoF, to which he has not responded, although he's taken the time to respond to fawning praise of his efforts.

There's also the issue of whether the One for One Giving program is really as great as it seems. According to my brilliant friend Diana:

"TOMS isn't as wonderful as everyone makes it out to be. they undermine the local economy of the shoe industry in the countries where they donate and give people a false sense that they gave-back, or 'made a difference' by buying shoes. as if we could consume our ways into a better world..."

She's right, especially about the last point. And there are surely ways to get shoes to people who need them beyond buying them from a company that hangs out with people who actively hate me and my friends. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a lot to say about how horrifying Focus on the Family is. The SPLC last year also noted that Focus on the Family opposed efforts to decrease anti-gay bullying in schools. It's short, so let's block quote it:

For the last few days, an “educational analyst” for Focus on the Family has been getting a lot of press. She’s been suggesting that anti-bullying efforts that draw attention to the harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students are part of a “gay agenda” to “sneak homosexuality lessons into classrooms.”

One can argue, as some have, that Focus on the Family is a fringe group that doesn’t represent the majority of Christians in the United States. That’s true. But it’s also true that Focus on the Family has an outsized impact on conservative thought in this country. And by using deception and spin, the group has managed this week to grab the media spotlight. The goal is apparently to make schools less safe for LGBT students and more safe for their harassers. That cannot be ignored.

It’s also impossible to ignore Focus on the Family’s smarmy tactics. Taking a page out of George Orwell, the group has developed a website for parents designed to “challenge the monopoly.” They’ve named it TrueTolerance.org. Sound familiar?

Blake doesn't get to claim that he's working for social justice or uplift or anything if he's working with a group that actively oppresses people. He just doesn't.

So go leave comments on Blake's stupid blog post and write to TOMS and do whatever else you crazy kids do when a corporation does something horrendous.

The World's Women are All Kinds of Things

2011-07-08T13:36:00.000-04:00

I want to open my post today by letting you know that I was thisclose to writing a post from the perspective of my cat, Jonesy, who really loves lesbians, if his behavior around my friends is any indication. So be grateful for what you're getting, mmkay?

Anyway!

Tiger Beatdown has a breakdown of the United Nations report called Progress of the World's Women. The blogger noted that the report doesn't deal specifically with queer women, including trans women, at all. This bugs me.

It's true that trying to define "woman" gets sticky. I believe that anyone who wants to call herself a woman is one, and it doesn't matter what her chromosomal sex is, what her gender presentation is, whether she consistently calls herself a woman, whether she rounds up to "woman" for political purposes but feels the label doesn't really suit her, etc. Kyrie already wrote a post about this, so go read that if you have any questions. It's pretty brilliant.

So the question is: Why write a report about women and not include all of them? This report has a lot of great information, but it's incomplete and heterosexist. Given the world we live in, most cultures assume heteronormativity, so not explicitly including queer issues means that it's impossible to find out whether issues of violence and health are different for, say, lesbians. If they are, we need to do something about it.

When I was bugging Kyrie for something to write about for today, and we talked about this report, she said, "It's not very feminist to divvy up women into groups and then only help some of those groups. Plus, LGBT issues are gender/sexuality issues, which ultimately affect everyone anyway." This is exactly right. We talked about this a bit in the post and comments section of our discussion of Read My Lips: feminism hasn't always done a good job of representing everyone, especially white middle class feminism. As feminists, this is our job to correct.

Furthermore, queer people are not just white people, or cis, or middle class. We all carry lots of identities and signifiers all at once, and it's rarely uncomplicated. Some dyke-identified people, for instance, don't identify with "woman" at all. It is the privilege of straight, cis, white people to put these issues aside, I think.

Women's issues are issues of intermeshing. We are all coded differently at different times. For instance, I recently heard someone tell a story of a young gay black man who was standing on top of a building, contemplating suicide in the face of anti-gay harassment he had received at school. When the police arrived, they coded him as black [and therefore criminal] and hauled him away in handcuffs in the cruiser, instead of treating him with the sympathy the police department had shown to white gay boys. The same sorts of coding can happen to anyone, though it results in the denial of parts of peoples' identities.

Another thing that bugs me is that I can't find coverage of this report in any of the major US news outlets. What the hell?

A Feminist Logs Into OkCupid ...

2011-07-07T11:24:00.001-04:00

Okay, this post is not actually a joke. But your trusty blogger has been doing a bit of dating over the past year, mostly of the online variety. Overall, it's been a good experience. But what fun would it be to talk about my dating successes? Instead, let me complain about something I've noticed: a tendency on the part of some dudes to look for a date by criticizing things women do. It drives me nuts.

First of all, it's going to limit your options. If your online dating profile contains a rant about how a woman needs to have nice nails and so many women neglect this part of their hygiene and so forth, [1.] it makes you look like serious bad news, and [2.] it's automatically going to drive away every woman who doesn't use nail polish. Same with requiring that your date "smell nice." I don't even know what you have in mind there, and I'm not going to find out.

Then there are the dudes who think they're somehow getting ahead by denouncing a part of the performance of femininity often seen as "shallow." Hint: if you don't like women who wear makeup, don't message a woman wearing makeup in her profile picture. I mean, that just makes you look like an idiot.

I get the impression that some guys think they can bond with me by criticizing things I don't do. Like the dude who went off on women who get breast implants. This did not endear him to me. And it's a little offensive that anyone would think it might. I don't hold the viewpoint that my femininity is the "correct" femininity; people get to look how they want.

Now, everyone totally gets to have preferences. But you can state those preferences without being a dick. Try "I'm a sucker for beautiful nails" instead of "so many women have poor nail hygiene." This will only work for some things, though; you're better off not talking about how you prefer a "natural" look or whatever. Basically, hetero dudes should keep one thing in mind: no one fucking cares what your particular flavor of patriarchy looks like.

Queering Academia, Part 2: The Commentary

2011-07-06T11:00:00.001-04:00

On Monday, I wrote about how academia is a challenging place to be openly queer, and how a new study shows that students show some bias against openly gay and lesbian professors. As promised, today I'm going to look at the comments on two of the blog posts I found on the internet about the study. There are lots of them and not all of them are interesting to me. "This study is stupid," for instance, is not an argument I'm going to bother to engage with. Anyway. All comments are, of course, [sic.].

From Insider Higher Ed:

Brian: What I am concerned with is the very concern with the notion of "bias". Isn't it better that we teach from who we are; our academic training; AND our life experiences? To even consider the notion of bias as relevant seems to me to fly in the face the feminist and queer pedagogies that have encouraged an inclusion of self in the classroom; the personal is not only political but also pedagogical. After having read this article, I thought SO WHAT? Students should come to university to not only learn from texts but also be exposed to many, many, many ways of viewing the world offered through their professors' perspectives.

Yes. This is excellent and also true. There is literally no way to be completely neutral all the time. Even if we just gave kids a list of facts to memorize (robbing any humanities class of its ability to exist), the inclusion or exclusion of facts would be entirely based on the agenda, outlook, and so on. What I think is really important about the history of education might not be important to other people. I mean, obviously, or there would be more than half a handful of us writing about queer history of education.

BAW: Why is a professor's sexual orientation any of a students' business?

I mean, it isn't, is the short answer. It's no one's business. But some of us have made it our business, because we believe that being openly gay in academia means making the environment safer for our queer students and colleagues. The more we can demonstrate that queer people are just folks, no big deal, the better we'll all be in the long run, I think. Of course, this is a choice that I make for myself, and not a choice I think anyone else needs to make if they're not comfortable with it. And this also does not mean that anyone is "shoving her sexual orientation down anyone's throat" or anything similarly graphic and inaccurate.

V E McLure: Be a single woman with short hair some time. Believe it or not, those were the two reasons I was "accused" of being a lesbian. Yeah, it happens. If you don't believe women are judged, and yes, I do mean judged, in the worst possible way, by a different standard, come live in our world some time. My male colleagues make comments in the classroom that would get me fired in about a nanosecond. What the students think is funny from them they would regard as "bitchy," "judgemental," "sexist," "racist," you name it, from a woman.  I have had comments on my evaluations that have dealt with my clothes, my hair style, in other words, just about any and everything except my teaching, other than to say that I'm a bitch because I don't take late work. My male colleagues don't either, by the way.   It is a double-standard world. I have no doubt at all that students will look at a syllabus and percieve bias of some sort based on the gender, sexual orientation, race, heck, on the height, age, hair style or eye color of the professor. Stereotyping is alive and well - and flourishing. The only people who doubt it are the ones who are not directly affected by it.

I don't love her use of "accused," even with the scare quotes, but I hear what she's getting at (and the student(s) may have meant it as an accusation). This is in response to people arguing that bias is probably not really happening, and she is calling them out on that. It's to be expected that we'll be judged on external factors, of course. I think this points to a need for a follow-up study that engages with complex questions of how students perceive a professors' sexual orientation/gender presentation and how that affects their feelings about the professor. This would be harder to do, of course, because you'd have to look at students in an actual classroom, and for it to really be meaningful, you'd have to track their reactions and feelings over the course of the semester.

Michael Dumas: Interestingly, I just taught about LGBT issues last night in a doctoral class on diversity in education. The course is taught by two instructors, both African American, one straight-identified female, and one gay male (me). If this year's student evaluations are similar to last year's, I fully expect to see one or two students complain that "too much time" was spent on gay issues, even though the LGBT content is--coincidentally-- only about 1/10 of the subject matter covered. I also can expect similarly critical comments about how much time was spent on race and African Americans, even though both instructors are conscious about including other populations in readings, media and examples. I don't want to comment on methodological rigor of the study without reading it, but I can say that it is consistent with my experience, and that of a whole range of LGBT, women and people of color in the academy. And yes, negative and untruthful course evaluations can hurt one in the tenure and promotion process.  Now, as for the question raised above about why a professor would reveal her or his sexual orientation, the study states that sexual orientation was indicated in the autobiographical statement given to research participants. It did NOT say that instructors listed their sexual identity on the syllabus itself! And yes, students do talk amongst themselves about who their professors are as people; they see photos on our desks; they know about our involvement in various advocacy groups on campus; and, importantly, they make assumptions based on gender performance (length of hair, style of dress, speaking voice). So it is entirely reasonable that a student would be aware of, or at least presume, specific sexual identities.

This is my favorite comment, because he says "gender performance." He's right, as is the previous commenter, that students consider the humanity of their professors. He's also right that negative reviews from students hurt a professor's career - as they should, if the professor is a bad teacher. But I could imagine universities using reviews from students that were negative because of the modern homonegative reasons the study talks about (things like blaming their dislike of a professor on things other than sexual orientation, even if that's not really what's going on), it's another layer of modern homonegativity. "It's not that you're gay, it's that the students gave you bad reviews. Not because you're gay, but because you're politically biased." Again, as though there is such a thing as objectivity. Further, this guy is a gay man who is talking about gay issues, at least in part, which in my experience is that much harder.

And now, to Autostraddle comments, which are less academic but just as interesting:

Sweet: I really wish people would pay attention to these studies and not suggest that racism or homophobia don’t exist (in circumstances when it is not blatant). This just reinforces the fact that people need to be conscious of, and conscious in considering, their privilege. I go to a liberal Ivy and the number of times I’ve heard stuff like, “why isn’t there a white culture organization” or “why don’t be have a straight students alliance” is beyond not funny. I want to shout, “That’s what THIS WHOLE PLACE is!”

Heh. Right. I remember those conversations about white privilege in college. And, um, grad school. Some people grow out of it, some people don't. Part of what I try to do in my classroom is address this head-on.

Merin: I’m gay and I teach college students and I am not in the closet at work. I’m thinking about handing this article out to my students after a few weeks of class this fall. I am teaching a class on race and ethnicity and it could be good for a week in which we read stuff about modern racism to see how these ideas can extend to other marginalized social groups. Could make for an interesting discussion.

This is an interesting thought. Maybe I'll do it at the end of the semester, if I remember to. Thoughts from the crowd? Would you do this?

And finally, from our very own blog, Desi has this to say:

Specifically in a college of education, assimilation would be a great disservice. I don't want pre-service teachers to be "protected" from reality. I support making pre-service teachers uncomfortable--how else can they be prepared to work with the realities of the students in their classrooms? (Clearly, I'm basing my comment here on assimilation as an option--not as survival, as it would be in some cases.)

This is so dead-on. I know Desi, and I already know how smart she is, so I am not in the least surprised. But all teachers will have queer students, no matter where they teach. My friend Nic, who is not an educator in the traditional sense, but has sure as hell educated me, says that she thinks all teachers should see all students as queer, and I completely agree. If we worry about how to prepare mostly-white, female, middle-class, Protestant teachers to effectively teach students who are mostly not those things, we also need to be preparing teachers to deal with queer kids. And having queer teacher educators is important to that. I'm not a teacher educator, but maybe I will be someday, and maybe you already are. What are your thoughts on Desi's idea?

Anyway, I'm certainly a believer in the idea that we do want to indoctrinate the youth. I do want my students to learn about queerness, the historical contributions of queer educators, and the ways in which queer teachers have been persecuted. Everyone has to figure out their own relationship to teaching these issues, how comfortable they are with being out, and how they are out. I want to reiterate that these are intensely personal decisions, so do what makes you feel most comfortable or happy or whatever. But the fact is, we can't ignore the fact that students do perceive their gay and lesbian professors differently, and I would like to see more studies looking at this issue.

Lack of Faith and Feminism

2011-07-05T11:00:00.002-04:00

There's a series of posts on Feministing called "Faith and Feminism". In it, feminists with different religious beliefs discuss how their faith and feminism interact. The stated purpose of the series is to broaden the discussion of women and religion. It's pretty cool, and, I would imagine, particularly interesting if you are of a religious bent.

I am not, though. Sometime around my 15th year, I decided that I had no good reason to assume the existence of a deity and became an atheist. For me, this was about logic; I have no strong opinions about organized religion, and it doesn't seem to me to be any more prone to misogyny than our many other social institutions. (Some feminists feel differently.)

But my atheism does interact with my feminism in one important way: it was the first issue on which I decided that most everybody I knew was wrong. And accepting that everybody else can just be plain wrong is incredibly liberating. I highly recommend it. It means that everybody might also be wrong about fat, or that gender essentialism is ridiculous, and so forth and so on.

It's not usually my style to end my posts with a question, but guys, I would luuurrve to hear your stories about the time you realized everybody else was wrong about something.

Queering Academia, Part 1: The Gay Syllabus

2011-07-04T14:02:00.002-04:00

I've often considered what my future in academia will be like as an openly queer person who writes about queer issues. I'm in a college of education (and if I do have a future in higher education, it will almost certainly be in another one, as opposed to a history department or something), and colleges of education are notoriously heteronormative. Schools themselves are heteronormative, and heteronormatizing. There are certainly other openly gay professors in my department and in my field, but those who are both openly gay AND do work on gay issues are fewer and farther between. And they're heroes, each and every one of them, because this is not an easy row to hoe. But I yam who I yam, and I can't not be me, so either I'll find a place in a department as a radical queer or I won't, and I'll do something else. I love what I do, but I can't, as my friend Diedre says, take out part of my humanity and shoot it just to pay the bills.

So it was with great interest when I read about a study on the perceptions of gay and lesbian professors by college students (you can read more about the study here and here, and if you want to read the actual study, let me know and I'll e-mail it to you). Essentially, the researchers did two studies on the perceptions of gay and lesbian professors by students. They presented the students with syllabi and indicated through autobiographies whether the professors were gay or straight (through professional organizations they belonged to, and by statements like "Dr. Melanie Saunders lives with Lori, her partner of three years" or "... with David, her husband of three years"). They had many hypotheses, including whether students would see the professors as biased based on sexual orientation, gender, and political leanings, and whether they would judge professors more harshly based on typographical errors in the syllabus. I can't go through them all, but I wanted to pull some major points and talk about them. In my next post, I will address some things in the comments to the two blog posts I linked to above. [ETA: The syllabus was for a human sexuality class, which is certainly relevant information that I forgot to include. Thanks for the reminder, Desi.]

Point 1:

The undergraduate students in the present study viewed heterosexuals as the normative professor who is relatively objective and value-free. Lesbian/gay professors who taught a course with the exact same syllabus as heterosexual professors were viewed as coming to the course with a political agenda, with personal biases, and with the aim of forcing their views of sexuality on students (to paraphrase the wording from some of the statements that comprised the Political Bias factor).

This is not surprising. I've written before about how neutrality seems to only belong to straight white cis men, and everyone else is biased. Of course, this is ridiculous. We all have our baggage. They also made the point in the study that people perceive gay and lesbian people as flaunting their sexuality, but not straight people. But a straight person wearing a wedding ring or mentioning her husband is flaunting her sexuality as much as a lesbian mentioning her girlfriend. Because the latter is considered non-normative, though, it becomes A Thing We Notice.

Point 2:

...there was not one version of bias that accounted for students’ perceptions of both lesbians and gay men: Conservative gay men and liberal lesbians were viewed as more biased than were liberal gay men and conservative lesbians. In contrast, heterosexuals were not judged according to their political ideology. The ﬁnding of differing views of lesbian and gay men based on their political ideology supplies more evidence that lesbians and gay men should not be considered as one category of “homosexual."

Um, yes. This is certainly true. But there aren't even just "lesbians" and "gay men" as TWO categories of homosexual. Go visit a leather bar and then a drag show and then a dyke bar and get back to me. Oh, and let's not forget the people who don't go to bars at all, or who hang in the bear scene, or who go to straight bars, or whatever. Or look at the queeriodic table.

Point 3:

Homonegatives were less interested in taking the human sexuality course than were modern homonegatives and non-homonegatives. Furthermore, they perceived the course as politically biased, with fewer appropriate topics and materials, and taught by professors with less warmth than the other two attitude categories. Students with high levels of homonegativity, then, present a particular challenge, perhaps in the form of resistance to a faculty member who teaches courses such as human sexuality. Whereas homonegatives categorically dismissed the course, modern homonegatives viewed lesbian and gay professors as more politically biased than heterosexual professors with the same syllabus.

Sigh. I'm not stunned by this either. I like their use of "homonegative" and "modern homonegative." Homonegative means people who are just openly anti-gay. Modern homonegativity "rejects lesbians and gay men on the grounds that they attempt to obtain special privileges because of their orientation, or because it is believed that they flaunt their sexuality." Again, queer people don't seem to me to flaunt their sexuality any more than anyone else does. And there's a reason the gay rights movement has been saying "gay rights are human rights" for awhile now. There's no difference between rights for gay people and rights for anyone else, but when queer people are consistently not protected by laws and face discrimination, we need the law to acknowledge that, essentially.

Another concern I have from this point is that it might somehow justify people closeting themselves in order to not deter students from taking a class. "Just be strategic/less obvious" is something people here. Of course I wouldn't walk in on the first day of class and say "I'm a radical lesbian atheist and if you don't like it, leave." No one does that. But then there's the idea of being more assimilationist, or deliberately avoiding talking about one's partner in the same way a straight person would, and THAT is a huge problem. We should not have to closet ourselves because our very gayness might deter some kid from taking the class. If a student feels that way, that's on him, not me. I engage with all my students. Also, I think that sometimes resistance is good. Students aren't just going along to get along, giving the teacher what she wants. If they're resisting, they're thinking, and I believe we can build from there. We have this idea that college students shouldn't be made uncomfortable and that resistance is a bad thing, and it isn't, always. Sometimes it's healthy.

It's important to note that in this study, the students only had a syllabus, they had no face-to-face interaction. That has to make a difference for at least some people, because the more gays you realize you know, the less homophobic you tend to be. So that's the flip side of this argument: that if I can convince students that my being queer is not bringing America to its knees, we'll all get along better. This is the "making space" argument. The authors point out at the beginning of their study that the presence of openly gay and lesbian professors is good for queer students, and I would argue that it's good for everyone, including other faculty members. It's not always easy, but I really love teaching, and I know lots of other queer people who are talented teachers and researchers. I'm hoping that together we can keep pushing the boulders up the hills, and over time, they'll become lighter.

That's it for today. Next time, I'll address some of the comments to other blog posts on this, and any that you might leave on this post. So if I don't respond to you in the comments section here, sit tight and hopefully I'll get to it on Wednesday.

Image via.

Book Club: Wilchins's Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender

2011-07-02T12:10:00.011-04:00

Time for the first book club post! Our goal is to write an even less structured post than usual; we want to start a conversation rather than summarize the book.

Kyrie: One thing of the main things that struck me reading this book is how the author displays clear resentment towards the women's movement and even, at times, to cis women (e.g., calling herself "a swan among the platypuses", p. 54). I am not saying this is a bad thing (an angry tone does not invalidate an argument!), but it was not something I had been exposed to before. And it made me think about the way cis women treat trans women; I feel like we let the male privilege trans women may or may not have briefly experienced win out over the need to support our fellow women. As a result, we do a lot of bullshit to try and justify their exclusion.

Jess: I picked the quote below as a good starting point, because it’s about feminism and this is a feminist blog. If we are going to be honest with ourselves about feminism and its benefits to society, we also need to look at its shortcomings. If Wilchins believes that feminism has excluded her and other trans people, then it has. Audre Lorde similarly criticized the movement for leaving out lesbians and women of color, and people are still talking about similar issues regarding indigenous cultures. Feminism has long been the domain of middle class cis white women, and that needs to change, pronto. But I’ll just let Wilchins tell you.

Moreover, just as feminists have charged that patriarchy made women's bodies a site of contested meaning, and then appropriated women's flesh an experience as a tabula rasa upon which to inscribe their constructions of a subordinated Other, just so, you have made of our bodies a site of contested meaning, and then appropriated transexual flesh and experience as a tabula rasa upon which to inscribe your constructions of us as subordinated Other. Once again you are reenacting the very oppressive mechanisms from which feminism is seeking emancipation (p. 60).

Jess: Wilchins has another quote on page 60 that goes along with this: “Heterosexism requires binary and opposing sexes and genders: if there were a hundred genders, ‘heterosexuality’ could not exist.” Well, exactly. I tend to think there are as many genders as there are people, because I enjoy thinking that everyone in the world is queer. If gender is performative, as Judith Butler would have us believe - if it is an imitation which has no original - then we are all performing gender in unique ways. People might appear to approximate similar genders, which is how we come up with the idea of “man” and “woman,” but if we are all different, are our genders all different also? And if that is the case, how is feminism meant to represent a class called “women”? Have we robbed it of any meaning? And might that be a good thing?

Kyrie: Wilchins’s discussion of the fluidity of gender and the limitations of labels (see, for instance, p. 85) has me thinking a lot about how I would like to define gender. What appeals to me right now is a “style”-like approach, in which masculine and feminine are like “nerd” and “jock;” i.e, kind of a binary, but one in which you can identify with either, both, or neither label. Like “nerd” and “jock,” “masculine” and “feminine” don’t seem to me to be actual characteristics, but rather a shorthand for a collection of characteristics, and hence someone with a lot of one of those particular sets of characteristics can come close to embodying one of those labels, but in general people will not fit perfectly into these molds.

Jess: Furthermore, some people opt out entirely. Some people are punk, or preppy, or - like me - don’t really have a good definition for their style (or identity. I round up to a lot of things so that I can be intelligible, as I believe we all do). On p. 85, which Kyrie points you to also, Wilchins talks about how fluidity and inventing new labels or identities can work for us. I think that is the real revolutionary potential for feminism: if we can push ourselves to get beyond the idea that there is anything like “realness” when it comes to gender beyond what people feel about themselves, then maybe we can get to the point that we are advocating liberation broadly, and not just the end of one particular kind of discrimination while replicating that same form of oppression on other people.

I like the way Wilchins uses Foucault, and the Foucault-inspired question she asks on p. 39 is provocative: “What kind of system bids us each make of our bodies a problem to be solved, a claim we must defend, or a secret we must publicly confess, again and again?” I’m not sure where I’m going with this exactly, but I’d like the revolution to include the possibility of never feeling bad about one’s body or identity. As Wilchins also says, no one is ever trapped in the wrong body. We’re trapped in the wrong society. If society weren’t so terrified of gender transgression, and surgery were available on demand, more people could have it if they want it, and more people could, I hope, feel liberated.

Kyrie: One part of the book that really resonated with me was the chapter in which Wilchins talks about seeing her female relatives’ bras, and how she immediately recognized the symbolism behind them. It reminded me of the first time I went shopping with my mom for a “real” bra, and how I hated it. My discomfort stemmed from a similar realization that these weren’t just objects, there were symbols, and I desperately wanted a utilitarian bra in plain white with no padding, no flowers, and no lace. My 12-year-old self wanted nothing to do with that sort of performance of femininity, but it also wasn’t something I was able to articulate, so I ended up with the little bows and flowers. [Jess: I am also not a big fan of lace or anything, and certainly didn’t have reason to wear a bra when I was 12, but I think it’s kind of funny that Kyrie is the straight one here. Just another bit of evidence for my whole “we’re really all queer” argument.]

This is partly because the type of bra I wanted did not exist, at least not in my size. And this is symbolic of the whole gender problem. There should not only be plain, utilitarian bras in every size, there should be beer label bras, and dinosaur bras, and so forth and so on. This lack of choice in expression which is tied to your anatomy is a huge fucking problem.

Jess: I just want to say that I really loved “17 Things You Don’t Say to a Transexual.” I read it to my brother and my sister-in-law when we were all tipsy. It’s brilliant and hilarious, but I have nothing to add, so, you know, noted.

We’ll carry on this discussion in the comments, so please jump in. Also, we’re reading Stone Butch Blues for next month, so get your Kleenex out and get to reading.

Working with Men

2011-07-01T14:31:00.000-04:00

As I've mentioned before, I make my living as an astronomer. This is a highly male-centric field -- especially in theoretical astronomy, which I do. Overall, there's about 15% representation by women, so it'll often happen that I'm the only woman in the room.

Our roller derby team, in contrast, is made up entirely of women except for the referees. Thus, I go from a nearly all-male environment during the day to a nearly all-female environment at night. As a result, I have a great opportunity to compare and contrast the two.

So, what differences have I observed? The only significant one is that my derby teammates are much more polite and encouraging than my colleagues. I hesitate to ascribe this difference to gender, though, since scientists are notoriously socially inept and one's teammates will be motivated to be encouraging for the sake of morale. Other than that, the set of behaviors are not noticeably different to me.

What does surprise me is when someone (usually a woman) will comment on how unpleasant it is to work with a group of women, usually with a comment about how much drama women generate. I'm sure that's not easy, but let me tell you, working with men is no picnic, either. They can be rude to each others' faces -- what would be called bitchiness if they were women. They'll complain or share information about each other behind their backs -- what would be called gossiping if they were women. They'll snipe at each other and carry grudges -- what would be called cattiness if they were women. Sometimes they'll struggle to be polite to those they dislike -- what would be called passive aggressiveness if they were women. And occasionally they'll have big blow-outs -- what would be called drama if they were women.

I think you get the idea; it's the same set of behaviors, different labels. Any large group is going to have difficultly getting along all the time, and I really don't think the two genders handle things all that differently.