“In the boy scouts, they came first for the homosexuals,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a homosexual;
And then they came for the atheists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an atheist;
And then they came for the fat people,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a fat person;
And then… they came for me…”
If I ever have the “pleasure” of having a pro-life individual in my house for lunch who won’t stop using the word “child” to refer to fetuses, I fully plan to serve everyone else apples, and give them an apple seed, and tell them that since they can’t tell the difference, I figured they wouldn’t mind.
Grumble. Internets. Someone wrong on. And so on.
PhysioProf, guest blogging at Isis the Scientist has a post up called the Handy-Dandy Guide for D00dly Commenters which struck both me and Ampersand as being similar to his How Not to Be Insane When Accused of Racism: A Guide for White People (Amp notes that he would use different wording were he writing the post today).
Here’s an excerpt:
(1) If you are leaving the first comment to a post, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(2) If you are using the words “men”, “boys”, “fathers”, or “sons”, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(3) If you are using the words “should” or “useful”, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(4) If you are telling people that talking about this, that, or the other issue is fine, but also asking them what they are doing about this issue, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(5) If you are complaining that by being “mean”, people that might be allies are being turned off, you are almost certainly fucking up.
Seems worth reading through.
I Blame the Patriarchy has a discussion of the piece (with worthwhile comment thread, I thought). Twisty wrote:
While it is always hi-larious to read what expert dudely readers of heartwarming nature crap blogs have to tell their less-enlightened brethren, it’s also maddening and, if you like, ironical, since such a post can only be written from the patronizing position of male privilege. It’s a kind of double-privilege, too: “Unlike you, Grasshoppah, the feminists have accepted me, for I have been to their savage death island and live to tell the tale.”
These guys are veteran ethnographers doing a field study, warning the new grad students: “The natives have curious, unpredictable ways. Approach them with caution or they will prong you sure as shit with curare-dipped spears. Oh, and we’re meeting for beers later at Chip’s tent.”
Hardy har, because implicit in these man-to-man, how-to-walk-on-eggshells-around-a-feminist tracts is an ingrained sense of the inconsequential status of women in the feminist heartwarming nature crappism blog community. It’s comical somehow, that feminist women — women who are widely considered to be the hairy minority, the kill-joy joke-butts of the internet whose blogs are often described by dudes as “lame” or “parodies” — are so aggressively protective of their trivial little sectarian colonies on the web that men need special training and travel visas to avoid blogular deportation.
As well as other things.
Twisty, as far as I can tell, respects PhysioProf as a feminist. She’s just calling him out on this particular dynamic.
This is one of those many areas where I don’t agree with Twisty exactly, but I think she’s saying something interesting. I think that PhysioProf’s post is interesting, and has some potential to be practically useful (although I disagree with some of his points; for instance, here at Alas, a male commenter probably isn’t fucking up by commenting first on any given thread. We’re also a little bit more comfortable with personal life sharing, I think, than the blogular culture at IBTP. But nevertheless, there are a lot of good points, and I think the way PhysioProf is analyzing his own privilege could be usefully generalized to other areas — for instance, white commenters who are trying to be genuine allies to poc, or cis commenters trying to be genuine allies to trans people, etc.).
However, Twisty is correct — in order to make a post like that, written in the language of the privileged, you have to be *exercising* your privilege.
It’s a good thing for privilege to be exercised in this way, I think. Certainly, I think on the whole, Barry’s post about how not to be insane when accused of racism (a guide for white people) has on the whole been useful, and it seems to be useful to POC activists as well. I note that ABW links to it periodically when she wants white commenters to be able to go read something that they’ll understand, and stop bugging her.
I think that one of the more important things allies can do is to help express things in terms of their privilege, specifically so that they can help preserve the valuable time of people like ABW who do not need to be dealing with that 101 shit when they’ve got better things to do. Allies who are privileged can do this without committing the same emotional reserves (it hurts — in my experience — to have to defend your basic rights against privileged people, and is not so personally painful when you’re defending others), and to some extent without committing the same amount of time, because the privileged language will click with the other privileged language in a way that the privilege-poisoned party can hear and acknowledge.
But it’s still kind of icky that these things are necessary. And the use of privilege, even for good purpose, still involves othering, as Twisty points out with her savage island metaphor. Thus even though the privilege is being used to ease one problem, it adds wrinkles to another by reinforcing the voice of privilege as the voice of authority, in contrast to the othered voice of the oppressed group.
Now that I think about othering: interesting that Twisty’s metaphor for feminism as understood by the privileged dialogue was a “savage island.” Interesting that we get back to colonialism and to race. I wonder what that speaks to. (I don’t think it’s just white privilege, although that’s probably part any metaphor like this; there’s a long history of using “savage island” imagery to refer to feminist-only groups, such as amazons, and even the ways in which female only groups are described in old SF and fantasy, both female-positive and female-negative. Is it easiest for us to imagine women’s liberation in terms of geographic separation? And do we culturally have a tendency to map the ‘primitive’ nature of white women with the ‘primitive’ nature of all people of color, as Victorian scientists did, when postulating the white male brain as the only civilized one?)
[And finally, as someone else who likes to mix high-falutin' language with teh crassness, I offer this tribute to PhysioProf: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity fuckpants.]
I’ll be there. Will you? Shall we meet up?
(ABW, we better meet up. :) Ditto you, Nojojojo, if you’re going this year.)
Ampersand and I have periodically discussed the issue of ableist language. We’d both like to do better about purging some of the words that infest our vocabulary. In particular, the word “lame” has a tendency to creep into our statements, probably because it’s part of the sort of casual geek slang we both have a tendency to use.
We’ve made a pact — my husband is in on it, too — to try to note to each other when we slip and use the word without thinking.
Lately, I’ve been trying to come up with fun replacement words, particularly because I know that then I’ll be looking forward to opportunities to replace the ableist word with something fun. Cuz I’m a word dork.
My candidates (which don’t really work) are: Xander, as in “That’s so Xander,” and “I can’t believe you would say something so Xander,” because I really dislike Xander from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Obviously, that’s too in-jokey to pass real world muster.
My other candidate comes from the nerdy front: a friend of mine was recently reading some Victorian translations of medieval texts and coming across frequent usage of the term “brast,” which means burst or shatter, often with amusing faux-archaic add-ons, such as “to-brast,” e.g. “the spear went all to-brast.” Here’s an example of the term from Spenser: “Dreadfull furies which their chains have brast.” Another similar, out-of-usage word is “frush,” and its silly add-on “to-frush.” For instance from Shakespeare, “I like thine armor well; I’ll frush it and unlock the rivets all.”
None of these are particularly good replacements, even though they amuse me. But luckily Deborah at The Hand Mirror has an admirable list:
flimsy
inadequate
insufficient
unconvincing
weak
unsatisfactory
inept
pathetic
deficient
hollow
meagre
perfunctory
So, next time you have the urge to use inept ableist language, put aside your pathetic ableism, and be deficient no more. Don’t be Xander; don’t let your vocabulary go to-brast. Find another word.
(via Shakesville)
Racist cartoonist Donna Barstow, who is here seen being responsible for racist cartooning on the subject of swine flu, has unsurprisingly dabbled in racist cartoons before.
In the following cartoon, she shows herself as unsavvy about race politics affecting African Americans as she is about race politics affecting the relationship between the United States and Mexico:
As we all know, the only real, good hair is the hair possessed by white people — smooth, silky, shiny, straight, lushly falling whitey white hair. Hair possessed by black people is funny. It’s not like hair at all. It’s like plant growth!
Of course, it’s been well-documented by many bloggers of color that the politics of hair are used to suggest that black people cannot maintain a decent or professional appearance if they wear natural hair, that their hair is something abnormal that needs fixing, and that their appearance is deviant in comparison with the white default. Black people are sometimes charged more for styling their abnormal, so-not-white hair. Kinky, nappy hair is ugly and insulting. And of course, black-looking hair is “bad hair” and white-looking hair is “good hair.”
But I’m sure the observation that our first African American president “looks like a Chia pet” is totally race-neutral, and nothing to do with making fun of him for looking so blatantly non-white, just like all those other totally non-racist visual dog whistles.
Mandolin is on board with laughing at him.
My (non-Jewish) father told me about this story over the weekend. I wasn’t surprised to see PZ critiquing it.
Here’s the argument, as quoted by PZ:
Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?
Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.
It offended Cochran’s sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?
At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
“I’ve figured it out, I think,” Cochran typed. “Pardon my crazed excitement.”
The “faulty” genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.
I had basically the same reaction to my father’s summary of the article that PZ did, though of course PZ probably said it better than I did off the cuff in the car:
My first answer would be to consider that they are a sub-group isolated by a history of bigotry from the outside, and strong cultural mores from the inside that promote inbreeding. These are variations amplified by chance and history…
Mr Cochran’s flaw is in his premise. There is no reason to assume that the frequency of every allele in a population must be the product of a selective advantage.
Ashkenazic Jews may simply be susceptible to many genetic diseases because those diseases didn’t sufficiently interfere with our breeding that they were erased. They don’t have to have given us a benefit. That’s not how evolution works.
My other question about the article revolves around the idea of “smarter.” There are certainly a lot of cultural ideas floating around that Ashkenazic Jews are somehow smarter than people of ethnicities — and these are old enough that when Goddard tried to push his flawed IQ tests as proof that Aryans were smarter than other peoples, he specifically mentioned what he felt were myths of Jewish intelligence.
But what is this coming from? Do we really have data to prove it? Remembering, of course, that minor fluctuations in IQ tests are easily explicable because of the ways in which upbringing informs interaction with standardized tests, I’m unwilling to take the 7 point difference they find between Ashkenazic Jews and other ethnicities too seriously. However, if — if — Ashkenazic Jews are performing meaningfully higher than average on IQ tests (in a way that suggests they actually have a higher narrow-and-problematic-thing-that-IQ-measures rather than just a better facility with standardized tests), have we ever done anything to try to confound environmental factors? Why does it have to be genetic?
When I first went to college, I attended a school with something like a 40% Jewish student body. I hadn’t been around so many Jews before. Many of my childhood friends were Jewish, and of course I’m ethnically Jewish, but I hadn’t had the experience of being in social groups that were predominantly Jewish.
I remember commenting to a friend of mine who had attended a Jewish private school in Chicago that my experience was that Jews were smarter. The Jewish friends I’d had in high school, I said, were all intelligent and academically capable. Therefore, I concluded, Jews were smarter than average.
My friend lowered a skeptical gaze at me, and said, “Believe me. Jews are just as dumb as everyone else.”
John Klima, the editor of Electric Velocipede, is having a little financial trouble.
Consequently, he’s redoubling energies toward selling some of the back issues of Electric Velocipede, as well as some of the chapbooks that he’s printed through his small press.
People who enjoy my work can find the original printing of my story “How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth” (later printed at Escape Pod and in Best American Fantasy 2) in Electric Velocipede #13 for $5.
Though I haven’t read it yet, I just ordered and am looking forward to “An Alternate History of the 21st Century”, a chapbook of stories by William Shunn, whose story “Colin and Ishmael in the Dark” we featured on PodCastle this Halloween.
Other available magazines feature work by authors like Cory Doctorow, Karen Joy Fowler, Jeffrey Ford, and Hal Duncan.
Electric Velocipede has a reputation for publishing the quirkiest available in science fiction, fantasy, and other fiction of the weird. John Klima likes to publish the weird and wonderful, stuff that you won’t find anywhere else.
John Klima has a strong, unique editing voice. Check out his catalog and see if anything strikes your fancy.
So, I’m talking to Ampersand, and he says that he’s chatting on a mailing list, having a frustrating conversation about some political hot topic, and I respond,
“Bleagh. You really like debate, don’t you?”
Well, of course he does.
Me, though? I hate it. I would MUCH rather read the positions of people I disagree with, or listen to them talk without having to respond. (And then if I had to respond, do it all in one chunk, and then meander off.) The back-and-forth “No I’M right” “No I AM”… ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh.
I associate debate with power games, attempts at manipulation, and a confrontational mindset. Is this gendered? Well, maybe — I’ve noticed that 90% of the people who have attempted to wrangle me into debates and refused to let me stop talking about the subject even after I’ve expressed my clear desire to stop… are men. Often men who are around my age, who say they’re delighted to find someone articulate! political! and informed! The mere fact that I’m capable of debating means I must want to listen to their theories on Ayn Rand or… whatever. And then rebut them! Rather than ignoring the argument I’ve heard 100 times and talking about cute graphics on Animal Crossing, which isn’t any less productive, certainly, and doesn’t make my heart pound or make me think the other person is a jackass.
And especially in verbal debates, where there’s no recourse to the internet… oh, ugh. “Semi-colons are used just like colons!” says College Guy I barely know, who has asked me to proofread his essay because I’m a professional writer, and is now repaying the favor by arguing stridently against my critiques. “Um, no, semi-colons are properly used in two ways…” But College Guy Must Be Right.
But the dynamic can’t totally be gendered. Mike and I are at Thanksgiving this year, and my aunt is talking about how lazy poor people are. Mike is melting into a pile of goo, because these arguments hit home for a guy who grew up eating from the dented can store. “Please, can we change the subject?” I ask. “We’re really uncomfortable. You’re really hurting our feelings. Maybe this isn’t the best time or topic.” But no — we just don’t understand because we don’t have EXPERIENCE of the world, there is no such thing as a hard-working poor person who can’t make ends meet.
And besides, it’s not that Amp is somehow socialized to be more comfortable with debate than I am. His interest in debate, and my disinterest, cannot be explained by the differences in our sex.
There are a lot of kinds of political discussion I *am* interested in. Conversation, negotiation, mind-stretching, talking about things, and talking things out. But as soon as the confrontational comes in, the sense that it’s me AGAINST you, instead of me AND you trying to work out an idea? I’m gone. Strong disinterest.
Which is probably why I have no particular interest in chatting with people with whom I have irreconcilable views. There’s no way for me and a person who believes gay people are going to hell to work out an idea of how gay marriage should work as a cooperative exercise. We’re always going to be in opposition. How tedious. How fruitless. How obnoxious. I’d rather be talking to the radical queers who want to abolish marriage in the first place, to discuss whether there’s anything salvageable in the Western family structure (I’d probably say yes) — we disagree, but there’s a basic level of respect.
I tell Amp this, in shorthand, and he replies that in debates there’s often less politics of the interpersonal at stake than in other kinds of conversations. I can’t say I totally understand this, since my instinct is so strongly against competitive conversation, but maybe some of y’all do.
Again, I like being exposed to opposing points of view — at least within my Overton Window of acceptability — but I’d much rather be exposed in such a way that does not involve direct, personal confrontation and power games.
So, the conversation made me wonder how other people who read the blog might feel. How do you feel about debate versus collaborative argument?
I’m only opening this post to comments from people who accept the inherent dignity and worth of all people. I’m sure that the rest of y’all have interesting points on the subject, but… another time, another place. Hopefully, if I’m involved, in a collaborative way.
Via Pandagon, this link on what may be behind the Easter Sunday reveal of a corporate policy that makes absolutely no sense:
Writes tehdely:
Now, let’s just put ourselves in Amazon’s shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in fucking Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist. Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as “adult” content? Why would this happen over a weekend?
It’s obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as “adult” after too many people have complained about it. It’s also obvious that there aren’t too many people using this feature, as indicated by the easy availability (and search ranking) of pornography and sex toys and other seemingly “objectionable” materials, otherwise almost all of those items would have been flagged by this point. So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question.
This was more or less my question when I started reading about the phenomenon, thanks to our guest poster. Why would Amazon do something like this when it seems to make no business sense? In order to accept this is a deliberate corporate policy, we have to accept that there’s a significant portion of the Amazon audience that is offended by feminist, pro-GLBT, and survivor literature that simultaneously is not at all offended by Playboy and sex toys.
Sure, there are anti-feminists whose tastes run that way, but I strongly doubt that they constitute much of an influential audience segment. The conservative Christians who liberals might suspect of wanting to get rid of pro-LGBT material in favor of books that tackle the topic of how to prevent your kids from catching gay… really also dislike a lot of the other things that aren’t being banned.
Like the author of this LJ post, I suspect this is some sort of programming error which we’ll probably hear about from the company fairly quickly.
Tehdely goes on to suggest that there may be some kind of trolling going on, wherein people are (possibly deliberately?) creating difficulties between Amazon and its target audience, in ways that have been seen on the internets before:
Now let me backtrack for a bit, and talk about a similar event that happened to my own company, Six Apart, back in 2007, called Strikethrough. Here’s how Strikethrough worked:
- Somebody enlists Warriors for Innocence, a “To Catch a Predator”-like organization (but significantly more fundie and batshit) in the battle against “pedophile” content on LiveJournal
- Warriors for Innocence brings down holy Jihad on Six Apart, consisting not only of complaining directly to 6a, but also threatening to involve the media, as well as directly threatening companies like Google, which advertised on LiveJournal, to pull their ads, lest they be viewed as supporters of pedophilia
- Six Apart, faced with a sudden and unexpected and multipronged attack, reacts rashly, and in an unannounced and unexplained policy change bans thousands of accounts from LiveJournal for listing certain sensitive keywords in their profiles, without the chance for appeal, and hopes that WFI will leave them alone
- The ban ends up targeting mostly fiction writers, and is so sweeping that it includes communities for discussing famous works of literature, rape and incest survivor communities, and more. The collateral damage is massive
- Butthurt users rise up en masse and create a shitstorm the likes of which Six Apart hadn’t seen since the “Boob Nazi” debacle
- With its tail between its legs, Six Apart backpedals. Not too long afterward, LiveJournal is sold to SUP, who quickly roll back many of the more objectionable policy changes
That, my friends, is pure Bantown. What is Bantown? Some things Bantown is not:
- A trolling organization
- A group of people (at least since 2007)
- An IRC channel
Bantown is a tactic for inciting meta-lulz on multiple levels through the alignment of third-parties against each other. Bantown is like the plot of most James Bond movies, wherein some nefarious evildoer brings the US and the Soviets close to war. Bantown is a trolling technique of the highest order, which usually pits communities against each other, or communities against companies, or organizations against companies, or companies against organizations.
Tehdely also points out that “Cleverly as well, this troll was perpetrated on a weekend AND a holiday, when Amazon’s customer service would be operating on a skeleton crew and most of those who would be able to fix the problem would be at home and possibly unavailable or on vacation.”
This is certainly an interesting theory.
I suspect we’ll hear from Amazon in the next day or two. And if we don’t, well. I’ll certainly cancel my newly acquired Prime account. But since there’s something in the equation “1) piss off a large segment of your consumer base without actually making a larger segment happy, 2)…, 3) profit” that doesn’t quite add up for me, I’m going to go ahead and operate with the benefit of the doubt for a few days.
Last night, a concerned GLBT activist wrote and asked if we would post about Amazon. I told her that if she wrote a guest post about the subject, I would be happy to post it. Here it is.
UPDATE: Thanks, LindaH!
*
Amazon.com is promoting homophobia
On April 10 Mark Probst, who writes gay fiction for young adults noticed that two newly released high profile books suddenly had no sales ranking on Amazon.com. The writers of gay fiction wondered what had happened. The next day, they discovered that hundreds of gay and lesbian books had lost their sales rankings. The authors couldn’t figure out why this had happened, so they started contacting Amazon. Amazon responded to Mr. Probst’s question saying.
“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Included in this “adult material” were titles like the highly erotic Heather Has Two Mommies, and When Your Spouse Comes Out. Also excluded are classic works such as Brokeback Mountain and The Price of Salt. In addition, none of these books can be found if you search Amazon from the all departments page. You have to go to the Books search page to find them. Meta_writer is compiling a list of titles that have had their rankings removed. Interestingly, you can find some of these titles on Amazon if they happen to be part of the Kindle database. After all, Amazon wants to sell those machines!
This is not limited to Amazon in the United States. England and Germany have also had the rankings removed, although according to this post in Germany only the English versions have been purged. The titles that are written in German still remain.
There are some campaigns that have been started to protest this. Smart Bitches Trashy Books has started a Google Bomb campaign. Hilangel has a list of protest sites here and there is an online petition.
Do not think, however, that Amazon simply put in a filter incorrectly. You can still put homosexuality as a subject on the start page and pull up titles. They are edifying titles like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality; You Don’t Have to Be Gay: Hope and Freedom for Males Struggling With Homosexuality or for Those Who Know of Someone Who Is and Can Homosexuality Be Healed?
This is censorship by Amazon. I have already emailed them, Google bombed them and signed the petition. Tomorrow I intend to call Amazon to express my outrage at this policy.
This is an outrage and disgusting! The only way to fight this is to let Amazon know that we will not tolerate this. We need to fight this battle now, before Amazon decides other things are so “adult” that they have to be hidden from the public. Please help fight this now.
UPDATE 2: LindaH has received the Amazon form letter in response to her complaint. It follows:
Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.
This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.
Sincerely,
Customer Service Department
Amazon.com
…as it does in this Pandagon post, I wonder whether anyone else felt like my husband and I did — that having rings was a tangible reminder of each other’s presence and love, even when we weren’t in the same place. I was living alone in Iowa when we got formally engaged (we’d been informally engaged for a long time before that), and it was nice to be able to put on my ring as a reminder of him. We got him an engagement ring, too, which I understand he wore (more often than I did) for the same reason.
I like gifts of jewelry for this reason. My best friend gave me a seahorse pendant with an aquamarine eye (my engagement ring features an aquamarine because we were not about to do diamonds, cuz no fucking way) that I wear to remind me of her. I still wear the $20 shell pendant my husband gave me when we started dating. And I make my own jewelry as memorials, for instance the blown glass pendant filled with suns and stars that I wear to commemorate the writing workshop where I decided I was going to be a professional writer.
I make jewelry for people that I hope will serve the same function. It’s really fun to sit down with a collection of stones and crystals and glass and try to figure out how to capture a friend’s tastes and personal style, as well as some of your affection for them, in an attractive, material object.
Then again, I know that other people are interacting with the cultural symbols of engagement and wedding rings differently than we did — simply from things like the scandalized and angry reactions we had when we went shopping for engagement rings and told people we weren’t going to buy diamonds. Several jewelers told us we HAD to. And then we left. It took a while before we found a small family-owned store where someone said “oh, how European!” and sat down and helped us decide on what we wanted, an aquamarine center stone with two violet sapphires around it, all of the colors supposed to wash together like the gray-blue of the sea on a cloudy day, which is both my favorite color and a very prevalent hue in the city where my husband and I met and left our hearts.
I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that consumer choice (I have a pink ipod instead of a green one! A relatively inexpensive aquamarine ring instead of a wow-expensive diamond!) is a true expression of individual identity… but I always figured the only reason to follow any of the wedding traditions would be if it was fun. And for me, finding relatively-inexpensive relatively-non-bloody jewelry was fun. And it gives me a tangible and shiny symbol for when I want my husband with me and he’s not there — or when he is with me, and we want to share memories and emotions or just look at pretty rocks.
A few years ago, I set out to write a poem that was cute and funny and rhyming. It doesn’t seem to have a home in the current market, so I thought I’d post it here instead.
Mother’s Remedies
by Rachel Swirsky
Kitchen bare, the children’s stomachs ached
rumbling with involuntary fast.
“Hush dears,” mother called. “No need to fret.
Elves have come to cook us a repast.
“They warbled love songs to the pantry
’til water coyly boiled hot.
Potatoes spiced and diced themselves.
Carrots swooned into the pot.
“With tears of joy, onions peeled their skins.
Thyme and basil jumped in to swim laps.
Leaves of cabbage lined up single file
and dived inside like girls in bathing caps.
“Not to be outdone a fleet of gnomes
bubbled up a brine of salt and wine,
moonlight, mumbled prayers, and tangled hair,
socks and rocks and clocks and dusty twine.
They attached a pulley to my spoon.
Ho heave ho, they yanked it to and fro.
Flash! Smash! Crash! and look, a gourmet roast
golden flesh alchemic’ly aglow.
Cupboard pixies in a baking pan
fixed a ten-tiered cherry cake so sweet
just a slice would make the meanest grump
grin and cheer and dance along the street.”
Mother beamed. “Can’t you smell it all?
Bubbling broth, fresh apples, bread and cream?
Recall the scent as you drift to sleep
and let it fill your bellies with sweet dreams.”
OK, thanks to Shakesville, I have just realized that the abbreviation of the National Organization for Marriage is NOM.
That’s right.
NOM.
The ammunition to defang this group is in our hands! Someone must merely find a way to combine evil N.O.M. silliness with adorable NOM silliness! No one will ever be able to read their arguments again without helpless giggling, interspersed with a slight “awww.” And if you think that anyone can take bigoted arguments seriously while thinking of nibbling bunnies, well… I wouldn’t want to meet the soul so callous they could do that.
Nom.
I’m not really keen on having photos of myself on facebook and flicker accounts. As in, I’d greatly prefer that people didn’t take photos at parties and such and then post the ones of me publicly, without permission, tagged with my name.
Is there any way to discourage people from doing this while not being a jerk?
A friend of mine who writes for the anarchist magazine The Fifth Estate recently sent me their headline story for Spring 2009, issue #380. The piece by Henry Reed discusses the exorbitantly long sentences given to “terrorists” who damage property as a way to protest damaging environmental policies, using the case of Marie Mason (”sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison… after pleading guilty to two acts of eco-sabotage”) as a lens for analyzing the phenomenon.
There’s a lot of interesting and scary information in the piece that highlights how much the huge penalties given reflect wounded capitalist ideology rather than actual criminal fears:
For several years I lived in an apartment building on a crowded residential street on one of the last ungentrified blocks in my neighborhood. In one year, the buildings on both sides of my dwelling mysteriously burned. In their place, condos were built. No charges were filed; the police, the courts, and the city government smiled upon these “accidental” fires. The lives of dozens, if not hundreds, of people were put at risk.
Mason and Ambrose, on the other hand, burned down an unoccupied research building in the middle of the night, far from residential housing. No one was intended to be hurt and no one was.
The difference is that their acts were an attack on the “marketplace” ‐ not on humans. Attack the marketplace and you are a terrorist in the eyes of the State. Threaten the lives of hundreds of low-income residents to build condos and you are an entrepreneur and an upstanding citizen.
But what really jumped out at me about the article was a tangent that relates to the issue at hand, but which I also felt suggested a deeper analysis:
Since when have ideas been part of a “marketplace”? Intellectual thought, at its best, has always been a deeply subversive enterprise, unconstrained by the society in which it germinates.
Situationist theorist Guy Debord declared that in modern society the commodity form had colonized all aspects of everyday life, and both Grey and Maloney’s statements illustrate this. They cannot even talk about ideas, which are free, without framing them in the language of the market. Socrates committed suicide as a testimony to the power of critical ideas to resist the social norms of society.
I found this latter quote very profound. An economy is only part of a functioning culture. It’s frightening how much everything, from human relationships to ideological pursuits, is rendered through the lens of capitalist economics. It’s frightening, and it’s unhealthy. My ideas are not a marketplace, and my personhood is not determined by my economic worth alone.
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At last, science has produced the case for cougars. As Madonna understands intuitively, nature clearly intends aging women—whether married, divorced, or single; on vacation in Cancún or just killing time on line at the DMV—to snatch up passing youths in our talons and gestate a race of supersmart children. Who themselves, I presume, will be smart enough to self-select their partners likewise, forming a superrace of egghead Demis and Ashtons, a Cleopatran paradise of trophy studs and December–May embryos. Denying this is denying biology itself, and far be it for me to deny biology!
Now, I admit, my theory makes little sense. For one, the study, at least as described in the Times, suggests that the findings about older mothers—which were part of a reanalysis of a study conducted from 1959 to 1965—were likely due to social factors, i.e., “more nurturing home environments associated with the generally higher income and education levels of older mothers.”
…
But why not jump to conclusions? We do it every time a study comes out that confirms a cultural bias in the opposite direction—any bit of data that contributes to the portrait of women as desperate for an early sell date, while their roguish counterparts seek ever younger and more symmetrical reproductive targets. But the larger issue is that even the most nuanced scientific data tend to transform, in the popular consciousness, into “magazine science,” all caveats excised in the name of that greater sociobiological theme: that men and women are the way they are because this is the way they have to be.
Please, start the series over and refilm it, only this time have Danny Strong playing Xander.
No, I mean it. Go. Start over and refilm.
P.S. I wouldn’t be heart-broken if you replaced Sarah Michelle Geller with someone else, too. For instance, it would be nice if I didn’t watch the entirety of Who Are You? unable to get rid of the thought of how unfortunate it is that Eliza Dushku is a better actress than the main character.
